Youngs : The Brothers Who Built Ac/Dc (9781466865204) (17 page)

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 most 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.

“This is sacrilege to some but I've seen Led Zeppelin play a couple of times and while I was a fan of the first couple of records, I went and saw them live and just went, ‘You fucking kidding me?' They made unbelievable fucking records and because a lot of it was so grand you couldn't produce it live with those guys. But as far as studio records go, fucking
absolutely
in a world of their own. For me, you dig a band because of their recordings and you go see them and say, ‘Oh fuck, that was even fucking better than the record.' To me that's the greatest compliment you can give a band.”

Says Stewart Young, for a time AC/DC's manager with Steve Barnett: “They are brilliant; still probably the best live band I have ever seen.”

Yet for some arcane reason, “Jailbreak” fell between the cracks in
AC/DC
's coming assault on America. In fact, it disappeared into such a chasm of corporate ineptitude it wasn't released in the United States until 1984 on the
'74 Jailbreak
EP because the original album on which it appeared,
Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap
, was shelved by Atlantic and left to gather dust. Even when
Dirty Deeds
finally hit American record stores in 1981, outrageously straight after the multiplatinum
Back in Black
, “Jailbreak” was mysteriously left off.

“American record companies. Go figure,” says Evans.

Jim Delehant asserts somebody inside Atlantic Records, possibly Jerry Greenberg's successor Doug Morris, now chairman and chief executive of Sony Music, felt it was “too horrific for teenage consumption.” Phil Carson, who was in charge of Atlantic's operations outside America, says he can only “recall some discussion about that but I had turned my back on the project.”

Yet not before it very nearly claimed Carson's career. As a sign of how important he was to
AC/DC
between 1980 and 1981, he's the only man at Atlantic personally thanked by name on the sleeves of
Back in Black
and
For Those About to Rock
. (The latter album's cryptic mention of “Springfield” refers to Carson's time playing bass with Dusty Springfield.)

“By the time
AC/DC
decided to fire Mutt Lange [after
For Those About to Rock
], Jerry Greenberg had left Atlantic and A&R decisions were being handled principally by Doug Morris and his cohorts in New York,” he says. “I had become a little disenchanted with the way things were developing with the band. I told Doug that releasing
Dirty Deeds
[after such a hiatus] was a massive error. I told him it would disrupt what we were starting to create with Brian Johnson.
AC/DC
's audience had accepted more or less the unthinkable notion that Bon Scott could be replaced. What Doug did was to confuse our audience and destroy a large part of
AC/DC
's fan base.

“He brought an abrupt halt to the building process we had set in motion to elevate Brian. The band had to deal with yet another comparison between Bon Scott's
AC/DC
and Brian Johnson's
AC/DC
. At the time, Doug's argument was purely financial.
Back in Black
had already sold over five million copies. Because of those numbers, Doug told me that
Dirty Deeds
would sell at least two million. I told him he was right about that, but that it would also create a new sales plateau for
AC/DC
.”

Carson was proved correct. Certified platinum six times,
Dirty Deeds
(the one scandalously without “Jailbreak” on it) remains
AC/DC
's biggest selling album in the United States post
Back in Black
and their third-biggest selling overall behind
Back in Black
(22 times) and
Highway to Hell
(seven times).
For Those About to Rock
has been certified platinum just four times. Even
The Razors Edge
(five) and
Who Made Who
(five) have outsold it.

“Doug's motivation was purely greed driven. His comment was that we would all get bigger bonuses because we had made our numbers and that I should stop thinking like an artist. To this day, I am proud of the stand that I took on behalf of the band. Releasing
Dirty Deeds
was one of the most crass decisions ever made by a record-company executive. God knows how many albums
For Those About to Rock
would have sold had Doug waited for that to come out first. He really changed the band's history with that stupid decision. I blame the lack of success of
Flick of the Switch
and
Fly on the Wall
, to a large degree, on the inane decision of releasing
Dirty Deeds
right after
Back in Black
.”