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

by Fink, Jesse

  That doesn’t stop them from trying; and that, in itself, is a tribute.

  * * *

  “It’s a Long Way to the Top” was released in Australia in December 1975. The film clip, directed by Paul Drane, came out three months later: either an unintended or unashamed ripoff of The Rolling Stones’ promo for “Brown Sugar” on a flatbed truck in New York earlier in ’75. That had been Charlie Watts’s idea. As Mick Jagger explained: “Jazz in the old days in Harlem, they used to do promotions for their gigs on flatbed trucks.”

  At least the Rats of Tobruk Pipe Band was a wholly original idea. Executives from the band’s future American record company, Atlantic, had not heard anything like it. They were about as stunned as Holger Brockmann had been at 2JJ.

  After Coral Browning played Phil Carson of Atlantic’s UK arm a film of the band, he signed them to a worldwide deal. He had no misgivings at all.

  “From the moment I saw it, I knew that I could make the band work in Europe, and that was my initial goal,” he says. “This was in the days before videos, but Coral brought along an audiovisual invention by Fairchild. It was a briefcase that opened up to reveal a screen on which I viewed AC/DC performing “It’s a Long Way to the Top,” I believe, in a nightclub. It was electrifying and that’s what sold me on the band.”

  The clip was actually “High Voltage,” recorded at Melbourne’s Festival Hall and directed by Larry Larstead, an advertising-industry friend of Chris Gilbey’s who by his own account “just happened to be in Melbourne with a crew directing for Coke” when he got the call to see if he’d be interested in shooting AC/DC.

  He was and enlisted four cameramen (not five, as claimed in some accounts): Guy Furner, Ron Johanson, Paul Williams and Peter Willesee, the latter pair now deceased. They shot three clips that night: “High Voltage” for AC/DC, Stevie Wright’s “Black Eyed Bruiser” and John Paul Young’s “Yesterday’s Hero.”

  “The brief was simple,” says Larstead. “Even though we didn’t have sound for our cameras, we were to get as much wild footage as we could. AC/DC was headlining and when they came on the crowd were already pumped. They were there to party and nothing was going to detract from the night becoming something special.”

  But even with four cameras it didn’t all go to plan.

  “Larry hadn’t been able to get decent close-ups of Bon Scott and needed a further studio shoot to do the cutaways,” says Gilbey. “It wasn’t expensive, so we did it, ensuring that the lighting was perfectly matched, that the amount of sweat on his face was perfect, and that he sang as hard as he could in order to make sure that the throat muscles looked like they were straining.”

  Laughs Larstead: “We had a fantastically fun time shooting all those close-ups. It ended up being an all-out contest between the guys in the band to see who could out ‘rage’ the other guy. Angus had thrown his schoolboy hat into the crowd halfway through the live set, which we had missed on camera, so I was faced with the dilemma of only being able to use ‘hat on’ or ‘hat off’ footage of Angus when cutting the final images to their studio soundtrack. That was going to be hard, since I was trying to use all the great shots taken from that night.

  “Anyway, Angus and I worked it out where we thought the hat should come off in the final clip and he played that particular part on his guitar and threw his hat off into the imaginary crowd in the studio with the great AC/DC attitude you can see in the final clip. We had a make-up lady on the day that was in charge of sweat continuity. Hers was a tough job, since every time she sprayed some water on Bon’s face the whole band would yell for more.”

  Extra special effects were to come.

  “We needed audience noise,” says Gilbey. “George Young wanted to have control of creating the audience track and went in the studio to try to put something together. It didn’t really cut it for Larry, so he asked me if I would mind if he used some audio that he thought would work better. I told him to make the video as compelling as possible.”

  Which Larstead dutifully did by pinching audience noise off George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh live album.

  “The record was a gift given to me by a friend and it turned out, with a little extra looping and doubling, to be just what I needed. I think Chris was the only other person at the time who knew about that little bit of editorial skulduggery, so don’t blame it on the band. Many thanks to George Harrison, belatedly.”

  * * *

  Jim Delehant, Atlantic’s head of A&R, says he was handed copies of AC/DC’s first two Australian albums, High Voltage and TNT, when Coral Browning came back through his office a year after she’d foisted a copy on him of Stevie Wright’s Hard Road.

  “The grooves hit me like the best Stax and Muscle Shoals rhythm sections,” he says. “Phil Rudd four on the hi-hat like Al Jackson Jr, and Angus Young’s blues power simplified to the simplest. I made the deal and felt at the time it would be best to combine tracks into the Atco LP so when their second American LP came out it would have the best up-to-date material.”

  Phil Carson chose the track listings.

  “I went with ‘It’s a Long Way to the Top’ simply as the opening song because I thought it was the best for getting the attention of a worldwide audience. I just had to start that compilation with ‘It’s a Long Way to the Top.’”

  In May 1976 High Voltage, a mélange of the Australian-issue High Voltage and TNT, hit UK record stores. The United States followed in September. By November “It’s a Long Way to the Top” had been released as a single.

  “Because I spent so much time in America in those days, I was also sure that with the right help we could break the band on American radio,” says Carson. “Unfortunately, the guys in the Atlantic A&R department at the time didn’t agree with me and made only a minimal effort with High Voltage. Apart from getting a couple of great reviews, nothing really happened on that album. However, I do recall a review from Philadelphia that gave me great hope for the future. The closing line was: ‘AC/DC don’t rock ’n’ roll. AC/DC are rock ’n’ roll.’”

  Bill Bartlett, a program director from radio station WPDQ (later WAIV) in Jacksonville, Florida, who has a legitimate claim to being the first man to play AC/DC on American radio, stands by Carson on this: “When Atlantic released the US version of High Voltage, they were more interested in getting airplay for a band called Fotomaker. How did that work out for them?”

  * * *

  Contrary to the Murray Engleheart biography of AC/DC, which claims “the first person in the United States to really jump and down about the band” was Jacksonville concert promoter Sidney Drashin, and Joe Bonomo’s assertion that they got their first American airplay through disc jockey Peter C. Cavanaugh at WTAC in Flint, Michigan, AC/DC’s first true champion Stateside was Bill Bartlett.

  He has a letter to prove it, from Perry Cooper, dated September 25, 1979.

  “We are currently melting down some gold bars to press up the gold awards for the sales on AC/DC,” writes Cooper. “I’m hoping (and it looks real good) that we might even have to go into hock to make up a few platinum awards. This is just to show you that some of us … remember that you were the first person in the country to turn me on to AC/DC with their first LP. When the right time comes, the people at Atlantic won’t forget either.”

  That time has yet to pass. Bartlett is still waiting.

  Furthermore, suggestions that AC/DC only started getting US airplay at the tailend of 1976 with “It’s a Long Way to the Top” are false. They had in fact been played for some time by Bartlett. And not just the US release of High Voltage. He’d been playing the Australian version, on which the song doesn’t even feature, along with TNT and the album Atlantic kept in the vaults for five years, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.

  Bartlett’s contribution to the AC/DC story has never been adequately recorded in all of the books written about them. As far as the band and their biographers are concerned, he might as well not exist, though Engleheart at least mentions his name once in passing
and Clinton Walker, in a section of his book apropos Jacksonville, records Michael Browning talking about a “guy from the radio station” who “must have got hold of an AC/DC record and actually listened to it.” AC/DC’s one-time manager recalls this same unnamed figure haranguing Atlantic to get behind the band and drumming up so much support before AC/DC arrived to play their first show that the city itself became “living proof that [AC/DC] could work.” In her book Susan Masino underplays it: “A radio station in Jacksonville programmed four or five of the band’s songs into their playlist.”

  Such lack of recognition is a familiar experience for scores of people who have come directly or indirectly into the Youngs’ lives.

  “When I moved from Jacksonville to Seattle in 1977, I also broke AC/DC in Seattle,” says Bartlett.

  It’s an intriguing claim given local station KISW boasts on its website that “Steve Slaton was rocking the airwaves at night and was the first guy in America to play AC/DC on the radio!”

  But Bartlett settles it: “Steve did not know about AC/DC until I arrived [as program director in June 1977, leaving in January ’78]. The general manager of KISW, Bob Bingham, chided me for playing AC/DC in the beginning. I appointed Steve as music director.”

  Bartlett has retired from radio and now lives in Costa Rica.

  “The ownership of WPDQ/WAIV in Jacksonville could not understand AC/DC. All I said to them was, ‘AC/DC will be one of the biggest bands in rock history. Trust me on this.’ The funny thing is nobody ever called me to promote AC/DC. It was all done on my own and I think that this information did not get to the right people in the band. Atlantic Records never recognized my efforts. I know for sure that my station was the first in America to expose Australian music and AC/DC.”

  Even Sidney Drashin confirms he first heard about AC/DC through Bartlett.

  “Bill got so excited he talked me into doing business and requesting live dates for AC/DC. I was glad I did. Great band. Great guys. I loved the band. The Youngs were a pleasure to do business with. Boy, did we ever get them airplay. I remember calling [Doug Thaler’s agency] American Talent International and telling the president, Jeff Franklin, that AC/DC was fabulous—money in the bank for decades—on the Monday after the weekend concerts [in August 1977]. The crowds were on stun.”

  So how did an unknown DJ in Jacksonville cotton on to what would become the world’s biggest band even before its own American record company?

  “I received the Australian version of High Voltage in the mail from Australia as a promo copy while programming WPDQ/WAIV,” says Bartlett. “It was sent to me because word got around in Australia that there was an American program director that played Australian music on the radio. Alberts sent it to me. Geoff Reynolds from EMI must have spread the word to the other labels. I had met him in Melbourne back in 1972 and in Sydney I had met Ron Tudor. Both had put me on their mailing list for items that I might expose.”

  Interestingly, Tudor had signed The Valentines, Bon Scott’s band with Vince Lovegrove, to his June Productions in 1968. Bartlett dutifully went back to Florida and played one of Tudor’s acts, Mississippi, the core of which would go on to big things in the United States under the name Little River Band. Bartlett later recommended Beatles producer George Martin work with them, a suggestion that was passed on by EMI to LRB’s manager, Glenn Wheatley. Martin produced LRB’s Time Exposure in 1981.

  “When I was in Australia in ’72 I even appeared on a TV show out of Melbourne called Happening ’72. They basically interviewed me because I was an American radio programmer whose mission was to bring Australian music to America.”

  Why had he come to Australia in the first place?

  “I was accepted as a foreign-exchange student at Macquarie University in Sydney. I took a leave of absence from the station in order to check it out. I went to a few rock concerts in Melbourne and saw Spectrum, Captain Matchbox and other early ’70s Aussie bands but never heard them on the radio. That year, ’72, was the beginning stages of ‘album-oriented rock’ in America. I needed to find a niche that my competitors would not touch. I decided on Aussie music because it was genuine and fit into the AOR format that I was helping to develop. It also helped me brand the station and, once again, I had a commodity that I knew my competitors could not touch.

  “While in Australia, I decided to visit some labels and tell them my radio story and bring back some promo items. I actually went through the phone directory and physically visited the labels, where I met some execs. What a concept, eh? I also visited Macquarie and decided that I would rather pursue a career in radio.

  “I would receive new singles and albums directly from the record companies in Australia. When I received the import, I listened and played it immediately. AC/DC fit in with the branding that I was using at the station: simple, three-chord-progression rock with rebellion written all over it. It had an immediate positive reaction and there was nothing that even sounded like AC/DC out there, except for a band called Silverhead fronted by Michael Des Barres.”

  Whatever Bartlett was doing was working. The late Ron Moss, 2JJ’s station coordinator and Holger Brockmann’s boss when he played “It’s a Long Way to the Top” for the first time in 1975, visited him not long afterward in Jacksonville to discuss the FM format he was about to implement (2JJ eventually became 2JJJ and switched to FM in 1980) and Bartlett helped Moss develop format clocks.

  There were no station visits from AC/DC.

  “I only met AC/DC in the ’90s. They barely remembered who I was. I met them at an arena in Worcester, Massachusetts. I knew the rep at the record company and saw them backstage for all of two minutes. I told them who I was and they acted as though it was no big deal, which was sad.”

  But it was a big deal. Jacksonville was one of the key cities in the United States where the band first got some traction playing live.

  “Fans had been listening to the band on the radio before they got here,” says Drashin. “Airplay helped sell the show but the fans liked what they heard or never would have bought into it. AC/DC became headliners in record time. I thought they had made it in the middle of the first song they played.

  “What set AC/DC apart were their lyrics, their show/stage presence and the overall timing. Kids were delirious about live shows and records. But I think the southeast became a stronghold for AC/DC because of the early promoters like myself. There were just a few of us and we had to make our own game plan. Getting airplay was different back then because of federal regulation [that restricted the number of radio stations a company could own]. I was able to work with local DJs that I hired as MCs for some of the shows. This gave them an incentive to play the music. It was a win-win situation. The stations played the music to promote the shows and the station and employees gained recognition at the shows.”

  But not in the history books.

  * * *

  Remarkably, there was another unsung American radio hero working hard to push AC/DC.

  His name was Tony Berardini, a programmer for KTIM, a small rock station in San Rafael, just outside San Francisco, California.

  “Tony was a fanatic,” says Judy Libow, who was with Atlantic’s promotion department for 16 years and started out pushing the band on college radio. “He went on to program and eventually become the general manager at WBCN in Boston, which was one of the elite progressive rock radio stations in the country for many years. The guy would eat razor blades for AC/DC. He just loved the band.”

  And still does, nearly four decades on.

  “Their music was real,” says Berardini, now vice-president of talent development at CBS Radio. “It always rocked hard—in an era of music that featured singer/songwriters and disco. They had no pretense nor made apologies for who they were or what they did and they had a great sense of humor in their lyrics; lots of tongue in cheek. I loved that about them.”

  He has only happy memories of that time.

  “I was managing director and a jock at KTIM and one of my jocks, Wild Bil
l Scott, brought the album to a music meeting, we listened to it and immediately added ‘It’s a Long Way to the Top.’ It was a hard-rocking song with a bagpipe lead. Never saw that one coming. The lyrics were great; I could really relate as a jock making $2 an hour working late-night shifts six days a week. Not only does it perfectly capture the music business but in my opinion it’s a damn good description of life. It will be the last song played when they finally plant me.

  “This was long before the Internet and social media so the only way I would know if someone was playing a band was through the trade papers. We were such a small station in the Bay Area that we didn’t even report to a lot of the trade publications. All the jocks at the station loved High Voltage and we played it to death. We were conscious that no other stations in the Bay Area were playing the band. We really didn’t give a shit what other stations were doing. We played it because it rocked.”

  When he moved to Boston, nothing changed.

  “WBCN was getting its ass kicked in the ratings and Charlie Kendall, the program director, wanted the station to rock more. He and I had met over the years and he knew my preference for music that rocked. The first song I played on my first air shift was ‘It’s a Long Way to the Top.’ I figured that would set the tone for what was to come. The next week I added the album to our playlist, which given WBCN’s history with harder music—not much outside of Queen and Aerosmith, championed by Maxanne Sartori, a great WBCN jock—I think surprised the music industry.”

  With the support of Bartlett, Berardini and other unheralded believers in the band at radio stations from KMAC/KISS in San Antonio to WLVQ in Columbus, “It’s a Long Way to the Top” helped get the band its shot at the big time.

  It wasn’t going to let the opportunity slip.