Youngs : The Brothers Who Built Ac/Dc (9781466865204) (19 page)

“I hired Kalodner in the A&R department for product management,” says Jim Delehant, who remembers the record business in the 1970s as being far removed from the corporate circus of today. “We had some laughs.”

But a slew of others don't remember him too fondly. Prime among them is Jerry Greenberg.

“John Kalodner likes to take credit for signing Foreigner. He had absolutely nothing to do with the signing,” he says. “Once I signed the band, John was the A&R guy who worked
with
Foreigner. In fact, at one point [Foreigner's late manager] Bud Prager wrote him a letter and he still hasn't taken it down off his website that he signed Foreigner. Understand one thing: nobody could sign anything at Atlantic without me saying, ‘Okay' and signing off on a memo that goes upstairs. So that's that.”

Larry Yasgar agrees with his old boss: “Good old John Kalodner. John took credit for everything except the sinking of the
Titanic
.”

Chris Gilbey remembers meeting him one year at the music-industry trade fair Midem, in Cannes: “He didn't know who I was, told me that he had discovered
AC/DC
and because of that should be respected—or some such drivel.”

“Minimal impact,” says Michael Browning. “He pretends that he discovered them, which is nonsense. Certainly he was influential in convincing Jerry that they were worth doing something with, but beyond that there wasn't much involvement.”

*   *   *

Michael Klenfner was another polarizing figure inside Atlantic. Where the bearded Kalodner was wiry, lean and enigmatic, the mustachioed Klenfner was sweaty, corpulent and not shy about saying what he thought, even if it put some noses out of joint. Outside of his work with
AC/DC
, Klenfner is best known for having turned John Belushi's and Dan Aykroyd's
Saturday Night Live
act, The Blues Brothers, into recording artists.
Briefcase Full of Blues
, their 1978 album for Atlantic, went to #1 in the American charts.

Invited to form what one ex-staffer called the “road artist development & touring department” at Atlantic when he left his position as head of FM radio promotion at Arista Records in 1977, Klenfner's “bull-in-a-china-shop” style of management (a description used by a number of people interviewed for this book) eventually got him offside with Greenberg and saw him leave the company in acrimonious circumstances.

“Michael loved
AC/DC
,” says Judy Libow. “He was very close to the band. He fought to keep them at Atlantic. Michael was really kind of their champion. And to whatever degree he could speak for them and work internally on their behalf he did. His influence then had an effect on the other executives, who had to make decisions that he wasn't in a position to make.”

Steve Leeds takes the same position: “I think the people that were really responsible for championing
AC/DC
were Phil Carson, who signed them, and Michael Klenfner, because he believed in them more than anybody else in the company. And he was like an attack dog. He wouldn't let go.
We're going to break this band, we're going to break this band, we're going to break this band
. People at the time were ready to walk away from the project because it was just too difficult and nobody was really embracing the band.

“I didn't like Michael and we never got along. He parenthetically came into the company to disrupt the promotion department, of which I was a key person, so I'm not a fan. I tell you with total disclosure I was
not
a fan. But I have to say he really,
really
championed the band when nobody else in the company would. I'll give him that. Atlantic had a product flow of a lot of music and a lot of releases and it was easy for it to be skipped over and go to the next project. Long-term thinking, even in those days, was not really what people did.”

Carson, too, remains a believer in Klenfner's legacy: “There is no doubt that Michael got behind
AC/DC
when he joined Atlantic. He visited London shortly after he came on board. I believe he was trying to sign Bay City Rollers. I told him not to waste his time with them and that he should get behind
AC/DC
. He took a close look at the project, realized that this band had not reached its potential and really encouraged the marketing and promotion departments to spend more time and money on
AC/DC
. I think that was a major part in the development of the band.”

Only Yasgar and former Aerosmith manager David Krebs sound a different note, crediting head of artist relations Perry Cooper for being the band's gamebreaker inside Atlantic.

Cooper saw himself in that way, too, going on what he told Susan Masino in her book before he died. When Jerry Greenberg had given Klenfner and Cooper a film of
AC/DC
to watch, Klenfner, he said, “didn't give a shit” and asked his lieutenant to look at it for him. From that point, Cooper was under their spell.

“Klenfner was a fan,” says Krebs. “Cooper was very much an
enthusiast
behind the band.”

“We were all behind them at Atlantic,” says a bemused Yasgar. “I don't even know what Michael Klenfner's involvement was. The group always asked for Perry Cooper.”

Which could well be the truth. Renée Cooper, Perry's daughter, tells me: “
AC/DC
and my father were really tight. After Bon died, my dad and Brian became best friends. When Bon passed, they found the emergency-person-to-contact card and it was my dad.”

“There was so much internal bullshit going on, with everybody trying to take credit for it when it broke,” says Yasgar. “We had a ton of people in promotion that got involved and then they would come to me, ‘Look, Larry, it's going on in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Make sure we get stock there.' I would make sure we had stock in the area. I just had to follow all the records. That was my main job. And if they didn't have stock in an area, if it wasn't pressed yet or whatever, I would have at least 50 in my office to cover the airplay and just ship it to the stores so they would have it in.”

Bill Bartlett, however, doesn't separate the two men in his praise, which is fitting considering both came from Arista to Atlantic in 1977 as a team: “Thank goodness for Perry and Michael for believing.”

In 1977, according to Jim Delehant, Kalodner got quietly shifted from the New York office to Los Angeles “to keep an eye on that scene.” Two years later Klenfner also left the Atlantic building at 75 Rockefeller Plaza but, unlike Kalodner, went out all guns blazing.

*   *   *

It's a mostly neglected detail in
AC/DC
biographies but the United States in the mid to late 1970s was in the grip of disco fever. Atlantic's investment in
AC/DC
, even after they'd decided to stick with the vertically challenged Australians, wasn't a fait accompli. Another set of Aussie brothers, The Bee Gees, was doing much bigger business than
AC/DC
. Their manager Robert Stigwood's RSO label had been distributed by Atlantic from 1973 to the end of 1975, Ahmet Ertegun even introducing the Gibbs to producer Arif Mardin, who reinvented their career with “Jive Talkin'.” But Ertegun didn't stop them switching labels after they received a massive offer from Polydor, owned by PolyGram.

It was a decision Jerry Greenberg calls “a
big
mistake”; which it was, considering the
Saturday Night Fever
soundtrack would go on to be certified platinum 15 times in the United States alone. But Atlantic had other aces up its sleeve.

“In 1976–77, Atlantic was voted the disco company of the year,” says Greenberg. “We had Chic, Sister Sledge, The Trammps. Radio was into disco. FM radio was just starting. We weren't getting that much radio play for
AC/DC
. So how do you break a band if they're not getting any radio play? You've got to
build
fans. How do you build fans? You need to perform. How do they perform but only get paid $300 from the Whisky A Go-Go? They've got to get money from a record company.

“I supported them not only with coming down from the presidential office to the troops [and telling them] that they needed this band but also by writing the checks.
AC/DC
were very heavily in the red before they finally broke. There were times when I had to go up against corporate when it came to writing those checks for ‘tour support,' but I said, ‘Don't worry. You're going to get it back. The group's going to happen.'

“We supported The J. Geils Band in the beginning, The Allman Brothers, Black Oak Arkansas, The Marshall Tucker Band. You go through the history of Atlantic and you see these rock bands that we were able to break. How did we do it? Touring.
Touring, touring, touring
.”

A logistical and organizational job that fell largely to Doug Thaler, who had met George Young while performing with their respective bands on the Gene Pitney Cavalcade of Stars, modeled after Dick Clark's traveling show.

Thaler was employed by a booking group called the Thames Agency when he first heard buzz about this band of fist-waving scruffs from Australia. One of Thames's clients was Deep Purple, whose roadies' notorious scrap with
AC/DC
at Sunbury in 1975 had piqued Thaler's interest. (Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore later called
AC/DC
“an all-time low in rock 'n' roll.”) He dutifully got his hands on a copy of
High Voltage
, flipped it over and saw the names “Vanda” and “Young.” By then “It's a Long Way to the Top” was, he says, “getting played like crazy” in Columbus and Jacksonville.

“I said, ‘You have got to be kidding me!' I'd lost track of them. So when I saw their names and saw there was the brothers [Angus and Malcolm], I got a phone number for Alberts in Sydney and I called them up. And we had some good laughs. It had been eight years by then. So I said, ‘I'd really like to book the guys in the United States.' I think [the Youngs] were happy to have somebody involved that they knew themselves.”

Thaler made the arrangement official in March 1977 when he went to London to see
AC/DC
perform at the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park.

“I made a deal with [UK booking agent] John Jackson and Michael Browning to represent
AC/DC
in America—already having received the blessing of George and Harry.”

It was a propitious deal for both parties. Having joined a new agency, ATI, Thaler ended up booking
AC/DC
's first five tours in the United States and rostered them on to a line-up of acts that included Cheap Trick, REO Speedwagon, Kiss and UFO. Between 1977 and 1979, roughly the two years it took for them to become an American arena attraction in their own right, there was hardly a major band
AC/DC
didn't headline with, support or fall under on a festival undercard: The Dictators, Michael Stanley Band, .38 Special, Nazareth, Triumph, Mahogany Rush, Foreigner, Alvin Lee, Santana, Head East, Mink DeVille, Johnny Winter, Heart, Rush, Styx, Ronnie Montrose, Aerosmith, Poco, Rainbow, Savoy Brown, Molly Hatchet, Ram Jam, Van Halen, Alice Cooper, Blue Öyster Cult, Boston, The Doobie Brothers, Journey, Ted Nugent, Thin Lizzy and more. Future Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein and his company Harvey & Corky promoted their shows in Buffalo, New York. According to Nate Althoff's
acdc-bootlegs.com
, between 1977 and 1979 the band did 442 gigs, mostly in the United States, England and mainland Europe: an average of 147 a year. In 1976 alone, before they even got to the States in July '77, they'd racked up an incredible 183. In 1980, they did 135. In 1981, rolling in it after the success of
Back in Black
, they did just 74. Hundreds of thousands of kilometers clocked—a blur of promoters, diners and hotel rooms.

It wasn't always an easy sell.

At one show in December 1977, supporting Kiss at Freedom Hall in Louisville, Kentucky, the local newspaper's concert reviewer was so appalled by what he had seen from the two “gross-out groups” he was moved to remark, “It's hard to see where groups like Kiss and
AC/DC
can go from here.”

At another show, headlining Cheap Trick in Johnson City, Tennessee, in September 1978, one critic sneered, “The show as a whole was little more than amplified noise loud enough to burst the eardrums of anyone who hadn't thought to bring some cotton along … the crowd loved it, but it all only went to show that
AC/DC
's forte lies not in the music but in the show.

“As for that crowd, it was rowdy and young. Most of the intoxicated faces looked hardly old enough to be done with the Clearasil. This group will soon learn that
AC/DC
is not classic music, and their albums will gather dust while more sophisticated music is played.”

But wherever
AC/DC
performed, airplay followed. Even when they couldn't get their hands on new material, radio announcers proved resourceful.

“When I received the Australian version of
Dirty Deeds
, Atlantic got a little upset and said they were working
High Voltage
,” remembers Bill Bartlett. “It took them long enough. They, in so many words, wanted me to back off from
AC/DC
because it did not fit into their master plan. Of course, I could not do that. It was difficult to back off from
Dirty Deeds
after I played it on the radio.”

Says Tony Berardini: “I went to our local import music store and grabbed
Dirty Deeds
and began playing ‘Jailbreak' as an import. The listeners loved it.”

*   *   *

In 1977 Peter Mensch, who two years later as an employee of Leber-Krebs would supplant Michael Browning as manager of
AC/DC
, wrote a university thesis called
An Exploratory Study of the Effects of Radio Airplay and Advertising on Record Sales
. The equation was simple: “Support of a tour by a record company will demonstrate to radio program directors that the artist is important to the company and thus might have something to offer their audiences … unless the product is promoted by the record company, it won't get airplay.”