Youngs : The Brothers Who Built Ac/Dc (9781466865204)
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Authors: Jesse Fink
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For Tony Currenti and Mark Evans and in memory of Michael Klenfner
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Violence and energy ⦠that's really what rock 'n' roll's all about.
âMick Jagger
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TRACK LISTING
AUTHOR'S NOTE: “Gimme a Bullet”
PREFACE: “Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution”
1. THE EASYBEATS “Good Times” (1968)
2. STEVIE WRIGHT “Evie” (1974)
3. AC/DC “It's a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock 'n' Roll)” (1975)
5. AC/DC “Let There Be Rock” (1977)
7. AC/DC “Highway to Hell” (1979)
8. AC/DC “Back in Black” (1980)
9. AC/DC “You Shook Me All Night Long” (1980)
10. AC/DC “Hells Bells” (1980)
11. AC/DC “Thunderstruck” (1990)
DRAMATIS PERSONAE: “Who Made Who”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: “For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)”
APPENDIX: “What Do You Do for Money Honey”
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AUTHOR'S NOTE
“Gimme a Bullet”
We all have a story when it comes to this band.
I can't put a date or a time on mine. My memories of the occasion are blurred by the whiskey fog that eventually wiped me out that dismal eve. Home alone on another Saturday night, wondering how I'd ended up in an untidy room in a damp, shitty, below-street-level flat in inner-city Sydney, Australia, when for so long I'd had it
all
: the comfortable suburban home, the happy family, the beautiful wife, even a scrawny pound dog with a waggy tail. And now I'd been reduced to sorting black socks to pass the time before it was late enough to safely go to sleep and not find myself waking up at 4 am. If being up at 2 am is lonely for a newly divorced man, 4 am is unbearable.
Wanting to go out and be with a woman, any womanâjust to hold and touch someone; and I'd done enough emergency “dating” to get through such nightsâbut paralyzed by the fact that the one woman I still loved and wanted to be with was with someone who wasn't
me
. I felt powerless, angry and, more than anything, stuck. I was totally depressed. My situation was quite pitiful.
And thenâit was as simple as “then” in this tale of wretchednessâI grabbed my battered old MacBook, opened up iTunes and put on some
AC/DC
.
The song I chose wasn't “Back in Black,” “Highway to Hell,” “Thunderstruck” or any of the Australian band's catalog of arena standards. (Aussies still claim
AC/DC
, even if Angus and Malcolm Young have gone out of their way in recent years to effectively disown their antipodean heritage.) It was “Gimme a Bullet,” a largely forgotten track off a release that had somehow slipped through the cracks of mainstream acclaim and bypassed mass album sales, 1978's
Powerage
. Their fifth album, the last studio album produced by the ex-Easybeats duo of elder brother George Young and Harry Vanda in
AC/DC
's golden period of 1975 to 1980 and the band's unshowiest, most artistically realized recording. There isn't a bad track on it.
Oh, she hit me low.
Yes, Bon, my woman did. Was this band reading my mind? I'd heard
AC/DC
before, of course, but that night, sitting on the end of my bed, I was utterly transfixed by what I was hearing. The flinty tone. The rising power. The delineated but somehow enmeshed guitars. No Angus flourish to speak ofârare for
AC/DC
. Just the Youngs interlocking with a driving groove from their rhythm section. And the words: lyrics that were a balm to the part of my soul that had been torn open by my wife's leaving. Finally, I was
getting it
. When it was over, I had to listen to the whole albumâand then all over again.
More than anything they did before then or have done since,
Powerage
, clocking in at under 40 minutes, is a sonic Polaroid of real life, in all its domestic ordinariness, as seen through the lens of a group of disreputable-looking men that can lay serious claim to being the greatest rock 'n' roll band of all time.
Knocked together in a handful of weeks in a studio on the fifth floor of the now-demolished Boomerang House in Sydney,
Powerage
isn't an album about fucking, drinking, guns or inclement weather. Mercifully there are none of the juvenile sexual double entendres with which the band's third and final singer, Brian Johnson, managed to spoil some of the Young brothers' best guitar work in the 1980s. It's an album true listeners (an important distinction from true fans) of
AC/DC
's music can relate to because, thanks in no small part to the input of Bon Scott, it's about human frailty.
It's this glimpse of humility and pathos in
Powerage
that separates it from the rest of the AC/DC catalog. Other albums feature the same wrecking ball of Gretsch, Gibson, Music Man and Sonor, but the nine songs of
Powerage
(10 on the European LP release) explore themes that rarely get celebrated in hard rock. Abandonment. Yearning. Dispossession. Aspiration. Hardship: emotional and financial. Getting dealt a bum hand. And, most electrifyingly, risk. The majestic Scott wouldn't have lived a life by any other credo.
The chorus of “Rock 'n' Roll Damnation,” the disc's opener, says it all:
Take a chance while you still got the choice.
I eventually did, leaving that room, the whiskey bottle and my unsorted black socks to run off to New York City to hook up with a burlesque dancer who looked like Scarlett Johansson. I wasn't going to die wondering. I wrote a book. I fell in love again. I got my life back on track.
But it was “Gimme a Bullet” that knocked me sideways first and still does every time I hear it. When Cliff Williams's bass breaks through the ramparts of the Youngs' guitars and Phil Rudd's beat at around 1:17, the song soars to another level of rock perfection altogether. It's probably the closest thing the workmanlike “plugger” Williams, as Rose Tattoo guitarist Rob Riley laconically describes him, has ever got to a solo in over 30 years of playing with
AC/DC
.
He hasn't done much else creatively. By most reliable accounts, the hard-nosed Youngs won't let him. It's not his band. It's not his
place
.
But was it even Williams's guitar? Mark Evans, the Englishman's predecessor in the band, later told me: “My understanding of the situation is that George played bass on the whole album.” Which might just account for why
Powerage
is so good. Such mysteries abound in any discussion about AC/DC. In any event, the effect it had on me was the same, whoever was playing.
Hearing “Gimme a Bullet” and being swept up by it gave me resolve and determination to stop feeling sorry for myself. I played it in my car, when I was jogging on the streets around Sydney or pumping iron in the neighborhood gym. My then seven-year-old daughter, normally into Selena Gomez, Taylor Swift and Ke$ha, loved the song so much she'd dance around the room to it. I felt a surge of paternal pride when she presented me with a drawing of a big heart with florid patterning around its edges and some scribble underneath where she'd written, “My dad loves
AC/DC
and The Rolling Stones.” To be able to connect to your child through music you love is a beautiful thing. At 37, after half a life spent listening to good, melodic but comparatively anodyne music, I'd finally grasped the meaning of
AC/DC
.
I can only liken the impact “Gimme a Bullet” had on me that night to the scene in the movie
High Fidelity
where John Cusack's character confesses he arranges his records not chronologically or alphabetically but autobiographically. Anytime I hear that song it takes me back to that moment when I thought I'd lost everything, could have easily walked outside and in front of a garbage truck but didn't. It restored my mood. It made me feel good. It made me feel like I wasn't alone in the world; that there were other guys out there and before me, Scott among them, who'd got through similar nights of loneliness, gritted their teeth and prevailed. And that is what the best music does. It immortalizes those beautiful, private moments of existential clarity. It makes us embrace life and its vicissitudes.
When years later, back in New York, I ran across the Brooklyn Bridge in a snowstorm with “Gimme a Bullet” on my iPod, the song propelling my legs forward like it had done so many times before, I had to stop for a moment in the frigid January airâManhattan on my left, Brooklyn on my right, Sydney and my old life very far awayâand smile for regaining my health and happiness.
AC/DC
's music as much as anything else had helped me get there.
Angus and Malcolm Young might shrug their shoulders and say they're only playing rock 'n' roll, be largely oblivious to the personal stories of fans for whom their music has been deeply affecting, shy away from writers and journalists who want more than the soundbites that get occasionally thrown out like burley off the side of a boat when they have a record to promote. But along with George, their reclusive elder brother, mentor and producer, they're more important than that. The music of the Youngs is about much more than drinking, fucking and rock 'n' roll. They might not believe it. They can go on protesting for all I care. No one's buying it.
For when they're gone, there's going to be a lost guy somewhere who'll hear “Gimme a Bullet” for the first time and decide to wake up in the morning. We all have a Young brothers song that has this kind of effect on us.
And it's that special gift of theirs, not the fame, not the record sales, not the incalculable wealth, that makes them worth appreciating.
â
Jesse Fink, August 2014
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PREFACE
“Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution”
In January 2013 I found myself in a kilometer-long line outside the Museum of Modern Art in New York to see Edvard Munch's 1893 painting
The Scream
. The line, remarkably orderly, stretched city blocks. It was a Friday night, free admission, and bitingly cold. Well below zero. Even with layers of clothing on, I had to stamp my feet to keep warm. But the discomfort was more than worth it. I was seeing
The Scream
. An iconic piece of art. Not something you see every day. Especially for free.
After about an hour I finally made it inside and went up to the fifth floor where all the heavyweights had been collected: DalÃs, Modiglianis, Cézannes, Picassos, Van Goghs, Matisses, Monets, Klees. The blockbusters. And there, just 3 ft by 2 ½ ft, was
The Scream
, one of four versions Munch had made and which had recently been sold to a banker for $120 million at Sotheby's. It was hard work getting anywhere near the painting. While some of the most notable artworks of history hung in nearby rooms unloved and ignored,
The Scream
was being mobbed.