by Fink, Jesse
“I never teach my granny how to suck eggs, you know,” he tells me. “Fuck that; I’m not getting involved in that one. To me, it’s still the same recipe. The basic content is so fucking strong, it still comes through for what it is.”
* * *
Ever the innovator, and mindful of the positive effect a modicum of aggression had had on the band with Let There Be Rock, George played on the cabin fever inside the studio by working everyone up to the point where sparks were flying.
“He’d be like, ‘Did you see The Don Lane Show last night? That bloody hypnotist!’” says Opitz of one George’s psychological techniques. Dissecting the performance of a guest on a TV variety show might seem unusual, but anything was fair game to George when it came to motivating musicians. “It wound everyone up into a state of angst. Got the adrenalin pumping.”
But there was also a degree of personal anger in the room that the band had already brought in, without George’s egging them on.
Anthony O’Grady had kept in touch with Bon Scott while they were touring overseas, Scott writing letters to him. According to O’Grady, by the time Powerage was ready to be cut in early 1978, AC/DC weren’t as flavor-of-the-month as they used to be. Let There Be Rock had fizzled in Australia. Cliff Williams had encountered visa problems. Local shows were canceled.
“They weren’t very popular then because they’d been out of the [public] eye; they hadn’t had any hits,” he says. “Molly Meldrum and Countdown had gone off them. Bon was not bitter. He was actually very angry about the Australian music industry, which had turned their back on them. AC/DC just weren’t on the agenda.”
All well and good, though, for Powerage. When the aggression was off the meter, the tape would roll.
Making use of the band’s first remotes, Angus would take his guitar everywhere. As is well known, he did the solo for “Riff Raff” in the control room.
“An unbelievable riff,” says Opitz. “I sat there with Angus for an hour and a half learning it off him. You can trawl the world of AC/DC aficionados and see which album comes up best, and it’s funny how Powerage has stood the test of time.”
Later, the band took the aggression-first approach George perfected on Powerage into their live shows.
“I’d hear stories from Malcolm and Phil about the way they’d sit around on their American tours, backstage supporting REO Speedwagon, and use the same tactic we used in the studio,” says Opitz. “They’d start ripping, talking about what a shit band REO Speedwagon is: ‘Let’s go and blow them off the fucking stage. Fuck ’em. They’re cunts with their fucking wussy, fucking long-haired, pop fucking music. They wouldn’t know fucking rock ’n’ roll.’ All that sort of shit. They’d psych each other up in the dressing room, hit the stage and fucking go bang.”
* * *
Meanwhile Cliff Williams, now free to record with the band, was a bundle of nervous excitement. This “definitely helped with the rhythm tracks,” according to Opitz. Williams did what he was told and knew his place. He’d learned a few things from the fate of Mark Evans and has largely kept his counsel ever since.
Tony Platt says he heard some of Williams’s songs recorded with Laurie Wisefield from Wishbone Ash when he visited the AC/DC bass player’s house and home studio in Florida and they were “fantastic songs; really, really great songs,” but “it would have been a difficult thing for [Williams] to do anything outside AC/DC without it rocking the boat.”
In well over 30 years playing with the band but being a non-writing member, Williams, like Phil Rudd and Brian Johnson, has done very little outside it. Typically over such a stretch of time lower profile members of major acts do solo records. Bill Wyman, Ron Wood and Charlie Watts did so while being part of The Rolling Stones. But that freedom doesn’t seem to extend to AC/DC’s non-writing personnel much beyond benefit gigs and the odd guest appearance onstage or in the studio.
I ask Phil Carson if Angus and Malcolm ever placed restrictions or had control over what the band’s other three members did outside AC/DC.
“As far as I am aware, the Youngs do not exert any particular controls on this except to set the AC/DC tone. They have never involved themselves in an outside recording project and everybody seems to follow that line.”
Asked how his own relationship is with them now, Carson plays a straight bat but, controversially, hints at discord within the band over the treatment of Johnson.
“That depends who you ask. In later years, I became particularly friendly with Brian and tried to help him with a musical he had written about Helen of Troy. I still believe there are some superb songs in there, along with a first-class script written by [Porridge creators] Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement. We took that one quite a long way, even making a deal with AEG [Anschutz Entertainment Group] at one point, but we never got as far as Broadway.
“While all this was going on, certain things came up regarding Brian’s treatment by the band’s accountant and the Youngs. I will leave that one alone other than to quote George Orwell: ‘All men are created equal, but some are more equal than others.’”
The band’s accountant?
“I am not naming any names.”
* * *
For the opening 45 seconds of “Riff Raff” AC/DC manages the singular feat of sounding like a massing Orc army. When Phil Rudd hits the hi-hat—one, two, three—it’s the cue for Malcolm’s rhythm guitar to come swinging in, Angus’s opening riff falling away like a separating rocket, and there’s a massive release of tension. Outside of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” it’s probably the most cinematic introduction to a rock ’n’ roll song ever put to tape.
The man who recorded it considers it his favorite AC/DC track.
“Oh, 100 percent,” says Opitz. “It just has every element of AC/DC right in it. Every bit. The rock element. The lyrical element. The cheekiness element. The complexity.”
And also the tone. Guitar sound is really where AC/DC set themselves apart from other bands. How do they get it?
“Two ways. I had that ability to go and find the right amplifiers. I sat there for a couple of weeks during the Powerage sessions with a notebook checking out every fucking speaker in every speaker box with every amp until I found what I felt was the best combination of amplifier and speaker. And then when they were in the studio I was keen to set the Marshall amps—every Marshall amp has a sweet spot in terms of volume—and to have those amps at the proper volumes, not turned down.”
What about the chunkiness?
“Malcolm has got his Gretsch Firebird with supersonic pickups; he’s got it on full volume as normal, so he’s able to hit the strings really lightly but get a big sound so it doesn’t overcompress, because he’s hitting the strings lighter and the pickups aren’t overloading. And the Gretsch pickups are known for being louder. It just so happens that AC/DC’s combination of a Gibson guitar with Gibson pickups and the Gretsch guitar with Gretsch pickups is the perfect combination. The other one’s got what the other one hasn’t. It’s typical to that guitar sound.
“The drums and bass you keep pretty dry and turn up the guitars and Bon can sing in an up register to cut through it. It’s a combination of all that, the microphones they use, Malcolm’s right-hand guitar and Angus’s right hand. That’s the major factor.”
But when they took the song on the road, AC/DC was able to summon the same energy, even ratchet it up. In video of their performance at the Glasgow Apollo in April 1978, the same concert that was used for the If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It) live album, Scott conducts Angus like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia directing the magic broomsticks. There is a beauty in the arrangement of the stationary Malcolm and Williams at the back of the stage and in the way they only surge forward with Scott in threes (Angus is off in his own world). There’s no prancing about. Just straight up and back. On top of their musical tightness AC/DC also have consummate stagecraft. So many other bands have tried to echo this AC/DC aesthetic in their own performance but too often deliver outright mimicry.
In 2010 I saw Airbourne at the Metro Theatre in Sydney and lead singer and guitarist Joel O’Keeffe carried off the whole Angus-Young-getting-carried-off-into-the-audience routine with polished aplomb. He even split a can of Victoria Bitter beer on his head standing on top of a Marshall amp and sprayed it over the audience.
“Airbourne are trying to capture that spirit. But they probably overemphasize a point,” says Opitz, diplomatically.
* * *
After eight weeks of recording with mixing involved, Powerage was done and dusted.
Everyone involved in the production, which had been done mostly on feel, was pleased with the results, even after it had been sent back by Atlantic for the band to record “Rock ’n’ Roll Damnation.”
“You can hear Vanda & Young in ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Damnation,’” says Opitz. “The hooks. The shakers coming in. Tambourine to get the groove. Which if you notice is just like [John Paul Young’s] ‘Love Is in the Air.’ They were very big on lots of Motown tricks. Clapping hands. Harry would clap behind George.”
It was a brilliant concoction by Vanda & Young, a song in the spirit of “Good Times” and “It’s a Long Way to the Top,” and went to #24 in the United Kingdom. However, to this day not everyone is impressed by Powerage’s only single. In his biography, Mick Wall calls it “a two-bit piece of head-bopping guff,” which is so ungenerous and untrue it’s a scandal of its own. Since when is head bopping a crime when it comes to rock ’n’ roll?
“AC/DC gets you moving,” says Opitz. “One thing George Young said to me was, ‘Always make sure they can dance to it.’ That wasn’t lost on the band. The dance would be a four on the floor. As long as you can stamp your foot, that’s all you needed. That was it. No complex twist. Just a straight, dead-ahead, four-on-the-floor rock ’n’ roll that connects physically with young guys in particular.”
The man whose opinion mattered most, Jerry Greenberg, thought the whole album overall was “a little too hard edge” for US radio.
“That was the problem,” he says, bluntly. “After Powerage I was the guy that convinced the band that they should come to America and work with another producer. That was pretty tough because the brothers’ brother was the producer of the band.”
Opitz’s take is different: “There was a big change in the songs, which didn’t go down with Atlantic well at all. They thought the producers were losing control, which they weren’t obviously. They were just giving them their head to find their own groove.”
But Doug Thaler, who visited Sydney during the recording, backs Greenberg: “When I went down to the studio in ’78 the albums didn’t sound quite as great as they might have. The music was great, the performances were great, but the sound was juuuusssst not quite what it needed to be.”
In any event, heads rolled. The fallout from the failure of Powerage was immense. AC/DC sacked their manager, Michael Browning, and Vanda & Young were replaced by Eddie Kramer, who was forced to make way for Mutt Lange.
Browning didn’t want to be drawn too much on the switch that would kill his relationship with AC/DC, insisting he’d already said enough about it in other books. As Clinton Walker wrote in 1994: “Thicker than water though blood may be, Malcolm and Angus were also extremely ambitious … [they] assuaged their guilt at George’s sacking by blaming Michael Browning. From this point on, things would never be the same again. What was once a defensive insularity now degenerated into fully blown paranoia. It was an atmosphere of fear and loathing that would escalate for years to come, and only exacerbated Bon’s growing sense of dislocation.”
Yet Browning is happy to boast: “It was the choice of producer where it went pear shaped until I managed to rectify that and hire Mutt Lange.”
By 1983’s Flick of the Switch, however, Lange too was gone.
Continued Walker: “The production credit the album bore, to Malcolm and Angus themselves, was merely the tip of the iceberg of a purging the pair had effected throughout the entire band and its infrastructure. It’s a classic syndrome: the successful campaigner who fears his own troops. But Malcolm and Angus never trusted anyone anyway. They sacked practically everybody: Mutt Lange, who had artistically engineered their breakthrough; drummer Phil Rudd; Peter Mensch, who himself had usurped Michael Browning; even de-facto official photographer Robert Ellis was ousted.”
When I tried to speak to Ellis, who toured with AC/DC at their peak and produced some of the best images of the band, he struck a sour note: “Everyone closely associated with the Youngs knows their attitude and closed ways. Anything you and I say can be mere speculation. As is most of what is in the biographies and books so far. I read the Phil Sutcliffe, Murray Engleheart and Mick Wall books. I reckon all are only adding to the mystique. There is plenty of space for the real story, but only [the Youngs] can tell it, and they have no intention of ever doing such a thing. Email me what you want to know from me. I will consider it, and give you some reply.”
So I did just as I was asked. But he responded with an outburst: “I am not convinced this is a project I want to be any part of. Another fan perspective, and another outsider view of ‘what really went down’ is just not interesting.”
Ellis’s pomposity surprised me. I will never claim The Youngs to be an account of “what really went down.” As David Krebs said to me in Manhattan, managing a rock band or writing about a rock band is like Rashomon. There are so many versions of the truth. Ellis himself is not writing the definitive biography. Who is? And would the Youngs, if they cared to write their life stories, produce the “real” story? Would they acknowledge the hurt they have caused so many people? What, exactly, is definitive? Is it even possible to be definitive?
I think not. So the band’s chroniclers try to patch together what they can from what came before or whatever they can obtain themselves through their own investigations. Even if the result of those labors is an approximation of the truth, there are stories worth trying to tell and to get right—such as the shabby treatment of Michael Browning.
Most tellingly, before he died in 2005, Perry Cooper, one of the band’s closest allies, told Walker: “Michael [Browning] gave his all for that band. But they’re as tough as nails, these guys.”
“It was hurtful,” Browning admitted to the same author, “and what made it more hurtful was that over the years, everyone, me included, with the Youngs and AC/DC, tends to get written out of history. It’s like you never existed.”
Phil Carson has only praise for Browning and the band’s original champions at Alberts: “Michael and I plotted every step of the way of the early development of the band. I still have the greatest respect for George Young and for Harry Vanda too. They were doing such a great job in the studio; I really left them to it and they delivered the goods. I also had a great relationship with Fifa Riccobono and Ted Albert. Ted was the guy I would call, along with Michael, to get Alberts to foot the bill for promotional events about which Atlantic were dubious. It was a truly terrific relationship and between us we made it work.”
Opitz was another band luminary to never work with the Youngs again.
“It’s really weird we haven’t put the same combination back together again, but that’s the way it goes.”
Or at least in the closed-off world of the Youngs.
* * *
Atlantic’s hiring of Mutt Lange changed everything for AC/DC. But how he came into their orbit and who can take credit for introducing him to the band is probably the most unchallenged story in AC/DC lore. Existing published accounts are either erroneous or don’t really scratch the surface of what happened, and it’s another story that needs to be retold from a different angle because it was a marriage of musicians that changed the course of so many lives, not to mention the history of rock. Without Lange and without the input of two other very important but unheralded players behind the scenes, AC/DC might not be kicking on today.
It all started with Doug Thaler. In 1976, two years before Powerage, he had got involved with an English band
called City Boy, who happened to be produced by Lange and were managed by Lange’s managers, South Africans Ralph Simon and Clive Calder. City Boy had supported AC/DC on one of their first shows in the United States, a December 1977 gig at the Capitol Theater in Flint, Michigan, and right before AC/DC’s Live from the Atlantic Studios performance in New York. Thaler was involved in the arrangement.
“City Boy had a minor hit in the States in 1979 called ‘5-7-0-5’ but they hadn’t really sold any great numbers of records over three releases with [record label] Mercury,” he says. “They had this great track called ‘New York Times.’ It came out later in 1979 and just shit the bed—it did nothing.
“I became very close with Clive. And I had a client in the late ’70s, a Southern rock band called The Outlaws, and I contacted Clive and said, ‘Clive, do you think Mutt would be interested in producing The Outlaws?’ Of course The Outlaws, who were arena headliners at that time, weren’t interested in being produced. They were interested in snorting as much cocaine as they could get their hands on. So Mutt did an album with them [1978’s Playin’ to Win] and they didn’t really get their act together and write the songs that they should have.”
Enter the formidable frame of Michael Klenfner. A huge man who’d got his start doing security for late San Francisco AC/DC promoter Bill Graham, he was part of the stage crew at Woodstock, worked as music director and disc jockey at WNEW in New York and rose through the record business, first at Columbia and then Arista, to head Atlantic’s marketing and promotion department by 1977, reporting to Jerry Greenberg.
Outside of AC/DC, Klenfner was an important figure in the careers of The Grateful Dead, Boz Scaggs and Bruce Springsteen, among others. He’s best known (even if no one can put a name to his face) for a memorable cameo appearance—written especially for him—right at the end of The Blues Brothers. He’s the fat guy with the thick mustache playing the president of Clarion Records (“the largest recording company on the eastern seaboard”) who bails up Jake and Elwood Blues backstage during their big concert at the Palace Hotel Ballroom and offers them a record contract while they’re trying to escape from the cops.