Youngs : The Brothers Who Built Ac/Dc (9781466865204) (5 page)

“As a rock producer you're looking for the human reaction,” says Mark Opitz, engineer on
Let There Be Rock
and
Powerage
. “The emotional reaction. The connection. Lyrics are incredibly important but melody and rhythm, that's the secret. It makes you dance. It's a release of energy. It keeps you going. The tempo's perfect for your heartbeat in most cases. It doesn't push you too far, not like thrash. It's got intensity. It's got that fucking ‘heart feel' rhythm. And by dance I don't mean dancing. I mean
moving
. Stamping your foot like an African. Just moving side to side. Nodding your head. That's ‘guy dancing.' That's testosterone being put out. When you add all that together that's what happens from it. What is the chemical reaction in the brain that adds it all up? I'm not quite sure. But I know what the result is. Melody and rhythm.”

Tony Platt agrees with the thrust of Opitz's hypothesis but makes an important observation:
AC/DC
's music is also steeped in humor, joy and light.

“There's a lot to be said for this notion that it's the resonances of our own body. It's something that gets the endorphins going. It's the same as drinking a nice glass of wine or going and doing exercise. It gets right to the core of you and lifts you.
AC/DC
's music is not depressing music. It's fun. It doesn't take itself too seriously. You take, for instance, Iron Maiden. One of the things I've always found quite bizarre about Iron Maiden is how seriously they take themselves, for starters. It's very difficult to stop laughing some of the time. Their fans take it really,
really
deadly seriously as well.

“And then there are a lot of those kind of darker heavy-metal bands. You look at how many of those darker heavy-metal bands have had accusations that they've been the catalyst that's caused some poor young adolescent to end his life, and there have been lots and lots of circumstances like that. There is music that has this darkness at its heart.
AC/DC
's music doesn't have that darkness at its heart. It doesn't take itself too seriously but, by the same token, it's going to make you jump about a bit.”

There is some credit to that argument, but it has holes. No one could ever claim
AC/DC
advocated violence, but their disingenuous explanation in the wake of the Richard Ramirez “Night Stalker” murders in the mid 1980s that “Night Prowler” off
Highway to Hell
was just about a bloke sneaking into his girlfriend's bedroom in the middle of the night convinced very few people. As Joe Bonomo writes in
Highway to Hell
, his excellent book-form essay on the album, “Bon Scott's more treacherous imagery pushes the song into regrettably mean places. I'm not sure that the band can have it both ways.” Ramirez, a fan of the band whose name has unfortunately come to be associated with the song, died of natural causes in June 2013 while awaiting execution.

But what Terry Manning tells me cuts to the secret of
AC/DC
's success and is a testament to the intelligence and brilliance of the Young brothers: their capacity to edit themselves.

“I think that somehow, whether they know it at the top of their brains or not, they innately know what just the basic, most simple rhythm of humanity is. It's something gut level, primitive almost. It goes right to the human condition. Basic fight-or-flight emotion. They somehow tap right into that. It never gets too fast. So many bands are too fast, too full, they try to do too much. I don't ever hear
AC/DC
try to do too much. They just do what's
necessary
. And that's such an amazing talent that is so hard to find and so overlooked.

“To me it's like a tom roll or a guitar solo. If you had the toms playing a roll through the whole song, they don't mean anything. If you have a guitar solo from beginning to end it doesn't mean anything. It becomes garbage, unlistenable. But if you have the toms come in with a loud, simple roll at the very right spot it just lifts everything. It excites you. If the solo comes in only in the middle or the end of the spot that it's really needed it lifts everything up; it just takes it to another level. So you have to learn the ability to put the embellishments in the right place. And
AC/DC
are the masters at doing that.”

When the band played its first Bristol concert in 1976, at Colston Hall, even the venue's owners were dismayed by just how much
AC/DC
's music had an unstoppable effect on its patrons.

“The management were rather perturbed to find a normally passive audience leaping out of their seats,” wrote a snippy local reviewer.

*   *   *

Bon Scott never got the fame and riches he was due while he was alive, but the Youngs have achieved more financially and in terms of celebrity than even they would ever have dared to imagine and perhaps even wanted. As far as your standard rock-star narrative goes, their success has been counterintuitive. They're by most reasonable measures unattractive, short, eccentric and highly combustible and good taste has been known to frequently desert them: for some reason they have approved or been behind some of the worst album-cover designs in the history of music (
Fly on the Wall
,
Flick of the Switch
, the original
Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap
). For so many reasons they shouldn't be as big as they are. But they're going to get bigger, even after they've stopped playing music.

It's almost a contradiction of their enormous drive to make it that they are private, almost obsessively so. One could make an argument it's a form of aggression born of inferiority complex because of their stature, modest background and lack of formal education; the Youngs spent a lot of time in their early days fighting among themselves and with others and telling anyone within earshot to fuck off. In the public realm, only a few photos exist of all three of them together; one of those is from 1978's
Powerage
sessions by Australian record-company executive Jon O'Rourke, at the time a music journalist who'd been invited into the Youngs' private realm by Alberts' house drummer Ray Arnott. A number of O'Rourke's photos are published for the first time in this book. The most ubiquitous picture of the three, by Philip Morris in 1976 and the cover image for
The Youngs
, was taken during the
Dirty Deeds
sessions.

“I didn't realize at the time the significance of it,” says Morris. “I haven't seen any photos that have got them together that close. It was hard to get.”

Four decades later, nothing much has changed. They are frustratingly inaccessible to anyone outside their super-tight circle of trust.

Unlike the relatively amiable Gibbs of The Bee Gees (only one of whom remains alive), the Youngs have a reputation for being brusque and as short with their temper as they are in their stature. George, who's been characterized as “very volatile” by his own music partner, Harry Vanda, and “a genius with the extreme character that goes with that” by Mark Gable, is a recluse who rarely speaks to the media. So reclusive that for years an Australian man was able to impersonate him and swindle gullible concert promoters and investors. But he remains active in the affairs of
AC/DC
. One anonymous insider described his work to me as “the equivalent of being the chairman of the board of whatever network of structures is in place to maximize the revenues to the band and the Young family … he has an extremely canny business brain.”

“George is definitely a recluse. Not a recluse from everything, but a recluse from the past,” says Mark Opitz. “He's a recluse from things he doesn't need to be involved with any more or that aren't interesting to him. Before Pete Wells from Rose Tattoo died in 2006, they had a concert for him at the Enmore Theatre in Sydney, and George was in the third row, standing down the front by himself. Came out of nowhere and disappeared just as quickly. I wouldn't say he'd be a recluse from anything that's interesting to him because he's got too big a brain and values his life too much.”

Gable's first encounter with George lasted just about as long as the great man's appearance at “the Enmore.”

“When I first met George I was in awe of him; I had idolized him for years,” he says. “Even though he was short in stature he was a giant creatively. As I got to know George I realized there was a dichotomy: unbelievably talented with amazing business acumen on one hand and yet there was this other side. There's more to him than meets the eye. It's something that I only understand now that I'm older.

“I remember going to the Bondi Lifesaver either in late 1978 or '79 and a very young Sam Horsburgh [the Youngs' nephew] came up to me and said, ‘My uncle George is at the back; come up and say hello.' I trotted up to the back of the room to find George at a table by himself holding what looked like a glass of scotch. At this time I was a complete teetotaller, so alcohol did not impress me at all. It wasn't so much that George had a glass of scotch in his hand; it was that he seemed to have maybe 20 in his guts. As I approached he lifted both his right hand and the glass in recognition of me. As soon as he had half-lifted his hand, it and his upper body collapsed forward onto the table.”

Reclusive or with 20 scotches in his guts, he remains a pivotal figure in the direction of
AC/DC
, according to Opitz.

“They're brothers. The older brother is the older brother and always shall be. Particularly when you get a close-knit family of Scots. They're like Italians. Family is everything. When you're struggling in Glasgow and your father's working down the mine you have a fucking shitload of respect. The women work hard at home, cleaning or doing other things, and the kids do it tough. Running around in the streets. The brawls. These guys came out here for a fresh break and they walked into fucking sunshine, thinking, ‘Can you believe
this
is here? Can you believe this? And all these fucking fat Aussies aren't doing anything about it because they're so used to it. Fuck that.' Just like the Italians and the Greeks who got out here and went, ‘Fuck. I can't believe it. Let's go.' It's a hard choice to take in life to follow your dream. But that was something they did because they came from nothing. And when you come from nothing you want to go to somewhere.

“I can remember walking into the A&R offices of Atlantic Records in New York, at that time the biggest record company in the world with the Stones and whatever else on its roster, and talking to the head of A&R and I said, ‘How big are
AC/DC
to you?' and he said, ‘Who do you think pays the fucking rent for the Rockefeller Plaza?'”

*   *   *

As for George's younger brothers, their aversion to any form of public exposition outside what they can dictate is legendary.

Clinton Walker, who wrote
Highway to Hell: The Life and Death of AC/DC Legend Bon Scott
and got no cooperation from the Youngs, was damning: “A closed shop, uniformly suspicious, paranoid almost, possessed of the virtual opposite of Bon's generosity, prone to sullenness. Just as nobody can find a bad word for Bon, few of the people who have had dealings with the Youngs can find a good word for them … Angus and Malcolm had this incredible tunnel vision where no one else counted … insularity bordering on paranoia. Malcolm and Angus were not blessed with many social skills.”

Evans was scarcely more charitable in
Dirty Deeds
: “Mal and Angus were very guarded guys, almost to the point of suspicion … there was a coldness about them that I hadn't experienced before. It did have me wondering about them; matter of fact, still does.” Most of the time, though, they were “morose, grumpy, sullen and generally not too much fun to be around.”

So what kept Evans looking so happy all the time? There's scarcely a photo from those halcyon days of the band where he isn't smiling or having a lark with Angus or Malcolm.

“That was one side of them,” he says. “They could actually be a lot of fun. There was a sense of humor around that band. While we were all very serious about it, for God's sake: you're playing in a band with some fucker up the front dressed as a schoolboy. We're not trying to be Pink Floyd here. There was a certain attitude—a lightheartedness—to the band when Bon was in it, owing to his lyrics. There were a lot of fun times in
AC/DC
and to be around was a lot of fun. But by the same token there were darker times too.

“It was just a normal relationship. Being in a rock 'n' roll band on the road playing with that intensity is never going to be a bowl of cherries. I think in all great bands there's a fair amount of internal angst. The Stones. The Who. Aerosmith. Metallica. There's a friction inside the band that becomes believable.”

But in his dealings with the brothers, Atlantic Records president Jerry Greenberg didn't find them difficult, instead finding them “kind of, like, shy.”

Jay-Z's and Justin Timberlake's engineer Jimmy Douglass, who got his start as Atlantic's in-house engineer, remembers them being “cordial and responsive … freaking cool human beings.”

It's a softer side of their personality few people get the privilege of seeing.

Opitz recounts a story of Malcolm delivering “four or five quick jabs to the head” of a much taller concert promoter over a dispute in Detroit in the late 1970s.

“They were tough customers, the Youngs,” he says. “They knew what to expect and weren't afraid of it. You didn't cross Malcolm. Great guy. No question about it. He's a strong-minded fellow. He's like George. He's got that determination—I can move mountains if I so wish—without the bullshit attached to it, because they're working-class Gorbals boys, so they've got that innate toughness that gets born into you if you're Glaswegian.”