Youngs : The Brothers Who Built Ac/Dc (9781466865204) (31 page)

“I had room mikes up,” explains Platt. “I just controlled how much of each instrument was leaking onto the other instruments' microphones. So that when you combine them together, it's what I call ‘acoustic glue.' It enables the sounds to actually feel like they're being played in the same place and at the same time, because of course they are. So it just helps to stick it all together. And that only works if you've got a band who is capable of playing tracks live—two guitars, bass and drums—and can get it right.”

When the tapes got to Diament, the onus was on him to retain that space rather than augment.

“Space is one of those things that can very easily be diminished, obscured or completely eradicated by too much processing, by compression of dynamics or by a less than optimal signal path in the mastering room. In addition to preserving performance dynamics, space and air are important considerations.”

That focus on preservation included some of the incidental sounds from the recording, such as the drag on Brian Johnson's cigarette in “Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution” and Phil Rudd counting down the beat in “Back in Black.”

“When we experience a musical performance, it isn't just the instruments in isolation that make up what we hear,” he says. “The humans playing the instruments and the space between and around the humans and their instruments are all part of the total experience. If the original recording engineer captured these, I would consider them crucial to the whole.”

Unlike some bands,
AC/DC
also manages to be powerful without being teeth-shatteringly loud.

“Some artists have mistakenly been led to believe that raising the level encoded on their CD—making the record itself ‘hot'—makes their recording cut through more on the radio. In fact, the opposite is true: radio compressors tend to clamp down even more on this type of record, resulting in rather wimpy sound rather than powerful sound. It would seem many record-company executives also believe people buy records because they are loud. I don't know about this as I've always bought records because I like the music. Neither do I know anyone who ever said, ‘Wow, that record is loud, I've just got to get a copy.'

“Making the record itself loud means other aspects of the sound must be compromised. Prime among these are the dynamics—the very place where the slam and power of the recording come from. This is why so many modern masterings have no real energy. In addition, the compressed dynamics lead to a stress response in the listener. No wonder folks aren't buying as many records as they used to. Joe and Jane Average might not be thinking about it consciously but they know their newer records just aren't as much fun to listen to as records used to be and they don't listen to them as many times as they've listened to purchases made years ago.

“In contrast, when the dynamics of the recording are preserved, the listener will have to turn up their playback volume control, especially compared to recordings mastered in the past several years. What a difference. They can turn the recordings way up without experiencing the painful quality a ‘hot' record engenders. And they can experience the full dynamics, the full slam, weight and power of the music in ways those ‘hot' records just can't achieve.”

Tristin Norwell, a freelance engineer at Alberts back in the early 1990s who relocated to London to work for Neneh Cherry and Dave Stewart of Eurythmics before becoming a composer in his own right, agrees with Diament.

“The recording purist will always want to capture and reproduce the full width of dynamics of an artist's performance,” he says. “If you go to a lyrical theater, and you are in a good one, you will hear an actor whisper when they are being coy, and when they shout they will get the message across without it being distorted.

“Recording music is the same. But the broadcast mediums are very different and therefore reproduction tricks vary depending on the message being sent. Tools such as compression, limiting and ‘loudness' are designed to exacerbate subtlety, not retain it. They are designed for an inattentive audience who might only ever hear music when they're shopping, so any musical message needs to be rammed down their ears at any given opportunity.

“
Back in Black
works because it's a beautiful technical reproduction of a great performance and of the space in which they are doing it. With Johnson's voice carefully balanced between the air of the room and two great-sounding electric guitars, a drummer and a bass player, all performing with genuine ‘intent,' it becomes a god-sent ear-candy moment.

“Any less dynamic would soften the message, and any more may send a metalhead to sleep. The point is that the quiet bits are as captivating to its audience as the loud bits. This is what an engineer is talking about when he or she talks about ‘space'—dynamic space. Space that is reproduced by a technical exercise in which we, the listener, get to ‘feel' a performer.

“Classical music is usually the best example of this for the audio junkie, as it requires massive signal-to-noise ratios for transparent reproduction, but
Back in Black
comes close to this for the hard-rock junkie.”

For all the audio whizzbangery of the
AC/DC
catalog, it hasn't always been so sophisticated. Tony Platt recounts a story that during the production of the
Bonfire
box set in 1997, George Young was forced to master the
AC/DC: Let There Be Rock
film soundtrack from old cassettes Platt had lying about. Norwell recalls that before he moved to the UK he was asked by Alberts to archive the entire
AC/DC
two-inch tape collection.

“I went into Studio 2 one day and found the in-house building maintenance bloke trying to work out why a tape he'd put on the MCI tape machine wasn't rewinding. I asked what it was, and freaked out when he told me.

“It was an original
AC/DC
tape. It was so old—and a notoriously bad batch of BASF—that it was dropping metal onto the heads. By the time I got there it was half a centimeter thick. The tape was ruined. Fortunately, it was probably only about two minutes of an old outtake, but I hand-wound it back on and sent it off to be rebaked.”

Rebaking is an archiving process by which the tape is restored temporarily to allow just enough time to transfer it to a new reel.

“Anyway, with a heavy heart I turned down the job. I would have spent six months transferring every recording
AC/DC
had made to that date. I don't know who did it in the end. Hopefully not the mentalist bong-head from the workshop cellar.”

*   *   *

While Alberts might have been sloppy with their archiving, Lange left nothing to chance in The Bahamas.
Back in Black
was as much a career-defining album for him as it was for
AC/DC
. He had under his belt a bunch of City Boy, Boomtown Rats, Supercharge and Clover records, Graham Parker's
Heat Treatment
and a ream of one-offs for a gaggle of nobodies. Foreigner and Def Leppard were still to come. The only album he produced between
Highway to Hell
and
Back in Black
was the self-titled debut of Broken Home, a side group of the British band Mr. Big, with Platt engineering.

It was during
Back in Black
that Platt saw the first clear signs of Lange's tendency to strive for technical perfection at the expense of feel. Progressively, Lange was becoming more of a taskmaster and today Platt is happy he got to work with him on those early albums for Atlantic and not later in his career, when Lange's requirements for an engineer didn't necessarily fit into what the Englishman wanted to do.

But Platt insists he enjoyed working with Lange, learned more under him than he had under anyone else for a long time and owes him a debt of gratitude. They did five albums as a producer-engineer combo before Platt went off to become a producer in his own right. And he gives a valuable insight into what set Lange apart from George Young.

“I think I was fortunate to work with Mutt at that particular point in time because I think I would have found it difficult once he became a lot more of a perfectionist. Mutt is an extraordinary producer. He is absolutely totally unique. His consideration for the artist, his understanding of the construction of songs and melodies and so on is quite extraordinary.

“A lot of people will say you're either going to get a take that feels good or a take that's perfect and the two things don't go together. You're always going to have some mistakes in a take that feels good and a take that's perfect is probably not going to feel that great. His response to that was, ‘Well, I don't understand why.' He thinks it should be: ‘Let's just keep going till we get it.'

“My ethos has always been that most of the music I really like has got mistakes in it but it feels great and it doesn't bother me too much. From Mutt's point of view it bothers him but it probably doesn't bother anybody else. So we would occasionally clash about whether a take was perfect enough for him and felt good enough for me. And most of the time I would try to persuade him by using my skill and expertise to repair things, to do edits. Certainly on Foreigner's
4
that was the case; there was a lot of me editing one note or a bar into something just to make it a perfect take so that we could have the take that felt best.”

It's a depiction that finds no argument with David Thoener and Terry Manning. Both men paint a picture of Lange as a workaholic, someone who can get by on a few hours' sleep, gets to the studio first and is the last to leave, who doesn't take drink or food breaks, who's totally absorbed in the
work
.

“When a band hires Mutt, they are hiring a producer with a
vision
,” says Thoener. “It's not easy to follow that vision to its finality. He has a reputation for making wonderful records; that takes time and patience. Any band should know that before making a commitment to Mutt.”

Says Manning: “He's an amazing, deep thinker and a hard worker. One thing that you will hear on occasion from people who have worked with Mutt is that in some ways they can almost get tired of being pushed to perfection. But Mutt never gets tired.”

Angus and Malcolm, used to George's expeditious approach in the studio, are on the record as having been very unhappy about that.

Yet Mark Opitz pays tribute to Lange for achieving something important.

“His job is to satisfy two things: the artist's integrity and the commercial proposition,” he says. “And that's a very hard thing to do; it's a hard balance to get right.”

No one can accuse Lange of not fulfilling that brief on
Back in Black
, no matter how big a pain in the ass he would become. Especially when so many of its lyrics were reputedly contributed by him. Derek Shulman calls the albums Lange made for
AC/DC
“incredible.” Yet the enigmatic Zambian producer would ultimately pay the price for being far too good.

*   *   *

As it had for the Youngs many times before and would many times again in the future, it all came to a head over money.

At a minimum Mutt Lange was costing hundreds of thousands to turn up to the studio—millions when royalties were factored in. But the money was more than worth it, according to Steve Leber of Leber-Krebs,
AC/DC
's management company between 1979 and 1982.

“They could deliver on stage,” he says. “That was never a problem.
AC/DC
needed something else. It was always management and a producer. Once you have that team in place you
never
break it up. It's like George Martin with The Beatles. Why break it up?
AC/DC
not only fired Mutt Lange, they later fired us after we broke them.”

Peter Mensch, the one-time tour accountant for Aerosmith who'd taken over from Michael Browning in 1979, was terminated after an August 1981 performance at the Monsters of Rock concert at Castle Donington, England, was ruined by a malfunctioning sound system. But it affected many bands that day;
AC/DC
's experience wasn't isolated.

Mensch didn't respond to interview requests for this book and has never explained why he thought he was sacked by
AC/DC
. His only comments on the matter were to Mick Wall, when he said: “I was never told why I was fired. They called their lawyer, who called David Krebs, who called me.” And to Phil Sutcliffe: “I was stunned. Till then my shit didn't smell.” Wall comes to the conclusion that Donington was to blame for the band dispensing with their manager: “Malcolm was in a vengeful mood. Somebody would have to pay; in this case, Peter Mensch.”

By most reliable accounts Mensch was a hard worker for
AC/DC
: an ambitious manager who was willing to move to London, hang out and be there for the band whenever he was required. He even identified Bon Scott's body in the morgue.

“That was my first job,” he told
The Sunday Times
in October 2012 as part of a profile of his marriage to former British Tory MP Louise Bagshawe. “I get a phone call that Bon Scott has died and I have to come and identify the body. I say to the rest of
AC/DC
, ‘Couldn't you guys go?' And they go, ‘No, you should go, you're the manager.'”

In April 2013, in a spontaneous question-and-answer session with Reddit, he gave an example of how the band tested his loyalty: “The dumbest request I've ever received was while managing
AC/DC
. I was in London. They were in Paris. Phil Rudd wanted hot water because his kettle was broken. He called at midnight to ask me to bring over hot water … wish I had told him I would charter a flight to bring him a kettle, and billed it back. Needless to say, I didn't go.”

Mensch briefly stayed on with Leber-Krebs but eventually came to an arrangement where he left to form his own management company—Q Prime—with business partner Cliff Burnstein. Def Leppard, a former Leber-Krebs band, was their first signing—with Lange as producer. Over four albums, the union was lucrative: 1983's
Pyromania
sold 10 million copies in the United States alone and 1987's
Hysteria
sold 20 million worldwide.