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

by Fink, Jesse

  * * *

  Today, Boston is AC/DC territory. The New England Patriots play “Thunderstruck,” “For Those About to Rock” and other AC/DC songs before, during and after games at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough. In the working-class Irish-Catholic area known as South Boston, the gritty milieu for Martin Scorsese’s The Departed and Gus Van Sant’s Good Will Hunting, AC/DC has taken hold because their songs are not just honest, real and aspirational, but also about not forgetting where you come from. There’s no place like that place, whether you can physically step back into it or if it just remains in your heart. You shouldn’t try to shake it off because it makes you what you are. Growing up in the Young family or the streets of South Boston, the bonds of family and birthplace are everything.

  Boston and the outlying city of Quincy (pronounced Quin-zee by true locals) is also home to Dropkick Murphys, an Irish-American punk-rock stadium band that has managed to do what so many others have not: crafted a serviceable cover of an AC/DC song, taking “It’s a Long Way to the Top” and turning it into something uniquely their own. They also perform “Dirty Deeds” and “TNT” live.

  In January 2013, at McGreevy’s in Back Bay, the “Dropkicks” perform a special free gig to celebrate the launch of an album with a very AC/DC-sounding title, Signed and Sealed in Blood. The bar is owned by Ken Casey, the group’s vocalist and bassist. I turn up, manage to get in and join the huddle of Red Sox caps and Bruins shirts inside. There must be 200 people crammed into the tiny space, many more disappointed out on the sidewalk. When it comes time to play their anthem, “Shipping Up to Boston,” immortalized in The Departed, the joint trembles so violently it’s like the walls are going to come tumbling down: what AC/DC were doing in small venues in Australia, England and America in the mid to late 1970s.

  After the show, Casey poses for photos and signs merchandise. For all his wealth and newfound fame, he clearly connects with his fans and hasn’t forgotten where he comes from. This is a man who’s gone on the record as saying, “I think our goal is to be the AC/DC of Celtic punk rock.” His face lights up when I mention I’m writing a book about the Youngs.

  “Genius songwriters and showmen,” he says. “They’re just everything it is about being a real rock ’n’ roll band. It’s not about how you look. It’s just about the music. AC/DC were a fucking man’s band and they stuck to their roots and stuck to their guns. You always know what you’re going to get from AC/DC and that’s like what we try to be. We want our fans to know what they’re getting and to be able to trust that the music’s going to be what they signed on for. That’s what AC/DC have always done.”

  I ask Tony Berardini what it is about Boston that saw them gain such a foothold.

  “The response to AC/DC on the East Coast was far greater than the West Coast,” he says. “Outside of the city of Boston, which is relatively small, there are a lot of blue-collar, working-class towns with a much larger population than the actual city. I think AC/DC’s hard-rocking music and subject matter appealed to that working class. AC/DC are real, no-pretense, no-apologies, what-you-see-is-what-you-get, stripped-down, straight-ahead rock. I believe audiences can hear and see ‘bullshit’ miles away. There is no bullshit in AC/DC’s music or shows. Think about it: the Dropkicks are in much the same vein, in their case traditional/Irish punk, and—let’s face it—who else could do a respectable cover of ‘It’s a Long Way to the Top,’ including the bagpipe solo?”

  Berardini himself had MCed AC/DC’s first Boston gig.

  “In the fall of ’78 I found out AC/DC were coming to Boston to play a small club, the 500-seat Paradise Theater. I immediately called the label and said we wanted to do a live broadcast. The label was like, ‘Really? Sure, no problem.’ That was in the days when you could do something like that. It would never happen today. The club was packed; I got on stage and did the intro, which went out over the air. Unfortunately, in my enthusiasm I dropped an F-bomb and probably a couple of other expletives in the middle of the rant. The crowd went absolutely nuts and the band proceeded to blow the doors off the place.”

  The Paradise still stands on Commonwealth Avenue, half a mile from Fenway Park, but has been renamed the Paradise Rock Club. The stage takes up most of the space in a tiny room. Going there, it’s incredible to contemplate that AC/DC went from performing in front of a few hundred people at dives like the Paradise to performing in front of hundreds of thousands in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro and Toronto and even millions at an airfield in Moscow. No other band can mobilize a mass of people like AC/DC.

  “AC/DC are still rocking as hard today as they did on their first albums. They sold out the TD Garden and Gillette Stadium on their Black Ice tour—I went to both—and their shows are still balls to the wall, 35 or so years later. You tell me how many bands have done it that long and with that kind of integrity?”

  * * *

  Not everyone agrees, though, on AC/DC’s mortgage on the “no bullshit” Australian sound.

  Rob Riley was just 17 when he first met the Youngs at South Side Six in Melbourne and, as he says modestly, “had a blow with them at their joint in Lansdowne Road.” At 21 he moved to Sydney with the band Dallimore, an Alberts act that released a solitary single, 1980’s “We Are the Kids.” A year later he joined Rose Tattoo, whose first four albums would be produced by Vanda & Young after Bon Scott had championed them to Alberts, and the marriage was instantly volatile but creatively productive.

  Riley says he got “blackmailed” into joining the band. He no longer has anything to do with them, having had a spectacular falling out with frontman Angry Anderson, but will live in rock celebrity for all time for his song “We Can’t Be Beaten.” Its riff is one of Australian music’s most distinctive and most loved. If anyone knows the chemistry behind a good rock song, it’s Riley.

  “There’s definitely an Aussie sound. Everyone tries to emulate it, which is a nice thing. AC/DC have an Australian sound but they’re a world band. They left Australia behind a long, long time ago and made their way in the world. The whole world finds their music accessible, the formula they’ve applied.”

  Mark Gable takes a similar view: “I wouldn’t necessarily say that AC/DC are the quintessential Australian rock sound. The fact that Angus and Malcolm came from Scotland meant that they could create something that had never been created before because they were in Australia. If they had been born in Australia they would never have sounded like that. These guys were different: they looked different, they thought differently and they saw Australia in a way that Australians couldn’t see it. They took pub rock and turned it into something that the rest of the world could appreciate.”

  Even old enemies such as Radio Birdman’s Deniz Tek have come around to appreciating what the Youngs have achieved since “It’s a Long Way to the Top,” the kind of song he might have been talking about when he slagged off AC/DC as a “lame early ’70s boogie trip” in the Engleheart biography. It’s the same boogie that courses through the songs “High Voltage” and “Rock ’n’ Roll Damnation.”

  But interviewed for this book, he sounds a more contrite note: “I’m not sure where that [Engleheart] quote came from. It is certainly possible that [Birdman lead singer] Rob Younger or I said it. In our early days, in the mid 1970s, we were critical of anything we felt was aimed at mainstream acceptance or was trendy. Electric boogie rock was definitely in that category. We were pretty hard on just about every band that had industry acceptance, mainly because we were excluded ourselves.”

  Time has softened that hostility.

  “Regarding AC/DC at that time I recall appreciating their energy and tough stance but did not regard them as a band that was breaking any new ground. I’ll stand by [what I said in Engleheart’s book], generally, but if asked today I would not say ‘lame.’

  “I suppose that they were helped by their brother and by having access to Alberts management and studio facilities. I would be very surprised if that was not the case. But that does not in any way detract, in
my mind, from what they achieved when they were given the chance. I would say that theirs became the quintessential ’70s Australian rock sound. Maybe they took over where Daddy Cool left off.”

  Phil Carson, for his part, doesn’t buy into the argument at all: “AC/DC is a great rock ’n’ roll band with a sound that crosses international borders. I certainly don’t think that their sound was indigenous to Australia. If you want to talk about an Australian sound, I would say that bands like Australian Crawl, Mondo Rock, Skyhooks, and Iva Davies with Flowers and Icehouse epitomize what I would call an Australian rock sound. I would put Cold Chisel halfway between that and a straight-ahead international rock feel, but AC/DC was full-blooded rock ’n’ roll from start to finish.”

  “They carved a path in Australian rock-guitar music,” says Mark Opitz. “No question. Just like The Bee Gees did with harmony and melodic music, they carved a path. Air Supply did too. If there is an Aussie rock sound, AC/DC play a very big part, not a total part. As far as guitar sounds are concerned, we were in that period when we didn’t have instant access to the rest of the world and what was happening so you more or less invented your own and what you imagined that other guitarist was doing to his amplifier. With so many pub gigs there was a lot of time to experiment with your sound and AC/DC weren’t alone in having a big sound. They were maybe one of the first to go that way but a lot of other people did as well.”

  There’s a better way to explain it, insists Anthony O’Grady, who in any case thinks Billy Thorpe lays claim to the title. The best way of hearing the difference between an Australian and American sound is listening to Ted Nugent’s old band Amboy Dukes cover Big Joe Williams’s “Baby, Please Don’t Go” against the AC/DC version off the original High Voltage.

  “The difference between the two versions is how Australians feel the blues and how Americans feel the blues. Amboy Dukes’ version was like it was on tracks. Like a train on tracks. Whereas AC/DC’s was like a truck revving up a mountain. You could feel the gear changes. You could feel the cam wheel underneath your feet. You could feel the rumble of the pistons.”

  * * *

  The rumble is unmissable to me as “It’s a Long Way to the Top” comes on the radio around midnight on a stretch of road outside Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the heartland of America. Close to 40 years after it was released in Australia, the song has lost none of its power. The band that American radio programmers weren’t so sure about in 1976 is now a radio staple alongside Journey, REO Speedwagon and Boston.

  As one anonymous radio programmer told Billboard magazine in 1981 after the success of Back in Black: “AC/DC is so ‘in’ that their old stuff, which was ‘out’ at the time of its release, is now ‘in.’”

  There’s simply nothing like “It’s a Long Way to the Top” late at night on a lonely road on a dark highway. Those double yellow lines leading you to the life you can have if you want it bad enough. I hear it and instantly I miss Australia.

  Allan Fryer, the Scottish-Australian singer who might have replaced Bon Scott were it not for Brian Johnson, calls me the next day from his home in Fort Worth, Texas, to tell me he’s going into the studio to record his own version of “Back in Black,” the song.

  What does he think about the Australian sound?

  “It’s from the heart and I’m talking from the heart here,” he says. “It’s not forgetting where you come from. When you play hundreds of gigs a year, sometimes three gigs a night, you pay your dues, you get out there, you bust your ass, and you do it for the love of what you believe in. AC/DC have never forgotten where they’ve come from. Ever. I think it’s a Scottish thing, an Australian thing, a real British thing. A lot of these people never forget where they come from. I live by that myself today. And I think that’s the sound. Just balls to the wall. That rhythm section. The rhythm guitar. Just pure honesty.

  “There’s no bullshit. There’s no make-up. There’s no nothing. It’s just honest. That’s what you get. You get a pair of jeans, a pair of sneakers, a T-shirt, and you get up there and you do your thing. I think the fans know that’s the truth. It’s straight-ahead rock ’n’ roll. And everybody can relate to every song. It’s just where you come from.”

  It is indeed.

  4

  AC/DC

  “Jailbreak” (1976)

  Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia, 1989. Three excited young boys from the Sydney waterside suburb of Balmain, two 16, one 17, are a long way from home: up on stage at Berrimah Prison, a correctional facility described by one criminal barrister as “something out of Dickens, in fact it is worse than Dickens,” in front of a rowdy crowd of 100 mostly Aboriginal felons.

  Their band, Sooty Blotch, was there as part of the Teenage Roadshow, an initiative pioneered by a white-haired, ex-army philanthropist called Gil Weaver and funded by the Australia Council. It toured artists and musicians to outback communities and prisons in the country’s disadvantaged north.

  Sooty Blotch mercifully changed its name to Baby Sugar Loud and for a moment in the early 1990s threatened to break the big time but instead broke up. At one point, Brisbane rockers Powderfinger, who would go on to become superstars in Australia and had a slew of #1 albums, supported them.

  “Virtually all the faces in the crowd were black while all the guards were white,” remembers Tom Donald, the guitarist, who now works in advertising. “We played a set, all covers: Stones, Free, Cold Chisel, Hendrix. Rocked very hard. Had a great response. The prisoners in maximum security were shaking their doors—you could hear them rattling.

  “The mood had started getting crazy-electric to the point that Gil was taken aside by one of the guards and warned: ‘The warden says one more song.’ But we were only halfway through. So Ben Quinn, our singer, announced to the crowd, ‘We’ve been told we can only do one more song.’”

  A few boos rang out, which became a din. The rattling in the cells was incessant. It was getting tense. Then came a cry from down the back.

  “PLAY ‘JAILBREAK!’”

  “We knew the song,” says Donald. “I looked at Stuart Miller, our drummer. He was grinning like a fool. I looked at Ben. He mouthed, ‘No,’ as if we were taking our lives in our hands. I looked at Stu again. He clicked the sticks—one, two, three, four—and I launched into the riff. The place went fucking nuts, and there was that brief moment where we didn’t know what was going to happen; that we could have made a terrible mistake. The guards made everyone sit down. We finished. The inmates went crazy. We were escorted out by the guards. One of them started screaming at Gil, telling him that the Teenage Roadshow was now banned from any Northern Territory correctional facility. Gil thought the whole thing was hilarious. It was one of the most memorable moments of my entire life.”

  Six years later Aboriginal rock band Yothu Yindi did their own cover of “Jailbreak” for the Fuse Box tribute album, a collection of AC/DC covers by Australian alternative acts such as Regurgitator, Ed Kuepper and The Meanies. With its didgeridoos and low, growly backup vocals, it almost betters the original: something not often said when it comes to AC/DC.

  To this day, “Jailbreak” remains a song that speaks like few others do for so much of the Aboriginal experience in outback Australia—for one simple reason.

  “High rates of imprisonment,” was the straight answer of Mandawuy Yunupingu, who spoke to me before passing away in June 2013. He sang backup vocals and the Yolngu-language part of the song. “Indigenous Australians are 10 times more likely to spend time in prison than non-indigenous Australians. Also it’s simply a great song.”

  But the original lyrics are also cleverly subverted. In a powerful political statement about Aboriginal deaths in custody, the words are changed at the end: He made it out/With a sheet around his neck.

  “A sad fact but true. It’s unlikely a death in custody will come from a rope. There are not too many ropes accessible to prisoners. A sheet is the stark reality of the situation.”

  * * *

  “Jailbreak” is not the mos
t original of the Youngs’ songs—the similarities with Them’s “Gloria” are undeniable, even though Mark Evans insists the bass line shifts and “takes it into a different area”—but lyrically and musically it’s one of AC/DC’s simplest and most venomous, what Clinton Walker calls a “virtual manifesto” for the band. It was thrown together in early 1976 and released as a single in Australia and the United Kingdom that year with an el-cheapo film clip, once again directed by Paul Drane, this time at a quarry in the suburb of Sunshine in Melbourne’s western suburbs.

  It starts pretty much as all AC/DC songs do: with Malcolm’s riff establishing intent and driving the rhythm from the top down.

  “Definitely a three-chord repetitive riff that recycles the same chordal riff to ‘Gloria,’” says Joe Matera. “It’s on a par with Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke on the Water’ and Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ as one of the most popular riffs learned by guitarists when they’re starting out. Yet from the moment the first strum is heard it’s instantly recognizable as AC/DC.”

  Then the drums and bass join in, but this time there’s more of a wallop to the George Young–patented boogie than there is on “It’s a Long Way to the Top”; a kind of bounce or elasticity. Bon Scott has his snarling narration down pat; you can almost visualize his missing tooth. And it’s complemented with backing vocals so blood-flecked and wretched they could be coming from a convict gang on the lam in Van Diemen’s Land. But most of all “Jailbreak” exemplifies the importance of space in AC/DC’s music. The single bass note for the racing heartbeat. Angus’s distortion and aggression as he mimics spotlights, sirens and firing rifles. The long pause before that lone bullet gets Scott in his baaack. It ends in a crossfire of cymbals, guitars and, perish the thought, even maracas: all-round AC/DC perfection.

  “AC/DC will always be a live band,” says Evans, explaining the tightness. “The four of us used to be in the studio together, recording, and that’s what made it easy to mix too. There weren’t any add-ons [apart from] vocals and guitar solos. So whenever you hear an AC/DC song, you’re hearing sort of two Anguses. Because Angus has hidden the big chords underneath but he’s also playing the solo. But ostensibly what you’re hearing is the band playing live in the studio. So when you go play live, they say, ‘Oh gee, it sounds just like the record.’ It is the fucking record.