Youngs : The Brothers Who Built Ac/Dc (9781466865204) (6 page)

That aside, though, Opitz also describes the Youngs as a regular family unit: “I remember going to a Christmas party at the family's place in Burwood. Playing table tennis. Having a few beers out in the sun. A barbecue. Normal as bloody anything. Just great. I remember thinking, ‘How well has this migrant family done that's just popped up, stuck together, stuck it out and they've had success in ways they couldn't have imagined?' And this was in the '70s.”

Says John Swan: “Margaret [the Youngs' sister] was like a big sister to all of us. She would have a big pot of soup on and she'd always make sure you had a feed and a bed to sleep in. They were much more family-oriented than most other musicians were. Most other musicians would do that if it were you
and
your girlfriend, but they wouldn't do that if it were just you. [The Youngs] took
everybody
in.

“That's why you'll find not just for
AC/DC
but for the Youngs they certainly lived the Glaswegian style of family communication. Everybody lives together. If it's your mate, it's
our
mate. They wouldn't bring an idiot to the house. They'd bring someone who was a fellow Glaswegian or a fellow Scot or somebody who had a problem that Margaret could help with.”

They've also maintained, at least outwardly, no traces of ostentatiousness, despite fabulous, almost undreamed-of wealth. When getting around they're sticklers for the Glasgow-style “gallus walk”—head down, hands in pockets, huddling up, a protective instinct—and it's not a rare thing wherever they are in the world to see them down at the local shops clutching a packet of smokes and wearing cheap clothes as if they're just average Joes.

Anthony O'Grady and Angels guitarist John Brewster were members of the private Concord Golf Club in Sydney's inner west. Several times they linked up with Malcolm and George for a social round. During one such outing, George told O'Grady
AC/DC
had sold “over 10 million albums” with
Back in Black
and were now the biggest band in the world.

“Soon after George had said that, Malcolm, in all seriousness, said to me, ‘This is a really good golf club, isn't it? How much do you pay to belong to this in a year?' I forget what the fees were then. I said something like $1500. And he went, ‘
Aw
, you must be
rich
! I belong to Massey Park [a nearby public course].' And I just looked at him and he was a man that could buy half of Florida and all the golf courses on it. They were very aware of being observed not to be putting on the Ritz. Very, very,
very
aware.”

Swan relates a similar story about Angus, who was living in Kangaroo Point in Sydney's southern suburbs. He was driving around in a Mercedes that had plenty of miles on the odometer and Swan, living in neighboring Sylvania, had bought a new Jaguar. Swan asked Angus why he was driving something so “fucking old” when he could afford anything he liked.

“He said, ‘There's nothing wrong with that car. What are you talking about? It's a perfectly good car.' I said, ‘Yeah, but you're fucking rich now.' He said, ‘That's got nothing to do with it. It's a good car. I
like
it.' They don't need to drive around showing everybody what they've got. Same goes with their shoes. They used to take the piss out of me for wearing flashy runners because they wore Dunlops. Seventeen bucks a pair. And I'd walk in with a $200 pair of fucking shoes on. And they'd go, ‘Ah!
Look!
Somebody's in the money!'”

“They're really good people,” says Opitz, “but they're very private people.”

*   *   *

For those readers seeking a conventional biography, the Youngs' life stories have been dealt with (or at least
attempted
to be dealt with) adequately in books such as Walker's
Highway to Hell
, Evans's
Dirty Deeds
, Murray Engleheart's
AC/DC, Maximum Rock & Roll: The Ultimate Story of the World's Greatest Rock Band
, John Tait's
Vanda & Young: Inside Australia's Hit Factory
, Phil Sutcliffe's
AC/DC, High-Voltage Rock 'n' Roll: The Ultimate Illustrated History
, Susan Masino's
Let There Be Rock: The Story of AC/DC
and Mick Wall's
AC/DC: Hell Ain't a Bad Place to Be
. There's a bunch more of them, in different languages, of varying quality, mostly straightforward chronologies or illustrated guides with little or no critical examination (some verging on journalistic fellatio), even less actually written about the music and why it works the way it does, and most containing some major howlers.

For instance, in the Wall book, there's a photo of an old man in a schoolboy uniform hanging out with
AC/DC
in London in 1976. It's from Dick Barnatt's well-known sequence of photos in which Angus Young is drinking milk straight from a bottle. The mystery man is captioned as being Phil Carson, one of the most important figures in the
AC/DC
story: the man who signed them. So it's a crucial detail to get right, especially when he's interviewed for the book. But the man in the photo is in fact Ken Evans, an Australian who was program director for Radio Luxembourg and formerly of pirate radio stations Radio Caroline and Radio Atlanta. He'd recorded an interview with
AC/DC
to help promote their music and they were there to help celebrate his birthday. Still kicking around in his late 80s but in declining health, he lives in Mona Vale on Sydney's northern beaches. He remembers little of the day but confirms it was “the one encounter” with the band he had.

In a brief email exchange, I remarked to Stevie Young, who filled in on rhythm guitar for the American leg of 1988's
Blow Up Your Video
tour, when Malcolm stood down to get on top of his drinking, that there was a lot of misinformation out there in books and fan sites about the band. I fell victim to it myself, thinking Stevie's father was Alex Young because of what I'd read. He replied: “There is. But I like it … my dad was Stevie Young, their eldest brother.” Stevie Sr. was the first of eight siblings in the Young family, born in 1933. Alex's son, he says, is called Alex and lives in Hamburg.

There you go. Like father, like son. Hopefully I have avoided making a few mistakes of my own.

So familiar details don't need to be rehashed here; retelling the already-told story is not what this book is about. Bigger is not necessarily better. I didn't want to relentlessly plunder old music magazines for secondhand quotes to fill pages or go over old ground with people who have been interviewed already ad nauseam or those who were sick of talking and would only open up under sufferance. Nothing is more dull, and so many books written about
AC/DC
have been just that, even the mercifully shorter ones such as
Why AC/DC Matters
by Anthony Bozza. The American writer says of Australia that the band was “raised there and imbued with the idiosyncratic cultural confluence that makes that island unique,” ventures “theirs is a wild-eyed cry of unruly youths from a country founded by convicts,” that “
AC/DC
came from the trenches” and that the band “have not reinvented the wheel—they've spun it like a motherfucker.”

You get the drift. Even a slimline 160 pages is hard going with that amount of fanboy guff. The well-intentioned Bozza later admitted he'd done the book in the hope he'd be anointed as
AC/DC
's official biographer. It reads as such: verging on hagiographical. All the same, the title of the book deserved answering. Bozza can be commended for having a crack.

The thing is, and it's a point that needs to be strongly made, not everything
AC/DC
has done has been good. In fact, some of it has been downright crummy (from individual songs such as “Hail Caesar,” “Danger,” “The Furor,” “Mistress for Christmas,” “Caught With Your Pants Down” and “Safe in New York City” to forgettable albums such as
Fly on the Wall
,
Blow Up Your Video
and
Ballbreaker
). Some of it has been crass (“Let Me Put My Love Into You,” “Cover You in Oil,” “Sink the Pink”). But even when the lyrics are bad or in dubious taste the music always manages to sound good—the riffs never let you down.

For a group that Bon Scott once described as an “album band” it's ironic that of
AC/DC
's 15 originally released, non-compilation studio albums at time of writing, only four (
Let There Be Rock
,
Powerage
,
Highway to Hell
and
Back in Black
) are truly essential. Their last great album was recorded in 1980.

As the Australian music critic Robert Forster writes in his book
The 10 Rules of Rock and Roll
: “The reduction that goes into an
AC/DC
song, and the tight palette of influences the band has always worked with, gave the early work precision and power, but three decades later it acts less as a liberator and more as a noose.”

Tony Platt agrees they've got themselves stuck in a musical corner of sorts from which there can be no escape: “Their biggest strength, the simplicity and directness of their music, is also their biggest weakness because there's only so much you can do with that. Where do you go? If you're David Bowie you can reinvent yourself on a regular basis and nobody bats an eyelid. But if
AC/DC
reinvented themselves, they would lose their fans overnight. You'd be hearing the outrage from millions of miles away.”

That said, the Youngs might not be reinventing themselves with each new
AC/DC
record, but that has never been the point of what they do. It's sticking to a basic palette.

Phil Carson, who signed them to Atlantic Records in 1975, says: “I guess that the Youngs had a realization that rock music should be a driving force that shouldn't be overburdened with complexity.
AC/DC
has a unique sound, and the space within it was created by the Young brothers as musicians and producers.”

Says Mike Fraser: “Everybody kinda says, ‘Well, they never change.' Yeah, but that's hard to do. [They'll do] B, G, C; three, four chords in a song. They play it in such a way that it's simple but it grabs you and really sounds powerful. I find with a lot of other bands—Van Halen, Metallica, for instance—they're different types of bands in that they create a
soundscape
. A very nice, complex picture. Great songs. But with
AC/DC
, it's red, white, black and that's it. I think your brain absorbs it better.”

Sure, it's possible. But then there is the view that trying to divine the secret of what they do is simply pointless.

“I've never heard a band so tight in my whole life,” says David Mallet. “Never
anywhere
. They play and they are tight and the subtleties of rhythm in those riffs and the way they are put together, you could analyze them from now for the rest of your life and you'd never know the way the riffs are played. It's certainly beyond what 99.9 percent of the population can begin to understand.”

But, hell, it's worth a shot.

*   *   *

As
The Scream
was to the history of modern art—redolent of what had come before it, but just a bit
heavier
—those
AC/DC
albums released between 1977 and 1980 were to hard rock. No other band has come close to what
AC/DC
achieved during that four-year period and nobody has been able to replicate the fury of the Youngs' guitars. When they come in together—
whoomp
—it's like a spark igniting a bushfire.

“I don't think there's been a better guitar duo ever,” says Mark Evans.

Perhaps only Guns N' Roses or Nirvana came close to matching
AC/DC
during those years in blowing apart the rock paradigm. But
AC/DC
are still in their own league. They delivered four absolute belters in a row and even in the lean period that followed released the occasional knockout track, like 1990's “Thunderstruck,” not to mention a slew of unappreciated gems off “lesser” albums: “Spellbound,” “Nervous Shakedown,” “Bedlam in Belgium,” “Who Made Who,” “Satellite Blues” and “All Screwed Up,” among others.

Rob Riley, who should have conquered America with Rose Tattoo but instead inspired Guns N' Roses to do what his band of illustrated bad boys could not, says he has “nothing but respect and fucking love and admiration for the boys from Acca Dacca.”

“Most people I know reckon, ‘Oh, but that fucking album sounds the same as the fucking last and they sound the same all the time' and I go, ‘No, I don't think that at all.' I think they're fantastic just for the simple fact that they can come up with that fresh sound. I think they're great. I love ‘Riff Raff,' ‘Thunderstruck,' ‘Ride On,' a shitload of stuff. Great stories. Like ‘It's a Long Way to the Top.'”

Even one of their most strident critics, Radio Birdman guitarist Deniz Tek, pays them respect: “I think
AC/DC
's strength was singlemindedness and unwavering adherence to a signature sound that millions of fans loved. They stayed true to it, within a narrow operating range. Most bands veer off course after the first few recordings, usually not in a good way.
AC/DC
never went off the track.

“It's not my taste in music but their incredible success and worldwide impact cannot be overstated. I appreciate their sticking to their vision and doing what they do best, giving their fans all over the planet exactly what they want over an amazingly long period of time. They certainly are great at it. They obviously worked very hard for their success and they clearly deserve it. They are one of the few handful of bands that have put Australia on the map as a center of uncompromising hard rock.”