Youngs : The Brothers Who Built Ac/Dc (9781466865204) (9 page)

That all changed when Ahmet Ertegun got personally involved, as he had with
AC/DC
in the late 1970s. With his elder brother Nesuhi, the urbane Turkish-American co-founder of Atlantic Records came to belatedly get behind
AC/DC
, even after the band's second US album,
Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap
, had been rejected by his own artists and repertoire (A&R) department.

Ertegun heard the INXS-Barnes cover by chance in February 1987 and was bowled over. “They don't make rock records like this any more,” he said. Accordingly a “softened up” US radio–friendly remix was put on
The Lost Boys
soundtrack and went on to sell a couple of million units.

“Good Times” was a shrewd choice by Pope and Murphy: a four-on-the-floor ripsnorter begging for the sweat and spittle of Barnes but which also managed the feat of transforming the normally effete, slightly soft Hutchence into a figure so ballsy and cocksure with the microphone it was like the ghost of Jim Morrison or Bon Scott had entered his body. Mark Opitz, who produced the single, could see similarities with
AC/DC
's late figurehead, at the time only seven years dead: “Like Bon, Michael was a real gypsy. A singer in a band that wasn't necessarily the same as the rest of the band.”

But beyond the two impressive lead singers, then at the height of their powers, and the not-too-shabby group of musicians behind them, the choppy guitar riff was the star. It felt familiar, almost
AC/DC
like. For good reason, hinted at by the mysterious credit. This remake of a forgotten Easybeats song was the first time much of the MTV generation on both sides of the Pacific had heard something composed by George Young, the Jor-El of
AC/DC
.

*   *   *

When it was released as a single in 1968 under the US title of “Gonna Have a Good Time,” having been recorded and produced the year before by Englishman Glyn Johns, “Good Times” sank without a trace, not even the backing vocals of Steve Marriott of Small Faces or the piano of Rolling Stones session pianist Nicky Hopkins able to cut the Australian band some chart slack. The only love it got in the States was an obscure but totally rocking, organ-scorched 1969 cover by a group of previously uncorrupted Mormon sisters from Utah, The Clingers, a cleancut rival act to The Osmonds. Looking for an image buster, they recruited Michael Lloyd and Kim Fowley as producers and released it under its US title.

“Michael and I found it on an Easybeats album,” says Fowley, a notable songwriter for Kiss, Alice Cooper and Warren Zevon, among others, who went on to create, manage and produce the greatest female rock band of all time, The Runaways, and would guide Guns N' Roses before they exploded on the rock scene in 1987. “We played The Clingers the song and they learned it and we recorded it.”

Like so many bands, The Easybeats were just too far ahead of their time. The spate of covers of the song—some 40 of them and counting—was mostly to come in later years. Before 1970 had rolled around they broke up, “Friday on My Mind” both their biggest hit and their albatross.

“The good thing about that Easybeats version is the high backing vocals,” says Mark Opitz. “Marriott just happened to be in the next studio. I was a schoolkid when I first heard The Easybeats' ‘She's So Fine' on the radio. I just thought, ‘
Fuck
, what's this? This is great. That's just brilliant.' I was blown away.”

Doug Thaler, keyboardist/guitarist for Ronnie Dio and the Prophets and later
AC/DC
's first American booking agent, heard “Good Times” in 1967 while on the same bill as The Easybeats in upstate New York on the Gene Pitney Cavalcade of Stars roadshow. Thaler went on to record the Vanda & Young tune but couldn't replicate the same swing.

“It really grooved,” he says. “I thought it was pretty funny that 20 years after The Easybeats played that song every night on tour over here somebody finally had a hit with it.”

Now intoxicated kids around Australia, England and America were throwing up on front lawns, down stairwells and in sand dunes as it shook the walls of house parties or reverberated from parked cars in makeout spots. “Good Times” was exactly as its title suggested: the kind of song you played on a Friday or Saturday night as a gee-up before you went out on the town. An unapologetic boozing and shagging song: exactly what it was intended to be in 1968.

But back then it couldn't resurrect The Easybeats' toxic career. There were rumors of drug use—heroin, no less—by one member (and it wasn't lead singer Stevie Wright) tearing the band apart. This and the band's failure to write another hit of the caliber of “Friday on My Mind” and the fact that for all their success they couldn't rub two pennies together cut George Young deep. He went off cursing under his breath about managers and record-company swindlers, hung around in London playing and recording music with Harry Vanda and older brother Alex Young, then returned to Sydney in 1973 from a “four-year binge” of creativity that his two pimply younger brothers were fortunate to absorb by osmosis and which ignited the beginnings of
AC/DC
.

Some of the best work of this “binge,” as George called it, is found on Marcus Hook Roll Band's
Tales of Old Grand-Daddy
, a 1973 album he started in London with Alex then finished in Sydney with the help of Malcolm and Angus. “Quick Reaction” and “Natural Man” are steeped in the sound of
AC/DC
. The bass line and power chords on “Natural Man,” especially, are replicated almost note-for-note two years later on
TNT
's “Live Wire.”

Martin Cerf, reviewing “Natural Man” for the Los Angeles–published
Phonograph Record Magazine
in 1973 when it was just an import on the Regal Zonophone label from England, described it perfectly as a natural progression from “Good Times” and saw the revolution that was coming when no one else did, not least a bunch of record companies in the United States that didn't know what to do with Marcus Hook.

“If you can imagine what The Easybeats would have sounded like four years on should they have stayed together, then you know what ‘Natural Man' is all about,” he raved. “It's got a snare that tears speakers. It's got protest lyrics. It demands you dance. It's got Beatle harmonies. It's got a riff the best this side of The Hollies' ‘Long Cool Woman' and ‘Heaven Knows' by The Grass Roots, and a hook, well, now I know the reason for the group's name.”

Marcus Hook, incidentally, is a town outside Philadelphia.

Declared John Tait in
Vanda & Young: Inside Australia's Hit Factory
: “The album is pure power rock—a prototype for the sound that was to become the signature of
AC/DC
.”

*   *   *

In
Why AC/DC Matters
, Anthony Bozza writes that nothing in The Easybeats' catalog “touches the musicality of ‘Friday on My Mind.' It is their most innovative track, and the only one relevant to a discussion of
AC/DC
.” Which is wildly wrong and underscores just how little some American critics really know about the music of The Easybeats, outside of
AC/DC
the most important Australian band of all time.

Wrong because three other songs—“Sorry” (1966), “Good Times” (1968) and especially “St. Louis” (1969)—set the tone for and laid the musical path of
AC/DC
. You can hear
AC/DC
in George's rhythm guitar in all of them, the violent swipe of a claw across the strings. The same riffs that have become the signature sound of Malcolm Young and the bedrock of everything
AC/DC
does.

The Australian music website Milesago describes the “killer hook” in “Sorry” as emblematic of “George's innovative (and much-imitated) guitar technique, in which he scratched the pick across the stopped strings to create an arresting percussive effect” while “St. Louis,” The Easybeats' last single and which scraped into the
Billboard
Hot 100 in the United States, is “an unmistakable signpost of the direction
AC/DC
would take a few years later.”

“I was pissed off it didn't do well chartwise,” says Ray Singer, who produced it.

The riff of “St. Louis,” a true companion piece to “Good Times,” was so infectious it got the attention of Motown's creator, Berry Gordy Jr.

“The following year I went to the States with my then–business partner [future Marc Bolan and Wham! manager] Simon Napier-Bell. We were invited to Motown, which was still in Detroit in those days, and introduced to Berry, who had just launched a subsidiary label called Rare Earth Records. They were releasing white rock music—quite something for an all-black label like Motown. One of their first releases was ‘St. Louis.'”

Stevie Wright, who lived for a period with the Youngs, remembers 4 Burleigh Street being a hive of creativity.

“I can remember seeing Angus practicing and I said, ‘Jeez, he's dedicated. He'll be a great guitarist one day.' And he sure enough is. [Angus and Malcolm] started getting it together early when The Easybeats were chasing women and drinking. I thought the Youngs would do okay. I didn't know just how well.

“I've never had such a good time as I did living with them. They spoiled me. It wasn't long after I met George that I was over there at Burwood writing songs with him. I was just too tired to go home one day and George said, ‘Stay here' and I never left. George was the first to invent the
chooga chooga chooga chooga choo
. That was in ‘Sorry.' Since then there's been many imitators. The Easybeats were a rock band as much as we were a pop band. I'm really proud
AC/DC
continued the job we set out to do.”

American producer Shel Talmy, the man behind The Who's “My Generation,” The Kinks' “You Really Got Me” and The Easybeats' “Friday on My Mind,” agrees: “I always considered The Easybeats as a rock band and not a pop band with all those negative connotations attached to being one. So with all those [Young] connections, I hear some of The Easybeats in
AC/DC
.”

But it was a sound that was also rooted way back further: to the music of Chuck Berry and piano player Winifred Atwell.

“I've said it for years and people have said it to me for years:
AC/DC
got our recipe and stayed with it,” says The Easybeats' first drummer, Snowy Fleet. “It's that basic 12-bar boogie rhythm that they come down on and then they work around it. They don't deviate from it.”

*   *   *

Enigmatic producer Glyn Johns, renowned for his work with The Faces, The Who, Eric Clapton and Eagles, wouldn't be drawn on “Good Times” for this book, saying he didn't recall anything about the 1967 sessions that ended up on 1968's
Vigil
and offered only this: “The Easybeats were a great band and I enjoyed the sessions I did with them enormously. ‘Friday on My Mind' was easily the best track I cut with them.”

But Shel Talmy, who actually gets the producing credit for that timeless song (Johns was his engineer), is more generous: “The Easybeats were very important and should have been more recognized for their contributions and should have achieved a much higher status. I thought when we were doing ‘Friday on My Mind' that it was a natural and knew it was going to be an instant hit.”

But he has nothing kind to say about the boss of Alberts, Ted Albert, and in actual fact blames him for sowing the seeds for the demise of The Easybeats. According to Talmy, suggestions that there was a falling out between himself and the band over “musical direction”—alleged in the Stevie Wright biography
Hard Road
by Glenn Goldsmith—are a crock. It was about money.

“I hope Ted Albert brought some sunblock with him. He's gonna need it where he went,” he says. “I was young, naive and stupid enough to think the person I was dealing with was honest and trustworthy. He wasn't, as I discovered to my chagrin. Unfortunately, I signed a contract to produce The Easybeats directly with Ted, one of the biggest mistakes I ever made, and one I never repeated, albeit that most everybody else I dealt with was not like Ted, but he sure as hell permanently soured my attitude toward trusting so-called managers or any others purporting to rep a band.

“Ted screwed me. He refused to pay me and I have never received one penny in the royalties I'm due for ‘Friday on My Mind' or any of the other tracks I produced. The fact that he'd pissed off back to Australia [from England] made it financially impossible to sue him and his company as I also knew what a big man he was there, so I realized I stood a snowball's chance in hell of succeeding and decided not to spend a fortune proving how right I was.

“Ted could get away with it as he rightly concluded I wasn't going to go to the expense of trying to collect what was owed to me on the other side of the world. History was on his side as other scumbags like [Beatles and Rolling Stones accountant] Allen Klein, [Roulette Records founder] Morris Levy and [Small Faces manager] Don Arden had been getting away with it forever.

“I'm guessing [he did it] because of a massive ego and jealousy because when he came to London and started producing The Easybeats, [their record company] United Artists told him to stop as it sucked: the reason why I was approached. So my producing an international hit first time out of the box had to be a huge blow to his ego. That's my pop-psychology take on it.

“After he kicked off [in 1990], none of his associates jumped up to declare, ‘I'll make it right.' [Easybeats manager] Mike Vaughan was just a stooge who was no help, as he was more interested in covering his butt. Bottom line is lots of my bread is sitting in Australia with Alberts and I hope they've been choking on it, as obviously none of the legatees had the decency to redress an egregious wrong.”