Youngs : The Brothers Who Built Ac/Dc (9781466865204) (20 page)

But Nick Maria says the number-one challenge for the Australian band was visibility—literally, stock in record shops. Once they had visibility the rest followed. And touring achieved it.

“Visibility, having them in the stores, was difficult when they had no airplay,” he says. “They stayed on the road forever. I don't know how they did it, but they did it.”

Larry Yasgar recalls having to chase their music around the country.

“Wherever they got airplay I had to follow it,” he says. “I'd have to get stock into the various markets. If a record went on [the air], I had to make sure it got into those stores. A lot of times we'd give the singles away for nothing just to get a sense if the record was going to happen based on airplay.”

Steve Leeds was behind promotional tours for bands such as The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin at Atlantic. When things were starting to happen for
AC/DC
, as he saw it, it was Texas where the loudest racket was being made on the airwaves.

“Texas was the market that first really embraced
AC/DC
in the United States,” he says. “A little station in Texas started playing
AC/DC
: KMAC/KISS in San Antonio. Bill Bartlett was an early supporter but the real support was in San Antonio. San Antonio is a very blue-collar town. It's where the Alamo is. KMAC/KISS was appealing to a working-class male and I think
AC/DC
was something they understood. A lot of the hard-rock bands had their first initial success in Texas, particularly San Antonio. Florida was another place.
Redneck rock
. The South embraced that hard-rock sensibility.”

Yasgar, for his part, pinpoints the Midwest as the crucible of the
AC/DC
liftoff.

“
AC/DC
to me started in the Midwest,” he says. “Cleveland. Detroit. Chicago. That was a big rock area for us. In fact, with all our records we would concentrate on the Midwest. That's where the concentrated airplay was.”

*   *   *

One look at
AC/DC
's US summer tour dates for
Let There Be Rock
shows how important those working-class and “redneck” areas were to the rise of
AC/DC
: Texas, Florida, Missouri, Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan, with New York and California at the tailend. In the winter, the band did a bunch of dates in Tennessee, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

After seeing Dropkick Murphys in Boston, I drive down to Tennessee via Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia and North Carolina and cut back to Massachusetts via Kentucky and West Virginia.
AC/DC
is rarely off the radio, even in the rural backroads. Nashville, incidentally, is where
AC/DC
would part ways with the manager who'd got them to the States—Michael Browning—in September 1979. It was the last time he'd ever see the Youngs.

John Wheeler, the lead singer of Hayseed Dixie, a “rockgrass” band from Nashville that shot to fame (and the top of the country charts in Australia) in 2001 with
A Hillbilly Tribute to AC/DC
, an album of covers, first heard
AC/DC
on the radio around the age of 10 and remembers that “it just sort of jumped out of the speakers—it was on about 12 times a day—then
Back in Black
came out and I don't think the radio played much else for the next two years.”

He insists Nashville's reputation as a country-music town is erroneous.

“Nashville actually isn't particularly country. It's known internationally for that musical style, but only because there is a branch of the music industry there that cranks out a cookie-cutter version of ‘country' music. Most of the local people in Nashville are no more interested in, say, Tim McGraw or whichever is the latest country ‘hat act' than they are in any other American city. There are more rock and pop radio stations than country ones.

“There are always more blue-collar people in any city than white-collar ones; this is the case everywhere in the world. In Nashville and the South, the same people who loved Lynyrd Skynyrd and Hank Williams Jr also loved
AC/DC
. If you went to a Hank show in the 1980s, half the audience would be wearing
AC/DC
T-shirts and vice versa.”

Music is important in the American South because the reality of daily life can be pretty humdrum compared to the big cities on the East and West Coasts. But smalltown America is the real America. The waitress who's seen better years wiping down the counter in the café. The Creedence song on the radio. The young girls in flipflops and NFL sweatpants catching up for gossip on the street. Listening to country music on the road, it strikes me that the themes are pretty much constant: being reassured that all you need to be happy with your lot is a tin roof over your head, a porch to drink beer on, a beautiful woman in your bed and mud on the soles of your shoes.
AC/DC
's music reassures in the same way. It elevates you by breaking down life to some pretty basic requirements: sex, drink and rock. Wherever you live, whatever your background, the intended effect is the same: to make you move with the rhythm, to forget your troubles. It's arguably why, more than any other rock band in the world,
AC/DC
connects with “real” people.

They achieved that lofty status not only through graft and talent, but through the investment of time and money on the part of the people the Youngs entrusted with making their career happen. In most tellings of the
AC/DC
story it's those people who tend to get short shrift.

“With
AC/DC
we had to really put the money in,” says Greenberg. “That's what we did. I think probably one of their big breaks was opening for Aerosmith and a couple of other big bands after they went to Leber-Krebs. It really helped. There was no MTV during those early days. The only way you could break a band was to just put them in that van and ship 'em around.”

David Krebs concurs on that point.

“I think that's true. But our management philosophy was if you loved Aerosmith there were other artists whose music we represented that you would love, so Ted Nugent broke off from Aerosmith,
AC/DC
broke off from Aerosmith or Nugent, Scorpions the same. We had a really good knack for picking great live acts and we tried to make sure that our support acts did not blow away our headliners or we could not do this.”

Krebs was at the Rainbow in March 1977, the same night as Doug Thaler, and instantly wanted to sign the band. He got it straight away; as you do when you're more of a Rolling Stones and Ten Years After man than you are a sucker for The Beatles. Krebs was in the business of music with a harder edge and
AC/DC
fitted the bill. When he approached an initially “receptive” Browning on behalf of Leber-Krebs to offer a co-management deal, he got turned down.

“I was foolish,” he laughs, stirring a coffee in a booth at Three Guys, a Greek diner on New York's Upper East Side. “You know how you re-examine things you did?”

Krebs's mistake, it appears, was his involving a third party. Browning blames Peter Mensch, who was at the summit with Krebs, of talking out of school and for undermining his relationship with the band.

“It fell apart because the guy who was going to run with them, Mensch, went back to the group and mouthed off about what went down at the meeting, so the confidentiality went out of the equation,” says Browning. “I think that got in the way of us being able to do a deal.”

Sighs Krebs: “I should have made a deal with him then.”

Though short of an alliance, Leber-Krebs got
AC/DC
dates supporting his bands. The Australians were about to hit rock music's biggest stages.

“I thought they were fabulous,” says Krebs. “I just loved the band. I tried to help them by putting them on some of my tours. It was good for them because I had two major headliners [Aerosmith and Ted Nugent], so from a standpoint of touring I ensured the fact that they could have the right exposure.

“The move [to Leber-Krebs] eventually happened. In the course of that Aerosmith tour Peter Mensch became friendly with them, they had a falling out with Michael Browning and they wanted to sign with us for worldwide management if we established an office in London that was run by Peter. The real day-to-day manager of
AC/DC
was Peter Mensch.”

*   *   *

One of the enduring legends of the band is that they got their break by blowing the by then severely drug-addicted Aerosmith duo of Steven Tyler and Joe Perry off the stage, destroying their confidence, bruising their egos, and the rest was history.

But Steve Leber disagrees: “No one could really destroy Aerosmith. They were a great band—they really were sensational—and
AC/DC
broke because of Aerosmith. Because of Aerosmith's popularity, they rose, and because of Aerosmith allowing them to be the opening act. I wouldn't say they
killed
Aerosmith but
AC/DC
had their own personality, their own excitement. It was different than Aerosmith's.

“By the time the guys broke, really, Bon was gone. They brought in Brian Johnson and he really wasn't as good as Bon. I wouldn't say as good. Brian was a
different
kind of lead singer. I would say the big difference is that
AC/DC
is led by a guitar player, Angus Young. And Aerosmith is led by a lead singer, Steven Tyler. Angus is probably one of the all-time greatest, if not
the
best lead guitar player in the world because he has personality besides having the ability to play. He's special and unique compared to other guitar players out there. Angus was one of a kind.
Is
. Not was.
Is
one of a kind.”

So was Aerosmith pissed off that
AC/DC
were so good?

“I wouldn't say pissed off. Just
aware
. They didn't throw them off the tour. They also didn't do any other tours together. But they broke them. And so did we.”

AC/DC
, contends Krebs, also benefited from a privileged time in music history: the days before expensive videos with high production values and record-company pressure of having to come up with hit singles every release.

“If you come from the 1970s,” he says, “you come from a philosophy of this kind of music, which is: ‘I like to have one hit single every two albums.' In the 1980s, with the advent of MTV and giant advances for groups like Aerosmith, it's four, five hit singles. It's a whole different mentality. How many hit singles did
AC/DC
ever have in a pop sense?”

Well, none that broke the top 10 on the
Billboard
Hot 100. Aerosmith had eight;
nine
if you include their 1986 reprise of “Walk This Way” with Run-DMC. The highest position
AC/DC
ever reached was #23 with “Moneytalks” in 1991, though they've since gone to #1 three times on the Mainstream Rock charts with “Hard as a Rock,” “Stiff Upper Lip” and “Rock 'n' Roll Train.”

“Jailbreak” never did any real business as a single, only on the 1984 EP that was cynically recast in the liner notes to the 2003 reissue as “a testament, a salute to
AC/DC
's tenth anniversary.” It ended up going platinum. All of which, of course, made their coming world domination even more remarkable.

 

 

5

AC/DC

“Let There Be Rock” (1977)

If Atlantic didn't know what to make of
Dirty Deeds
, they were right to be scared out of their wits with
Let There Be Rock
, an album that was recorded in a matter of weeks in early 1977 and sneerily delivered by
AC/DC
to their truculent overseers at 75 Rockefeller Plaza with unmistakable intent.

Let There Be Rock
and its volcanic title track consigned much of the swing of
High Voltage
,
TNT
and
Dirty Deeds
to the scrapheap. Wherever
AC/DC
ended up in the annals of rock history, this album would stand for all time as an expression of their unrivaled might as a guitar band. Its buzzsaw electricity demanded that Jerry Greenberg and his dithering pals in New York stand up and take notice.

But they were taking a big gamble.

“
AC/DC
's music
was
difficult,” says Steve Leeds, at the time Atlantic's head of album promotion. “It was the weirdest sounding thing; the weirdest thing on the musical spectrum. It just didn't sit with anything. It was loud, noisy rock 'n' roll. It was stripped down and the production was very austere. It wasn't slick. It was raw. The vocals—Bon was like,
growling
. And it was
filthy
. She's got the jack. He's got big balls. It didn't fit in. It was atypical. Vanda & Young always pushed the envelope. With Flash and the Pan, Cheetah,
AC/DC
, even ‘Evie' by Stevie Wright, these were things that were
atypical
.

“All of
AC/DC
's songs had that repetitive, hard-rock rhythm, with Bon screaming over it. It was different. It didn't fit in with what was going on at the time.
Bagpipes!
There are no bagpipes on the radio, even today. George and Harry were fucking geniuses. They figured it out. Conventional wisdom says, ‘You guys are crazy.'”

But having seen
AC/DC
at Fabrik in Hamburg, the man who mattered most—Greenberg—was now a believer. Asked if he was happy with
Let There Be Rock
, he says: “Oh yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely
.”

*   *   *

In June that year
Let There Be Rock
was released in the United States (albeit with “Crabsody in Blue” missing) and Greenberg's
touring, touring, touring
edict was followed to the letter. By the end of July
AC/DC
was playing its first show (tickets $5.50) in the United States—as support for Canadian band Moxy at the Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin, Texas, having been lured there by promoter Jack Orbin. He'd heard the band played on radio station KMAC/KISS by Lou Roney and the late Joseph Yannuzzi (aka “Joe Anthony”). In a 1978 feature,
Texas Monthly
magazine hailed KMAC/KISS as “the champion of hard-rock radio and the last vestige of true progressive-rock programming in Texas.”