by Fink, Jesse
Their storied guitarist, Paul Kossoff, had not only left AC/DC in the lurch when he died on them before they were due to support his band Back Street Crawler in 1976 but left an indelible imprint on Malcolm Young’s tone. Free’s “All Right Now” had been covered live by AC/DC in 1974 and, as Phil Sutcliffe points out in his biography, “the opening guitar figure of ‘You Ain’t Got a Hold on Me’ echoes Free’s ‘Wishing Well,’ with a lead solo by Malcolm” on the original Australian version of High Voltage.
“When I heard what Lange was doing on Highway to Hell I thought, ‘Oh, this is a step up,’” says Platt. “Some of the rawness had been refined a little bit where it needed to be but it hadn’t been overrefined or lost the energy. ‘Highway to Hell’ is probably the one song that owes most to ‘All Right Now’ in its construction. There are all sorts of things that come to bear [on a recording]. The desk that it was mixed on was the same desk that ‘All Right Now’ was mixed on. So there’s a certain tone that comes from that. The recording process is kind of a compromise at every step of the way because microphones are not quite as sensitive as ears in a lot of respects. And your brain processes sound in a particular way. And when you squeeze sound down wires all sorts of things happen to it.
“So really the job of an engineer and a producer is to try to reduce the amount of compromise that’s being applied. Now you can either do that by kind of chasing your tail with it or you can say, ‘Well, let’s turn this into a creative process.’ So then by choosing microphones, consoles, pieces of equipment and all those sort of things that address the compromises that you’re faced with [you can] actually turn them to your advantage in one way or another.”
Terry Manning, who’s also engineered for Lange, agrees choice of gear and equipment and even the room where the music is recorded has a massive effect on the resulting sound of an album.
“There is an influence,” he says. “It is true that whatever equipment you use and the way you utilize it will have an effect. But by far the biggest influence is the musicians and the sound that they are able to generate from the very beginning. And then second to that is the philosophy of the people recording it, in this case Tony and Mutt. A very big factor, too, I think, is the room itself because that’s one thing that was always so great about Compass Point: both studios, but especially Studio A, just had a really, really good room sound. You can also hear it on ‘Addicted to Love’ by Robert Palmer. The way things just sort of pop out.”
Continues Platt: “When you have a band like AC/DC who’ve got a very distinct sound, what you’re actually trying to do is not screw that up. You’re actually trying to get that across as faithfully as possible and, at the same time, if you can possibly do it, enhance it in ways that will make it sound larger than life so when it comes across on a record you come back to this thing of having the visual enhancement of imagining the band playing right in front of you.”
This is Highway to Hell’s great triumph. Lange achieved something Vanda & Young could not. He makes you see the music: the Youngs’ small fingers digging into the strings, even the grooves on the strings. The sound is that delineated.
“What Mutt wanted to do was to capture some of that British rock essence, the fatness, rather than have the edginess that you got from American rock,” says Platt. “So, having worked on those sort of things, I knew it was a matter of not having loads of layers of guitars and things like that.
“It was about creating a sound where you felt you could actually picture the room with the band playing in it. There’s a certain amount of visual aspect that you need to conjure up with the sound. And it was a little tough to do with Highway to Hell because it hadn’t been recorded in a way that enabled that to happen easily. So when I was asked to go back and do Back in Black I’d already got in my head, ‘Well, I want to do this slightly differently.’
“So there’s even a movement from Highway to Hell to Back in Black in terms of opening that space and making it much more accessible. It’s the sort of sound where you can envisage [the band] in the room but at the same time you can dive into it and rub it all over yourself. You’ve got to be able to see the strings humming to feel it.”
It’s a testament to what a good job Lange and his team did on Highway to Hell that other producers use it to test their studios.
“When we were recording ZZ Top’s Eliminator,” says Manning, “Billy Gibbons and I would start every morning by listening to a cut or two from Highway to Hell over the studio monitors, cranked up loud. This always got us revved up, in the mood for our rock ’n’ roll.
“Mutt wants something to be as professional and as able to translate to more of the world as possible, and maybe being ‘polished’ is a part of that, but he has always pushed the boundaries of technology, especially in that era, probably getting to certain ways of making things sound bigger, better, tighter and more compact than most people were doing at the time.”
For example, on Back in Black Platt and Lange used Angus Young’s live radio set-up to send his guitar to different amplifiers in different rooms, creating a sound so unique that when they wanted to change a part of one of the solos during mixing and the radios weren’t available, matching the sound was very difficult. For the mix of Highway to Hell, Platt also fed the guitar into the studio room in order to give it a “roomy” feel.
“Mutt was a terrific influence on AC/DC and a complete perfectionist,” says Phil Carson. “He got the very best out of AC/DC’s studio performances.”
In 1981, before working on For Those About to Rock, the album that marked the end of his association with AC/DC, Lange (again with Platt in tow) produced Foreigner’s 4, containing the superlative radio smashes “Waiting for a Girl Like You” and “Urgent,” which went to #2 and #4 respectively in the United States: his biggest hits to that date. Jimmy Douglass, AC/DC’s engineer on Live from the Atlantic Studios and considered for the Highway to Hell producer’s seat before Lange stepped in, worked on Foreigner’s first album.
“I was totally blown the fuck away by Highway to Hell,” he says. “I wouldn’t have made the record like that. I didn’t see that [coming]. It was really retro Zeppelin to me, as I saw it. They fucking nailed it. When I heard it, I was like, ‘Wow, that’s amazing.’ They were so powerful and so dynamic I didn’t see that as the direction they were going to take. The genius of Lange was that he went back and made something that we’d heard already and just made it fucking better.”
Mario “The Big M” Medious, Atlantic’s legendary promotion executive who worked with Led Zeppelin in the early ’70s and was once described by Rolling Stone as the “hottest promo man in the music biz,” seconds Douglass: “AC/DC picked up where Zeppelin left off. They had the energy and mindblowing, must-play-loud sound that made them some bad mamajamas. I loved AC/DC.”
Lange, a fine musician in his own right, didn’t impose his imprint on the band but extracted the best he could from them without having them mutiny.
“He was someone who loved hooks, and loved chord constructions,” Ralph Simon told Larry LeBlanc. “He always used to stress that you have the principal hook and then you have four hooks in counterpoint flecking the major hook.” He was also “very much into The Eagles [sic] and The Eagles kind of sound” and was “so talented” that “he is probably the closest shoe-filler to Quincy Jones.”
A rare insight into Lange’s approach in the studio was given in a Billboard interview in 1998 by Trevor Horn, the great British producer of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Grace Jones and Seal. Horn’s exacting, lush production places him comfortably in the same perfectionist category.
“Mutt Lange once said to me, ‘You get a band, you get them in a rehearsal room to do the songs, you rehearse them, you get them in a studio, you set them up, you go into the control room to listen, and it sounds like rubbish. That’s invariably what happens. After that, it’s a question of how much tenacity you have and how far you want to go.’ I think he’s right.”
The Youngs, as much as the
y grumbled about Lange’s painstaking ways, would have known they were in the presence of someone truly gifted. Michael Bolton, one of Lange’s most commercially successful acts, calls him “a mystic among producers—a serene, sage-like Obi-Wan Kenobi.”
“He never really stamped his sound on those guys, like he did with Def Leppard and Shania Twain,” says Mike Fraser. “He’s definitely got a sound to him. Highway to Hell and Back in Black still sound like AC/DC to me. Mutt’s really good at defining everything. He helps bring that out either in the arrangement or the sound structure of the songs. But it was always there with AC/DC; it’s just a matter of how you’re presenting it. Mutt’s such a Type-A guy, so attentive to detail, so he makes sure that comes out. Mixing his stuff for Iron Man 2, I have to say, boy, was it ever recorded well. You can almost just push the faders up and it was there.”
Says David Thoener, who mixed For Those About to Rock: “I’d agree with Mike. Mutt always knows what he wants and hears it in his head, so it’s just a matter of time to get the artist to perform exactly as Mutt hears it in his head. Sometimes that’s bar by bar if necessary. He has more patience than anyone I’ve ever worked with and doesn’t settle.”
Thoener, a New Yorker, remembers spending a lot of time with Lange “on a mobile truck parked outside The Rolling Stones’ rehearsal room” at Quai de Bercy, Paris, recording what would be Lange’s swansong album with AC/DC. He’d been working with The J. Geils Band on Freeze Frame when he got the call in June 1981 to come to France to work on the For Those About to Rock sessions. Another J. Geils Band album, 1980’s Love Stinks, was a Lange favorite.
“I thought I’d be done with J. Geils long before my August departure date. I was working 14 hours a day seven days a week and finished the last mix of Freeze Frame on a Saturday, slept on Sunday and got on a plane to Paris on Monday.
“It was a big stone room, as I recall; quite a challenge. We worked from 10 am to midnight six days a week in Paris finishing the recording, then flew to London. I had off the day we flew to London and started mixing the next day six days a week 14 hours a day for a little over a month. By the time we were done, I was toast.
“We spent five days mixing the song ‘For Those About to Rock’ even though I felt we had it after the first day. It was only 24-track analog but Mutt didn’t give up until all his ideas had been addressed. Yes, he is a perfectionist. I believe that’s why all the artists he’s worked with have amazing-sounding records. Every song he’s involved with is a work of art. When you work with Mutt, as an engineer you just try to keep up and do your job to the best of your ability. He is always several steps ahead.”
That obsessive zeal to get it right, no matter how long it takes, required forbearance not only from AC/DC, who were used to getting in and getting out in the shortest possible time frame, and Lange’s overworked assistants but also from the project’s paymasters: Atlantic. They were happy to stand back and let the eccentric producer do his thing.
“I was told that he really didn’t like anybody in the studio,” says Jerry Greenberg. “So we honored his wishes. I was used to being in the studio, sitting there watching Jerry Wexler and Tom Dowd record Aretha Franklin. I’d walk in and I would see the genius of Wexler and Dowd. Mutt Lange, all I could do was hear the genius. But Highway to Hell was a much sharper, much more well-produced record obviously than what we were getting with Vanda & Young.”
And what AC/DC’s American record company got for that patience, investment and tough decision making was everything they had been waiting for all along: a hit.
* * *
I spent months trying to work out ways of contacting Lange to get his memories of working with AC/DC, but to no avail.
“It’s a self-perpetuating thing,” says Tony Platt of Lange’s aversion to speaking about the past. “If you actually make enough money out of one album to be able to relax on the next album and not put up with the compromises, make sure that the album’s made right and the people that are marketing it do their job and all of those other little things that go toward making hit albums, you’re going to make another hit album. You then litter that with the huge amount of talent that Mutt has as well, and you’ve got a major success.
“He has no real need to promote himself in any way, shape or form. So he’s in a very fortunate position of not having to talk to press to promote himself and not having to step in that minefield that is doing interviews and being misunderstood and misrepresented.”
Platt suggests one interview that Lange did for a major American magazine sowed the seeds of some disharmony with AC/DC and put him off doing press forever.
“The interviewer said to him, ‘So what’s it like going from working with AC/DC to working with Foreigner?’ And what Mutt said was, ‘Well, they’re kind of two different bands, really, because AC/DC’s songs are riff-based and Foreigner’s songs are melody-based.’ A perfectly reasonable response. But the reporter actually wrote it up as: ‘Well, it would be nice to get back to some melodies.’ You can imagine what happened. Angus and Malcolm were, ‘What the fuck is this?’ And of course it all had to be explained. So you get burned a couple of times like that and it’s no wonder you go away and say no.”
But there is another explanation for Lange’s Greta Garbo impersonation.
David Thoener told Daniel J. Levitin for the book The Encyclopedia of Record Producers that Lange’s motives were ultimately egotistical: “His philosophy is to be very low-key about the music business, not to do interviews … he told me, ‘Don’t let anyone know what you think. If you don’t do interviews, there’s kind of a mystery about you. No one really knows what you think or why you think it.’”
Thoener never worked with Lange again after For Those About to Rock, or with AC/DC, which he admits was “a tough pill to swallow,” though “it’s the nature of the business and I’ve come to accept it.” No one could fault the man’s mixing or the majesty of songs such as the title track and the closer, “Spellbound,” which calibrates the power of AC/DC so awesomely it’s like a sort of rock Valhalla. However, in 1984 he went to Amsterdam to work on Def Leppard’s Hysteria with Meat Loaf’s producer, Jim Steinman. Steinman was sacked, Thoener took over, “but then the drummer [Rick Allen] got in a car accident, which put the record on indefinite hold.” Losing an arm does that. When they were ready to record again, Lange came on board and Thoener’s work was shelved.
“As far as I’m aware, everything I did was redone. I got a ‘thank you’ on the credits after working 12 hours a day for three months. The last time I saw Mutt was in LA when he was mixing The Corrs’ [2000 album] In Blue with Mike Shipley.”
Thoener had his own revenge, of sorts, winning two Grammys for Santana’s Supernatural, which went 15 times platinum, three million more than Hysteria. Does he think Lange’s aversion to the media is ultimately to his detriment?
“Mutt has an opinion about that aspect of a career and I understand,” he responds. “I can’t say that’s the way I should have conducted my career, in retrospect. I listened to him and for many years I never spoke about anything. I’ve had my career for almost 40 years and I’ve experienced an incredible amount of history I’ve never spoken about.
“We used to hang quite a bit, go to dinners. He is a terrific guy, one of the nicest producers I’ve ever worked with. I have tremendous respect and admiration for him. He and Clive Calder had approached me back in 1980 about becoming a part of their production team and I foolishly passed, something I have regretted since that day. I recently watched a movie about Phil Spector and in it he makes a comment that he was the best producer in the world. I think Mutt has a claim on that statement.”
In the only interview with Lange known to exist from recent times, a short email interview with a fan site in the 1990s, he was asked if he stayed in any contact with bands he had worked with: “No. We have separate lives. Some of them believe I was a merciless tyrant in the studio and obsessed with absolute perfection with each song. Some of those albums took sever
al years to complete. They’ve seen enough of me for one lifetime.”
* * *
Mutt the Merciless went on to record two more albums with AC/DC but Highway to Hell was the end of the road for three of the band’s most important contributors: Michael Klenfner, Michael Browning and, most prominently of all, Bon Scott.
Atlantic’s larger-than-life marketing and promotion walrus, Klenfner, the man who above all others worked tirelessly inside the company to get AC/DC to the top, was to pay dearly for his stubborn faith in Eddie Kramer and resistance to Mutt Lange.
“Clive Calder actually got Michael Klenfner fired from Atlantic over the whole Kramer thing,” says Doug Thaler.
“That’s true,” says Jerry Greenberg, of the story that Klenfner bailed up Calder when the pair met by chance in a New York club and complained about Lange having displaced his man, Kramer. A mortified Calder called Greenberg. The next day Klenfner was out on his ear.
“When the [AC/DC] guys called me and told me they were getting rid of Eddie Kramer, and I suggested Mutt Lange, they said okay. And that particular night, first Klenfner came into my office and basically called me a jerk. I mean, how would you like it if one your employees walked in and told you that you were a jerk? And you’re making a mistake? And you don’t know what you’re doing? So he rambled on and on, but I let that slide. Except that night he bumped into Clive Calder and he told Clive the same thing: ‘Mutt Lange shouldn’t be producing this band, he’s the wrong producer; Jerry Greenberg doesn’t know what he’s doing, buh buh buh buh.’
“So Clive called me up and said—because at the time we were negotiating for City Boy—‘Listen, I can’t give you City Boy.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ He said, ‘Well, your senior vice-president grabbed me at this club, told me that we were making a mistake with Mutt Lange’ and he really went on and on and on and ‘I can’t do business with Atlantic then.’ I said, ‘Clive, you don’t have to worry about that. He’s leaving the company tomorrow.’ So he goes, ‘Really?’ I said, ‘Yep.’ And I fired Michael the next day.”