Youngs : The Brothers Who Built Ac/Dc (9781466865204) (8 page)

Krebs hadn't seen the Youngs for three decades.

*   *   *

For all of
AC/DC
's Aussie pub posturing, their resistance to backup singers, symphony orchestras, samples and greatest hits albums, their anthems against greed (“Money Made” off
Black Ice
and “Moneytalks,” an insipid song from
The Razors Edge
that broke into the top 30 in the
Billboard
Hot 100, a singular feat for a group that has never seen itself as a “singles band”), the reality is that they own and control one of the most commercial and money-geared brands in the world, right up there with Nike and Coca-Cola.

They do exclusive deals with Walmart. They license their music to game companies, iOS apps and sports franchises. They remaster old records with new packaging—and truth be told don't sound any better for it. But who cares when they can outsell The Beatles' back catalog? On November 19, 2012, they finally released their albums on iTunes (plus two iTunes-only box sets:
The Collection
and
The Complete Collection
), something they previously refused to do—just like they'd said no to Live Aid in 1985 and big charity gigs in general but turned out for the SARS benefit concert in Toronto in 2003. It was a change of heart with a big payoff. “Highway to Hell” and “Back in Black” entered the British Top 40 singles charts a week later, more than three decades after their original release dates.

The move surprised many, failed to impress others. Anthony O'Grady, for instance, will only listen to them on vinyl.

“
AC/DC
were made for vinyl. Because vinyl has the bass,” he says, with a wistful look in his eye. “They were a band that used to go into stores and rearrange the racks so that their albums were up the front.”

There will be a time soon, no doubt, when they will give in to hip-hop artists and license samples of their music. It brings the catalog back. It introduces a whole new demographic and market to their music. Public Enemy, Beastie Boys and other acts have tried to use
AC/DC
's music officially but been knocked back. Jimmy Douglass, for one, is puzzled by their continued holding out against the inevitable.

“Without a doubt sampling, when it's done right, is the ultimate flattery,” he says. “It's a new form of art. That's all it is.”

They use huge stage sets with bells, cannons, Angus statues and inflatable fat ladies. They repackage greatest hits albums in the guise of box sets and soundtracks. Paramount Pictures used 15 of their songs on a compilation for
Iron Man 2
.

But O'Grady argues that they haven't sold out: “They're always very aware of
context
. So they would sell their songs to
Iron Man
because there's a shared context between
Iron Man
's audience and their audience. They wouldn't sell them for any movie that would use them in an ironic context, for example. If Woody Allen had have come up to them and asked, I think they wouldn't even answer his letters.”

*   *   *

Go to eBay, type in “
AC/DC
” and you're confronted with branded merchandise ranging from light-up red devil horns to baby bibs.
AC/DC
have their own range of wines, both whites and reds. They have their own self-branded German beer, each can of which contains an “individual code that fans can use to buy attractive devotionalia or bid for prizes.” (The company behind the beer also released an accompanying “High Voltage” energy drink.) They have their own line of Converse Chuck Taylors, their own Monopoly board game and their own high-end headphones. Their most recent tour grossed nearly $450 million, making it the second-highest earning concert series in history, behind only The Rolling Stones. In 2011, they were the first musicians to ever make Australian
BRW
magazine's Rich 200 list. In 2013, in the same magazine, they were adjudged the 48th richest family in Australia, with a combined fortune for the previous year of $255 million—the only entertainers on the list.

For brothers who pride themselves on a “no bullshit” philosophy, the reality of what the Youngs do and the mountains of money they make does jar. But like the way ZZ Top and Aerosmith reinvented themselves from loose, raw, “rough and ready” beginnings in the 1970s to become commercial behemoths in subsequent decades, Tony Platt sees
AC/DC
's transformation into an arena band as a sign of their character.

“That's the strength of the guys,” he says. “They reacted to a developing music market. As the audiences' penchant for bigger, more bombastic, and so on and so forth grew, as good artists, as perceptive artists, they developed to take full advantage of that.”

Phil Carson, who's put his neck on the line for them several times over his career, doesn't begrudge their success for a moment, even if it has come at the expense of some relationships: “
AC/DC
have found a real connection with their fans, and for the Young brothers it has always been paramount that the fans come first. That's why they kept ticket prices low while all the other bands of their ilk were charging more and more. Musically, they found a formula that worked, and they funneled their creative energy into staying within those parameters. They kept going even through the difficult periods of
Flick of the Switch
and
Fly on the Wall
and emerged at the end of it stronger and better.”

*   *   *

But left a trail of blood in their wake.

Witness the way the Youngs have discarded some band members, producers, engineers, managers and anyone else who rubbed them up the wrong way for whatever reason: Dave Evans, Mark Evans, Mutt Lange, Phil Rudd (kicked out for a decade after an almighty blue with Malcolm over a personal matter during the sessions for
Flick of the Switch
), Chris Slade, Michael Browning, Ian Jeffery, Peter Mensch, Steve Leber, David Krebs and a bunch of others, including a small army of forgotten drummers and bass players from their early days in Australia. The names Colin Burgess, Peter Clack, Larry Van Kriedt, Ron Carpenter, Paul Matters, Russell Coleman, Rob Bailey, Noel Taylor and the late Neil Smith only function in the
AC/DC
story as index entries or band trivia. When Smith died in April 2013, he didn't even rate a mention on
AC/DC
's official website (29 million “likes” on Facebook at time of writing—and counting).

The body count was not always to the brothers' advantage. The losses of Mensch,
AC/DC
's manager at the height of their fame, and Lange, the best producer the band ever worked with, were for many years catastrophic commercially and artistically.

It strikes me that
AC/DC
bang on about how much they do it for their fans because the fans, unlike some band members, managers and journalists, don't give lip. They don't say no. They don't ask tough questions. They swallow the hype. Buy the merchandise. Don't challenge the Youngs' authority.
AC/DC
, anecdotally, is as welcoming to outsiders as a Mongol's yurt. As Mick Wall says in his book, “the heart of the
AC/DC
story” is that they are “more of a clan than a band.” Yet when an American filmmaker and
AC/DC
superfan called Kurt Squiers decided to make an affectionate film called
Beyond the Thunder
, about how their music connected with fans, they didn't want any part of it. There is an inherent contradiction at play here. At time of writing, the documentary, some years in the making, hasn't been released. Squiers and his partner, Gregg Ferguson, are hoping to go into a partnership with
AC/DC
's management and get the band's blessing for a worldwide distribution deal.

Dave Evans paints a picture of insularity: “The Youngs were always tight knit and I remember George telling me that when he was with The Easybeats they were millionaires on paper but ended up broke because of being ripped off by management. The brothers closed ranks and none of us were privy to the meetings they often had which did not go down well with the rest of us.”

Anthony O'Grady, who'd been to singalongs at the Youngs' family home in Burwood, what he called “a genuine, ‘Knees Up Mother Brown' sort of situation,” also shares this view: “I think the band was representative of the Young clan. I don't think there's any doubt at all that
AC/DC
are the frontline troops of the Young clan and that Malcolm is the general of the band and Angus is the strike weapon of the band and everything else fits around that.”

He saw this at close hand, being asked to leave the house at one point and sit in a car outside with a passed-out Bon Scott to “listen to the pelting rain on the roof” while band business was being discussed inside with their then manager, Michael Browning. O'Grady sat the sozzled Scott upright and patted him on the back a few times when
AC/DC
's legendary frontman sounded as if he were choking. (If only he'd been with him in that Renault 5 in South London in 1980.)

But this is a family steeped in the rules of the Glasgow mean streets, in Protestant/Catholic rivalries. A band that started out playing roughneck pubs in front of crowds of “Sharpies”; that right from the beginning attracted the street element and a working-class audience.

John Swan, who was living in a migrant hostel in Adelaide when he met George and saw The Easybeats when they came through town, explains the Glasgow mentality: “Mine is the same philosophy as theirs: if you put it on me or mine, I'll get you back. It doesn't matter when.
I will get you.
If you beat me today I'll be back tomorrow. That was given to us by generations before us in Glasgow. You're brought up like that. So you bring that to this country and you tend to live that out. In Australia the average guy that was in a band would come from a fairly stable family, who had reasonable parents who didn't believe that one's a Catholic and one's a Protestant and they should fucking kill each other. If you fuck with someone in our family, then you will wear it.”

Another Glaswegian, Derek Shulman, was struck by how much George continued to play a crucial role in the decision-making of the band. Shulman had performed in his own group, Gentle Giant, with brothers Phil and Ray before becoming a record-company executive and launching the commercial juggernaut known as Bon Jovi into American arenas.

“When I worked with the guys, I realized that the fraternal bond was extremely close knit,” he says. “Having been in a group with my brothers I understood that this ‘bond' was one that needed trust from all three brothers. Also being born in Scotland myself I knew instinctively where, how and why the Young brothers kept their distance—as the Shulman brothers did in the past. Their ‘clannishness' really was intrinsically part Scottish reticence and part fraternal insularity.”

Yet this clan loyalty didn't stop Angus and Malcolm agreeing to ditch George as their producer after
Powerage
stiffed, even if they did so with his blessing. As long as he continued to pull the band's strings behind the scenes, it was a compromise they could live with. They are nothing if not pragmatic.

*   *   *

But all of these intrigues are peripheral. They're a job for
AC/DC
's biographers or for the person who writes the Youngs' inevitable official biography. This is not it. It does not attempt to be. Their personal and family lives are their own business, even if there are some journalists who fail to respect their privacy. This is a book, ultimately, about the power of their music and how they built the colossus of
AC/DC
. It's an appreciation of three brothers whose journey with the two greatest rock groups to ever come out of Australia appears to be coming to an inevitable end, with the announcement in April 2014 on AC/DC's Facebook page and website that Malcolm was “taking a break from the band due to ill health.” Intriguingly, though, AC/DC says it will “continue to make music.” They returned to the studio in May, with Stevie Young the talk of the AC/DC faithful.

The Youngs
covers nearly half a century of songwriting. November 2013 marked the 40th anniversary of the formation of
AC/DC
and the same month in 2014 marks the 50th anniversary of The Easybeats.

Two bands that form the horns of Australian rock.

 

 

1

THE EASYBEATS

“Good Times” (1968)

It took a teenage vampire movie and nearly two decades for “Good Times,” The Easybeats' maracas-driven thunderclap off 1968's
Vigil
album, to break into the charts, reaching #2 in Australia, #18 in the United Kingdom and #47 in the United States. The only other song by the band to break the top 50 in all three markets was “Friday on My Mind,” and that had happened round about the time it was supposed to: in 1967, not 1987.

There has never been any rhyme or reason to success in the music business, especially the fortunes of The Easybeats, and this confirmed it. The movie was
The Lost Boys
, starring Kiefer Sutherland and directed by Joel Schumacher, and easily the best thing about it was the Australian song, a duet for Jimmy Barnes, former lead singer of beer-soaked pub giants Cold Chisel, and the late Michael Hutchence of INXS, featuring the backing of his five bandmates.

Containing three talented Australian brothers of its own—Andrew, Jon and Tim Farriss—INXS was on its way to becoming an arena act with 1987's megaplatinum
Kick
, while Barnes was pushing hard to do the same thing with the self-titled and radio-geared
Jimmy Barnes
, a repackaged version of the
For the Working Class Man
album that had gone to #1 in Australia.

But unlike INXS, he had failed to fire in the States. Now, though, the Glaswegian shrieker had an accidental American smash on his hands. A hit no one involved with the recording saw coming, “Good Times” having been initially covered to promote Australian Made, a loss-making Australia-only summer concert series conceived by Barnes's manager, Mark Pope, and INXS manager Chris Murphy as a means of showing that a homegrown festival featuring homegrown acts could compete with big international tours for bums on seats.