Youngs : The Brothers Who Built Ac/Dc (9781466865204) (21 page)

The next night the band played San Antonio, then Corpus Christi and Dallas.

“Those were the good old days for the music industry,” says Orbin. “Lots of good bands being played on AOR stations. However,
AC/DC
always stood out as something special. Perhaps it was the raw rock 'n' roll beat that they drive home so well. At any rate, Lou and Joe played them and I wanted to promote them immediately. They were destined to become popular from the outset. Moxy was also a San Antonio favorite. However,
AC/DC
even back then played second fiddle to no one. How could they?”

Orbin won't have a bar of Jacksonville's claim to breaking the band.

“
Jacksonville?
Where is that? San Antonio has the reputation and the history. It was the breeding ground of some of the best, if not the very best, hard-rock bands ever. San Antonio broke all the strong hard-rock bands:
AC/DC
, Rush, Judas Priest, Trapeze. That's why San Antonio has the label of ‘Heavy Metal Capital of the World' and my company helped break them. The bands broke out of San Antonio and we used that fact to help promote them in other cities, especially in Texas. These bands all were new and upcoming but were also the cream of the crop of hard rock back then, so after the initial promotions, once they played in front of a decent audience, they exploded. Rightfully so.”

But Mark Evans never got his chance to play with
AC/DC
on an American stage, having been dumped from the band in May; Cliff Williams played those Texas shows.
Let There Be Rock
was the last album he'd record with
AC/DC
. He was only 21.

“It was a real disappointment,” he says of missing out. “Probably on the same scale as getting the flick from the band. It was an upsetting time. It was a whole bunch of things. When you're in a band like that it's pretty much like being in a professional football team. You're just moving around to all these different grounds or gigs and you're just taken care of and you don't have to think of anything other than playing the gig. So once you're outside that sort of thing, it's like a divorce. Not only does your employment change but because you're living with the guys in the band your whole lifestyle changes. It was a wrench.”

Evans flew from London to Melbourne and straight into a charity gig where George Young and Harry Vanda were making an appearance. There was a domestic pilots' strike going on and the ex-Easybeats pair had ridden in the back of a limo all the way from Sydney.

“I remember George's exact words,” says Evans. “He said, ‘Listen, you know, things happen. I wish it were different. But it's
not
.'”

It was an interesting meeting for another reason; coming not long after the Reading Festival in 1976, where George had given Evans a ferocious dressing-down after a lackluster performance.

“I've got a lot of time for George,” he says. “I took [what happened in Reading] almost like a medal. He got stuck into me like how he got stuck into his brothers. So I didn't really take that badly. In Melbourne George actually said, ‘You've got to come and play bass for Stevie Wright.' That was when Stevie was still very much inside the [Alberts] building. At that stage he'd started missing gigs [because of his addiction]. George wanted me to go straight into that. Not much later I was approached to join Rose Tattoo.”

At Alberts, Evans subsequently bumped into George at Studio 2 while recording with Finch (aka Contraband). He'd turn up to sessions to find the tuning on his bass had been fiddled with overnight: George had borrowed his guitar.

Does he think George had anything to do with his sacking?

“I don't think he would have been directly involved,” he says after taking about six seconds to formulate a response. “I'm surmising here. I don't think he would have had any great issue with it.”

In fact, Evans says he is still on good terms with George and the last time he saw him they “had a great chat and get on really well, still.”

In his autobiography,
Dirty Deeds
, there's a photo of Evans flanked by Ted Albert, Brian Johnson, Malcolm Young and Phil Rudd, looking at a platinum record backstage at the Sydney Showgrounds in February 1981, almost four years after he'd been cast aside, the wounds still fresh. The pathos is so thick it's almost painful to behold. How did he feel?

“I felt good at that time,” he says. “That was a bit of a funny night because really that night was the first time I'd ever seen the band play except for the Station Hotel [in Melbourne, 1975] when they were a four-piece and I first joined them. It was strange. The actual gig had been postponed twice because of wet weather so there was a bit of an unusual build-up. It was the band's first gig back in Sydney without Bon, so it was a very poignant night. But the relationship between us—I think you can tell by the way Malcolm is and the way Phil's looking at me, and Brian—we were all happy to be there. We were all very close up until that point.”

Up until that point
.

Some time afterward Evans launched a legal action over unpaid album royalties against Alberts and
AC/DC
that dragged on for years and was eventually settled out of court. The terms of the settlement preclude him from speaking about it in detail but he does say: “It took a long time and it was good to get a resolution.”

In 2003, the year Evans was denied induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame despite being initially invited to the ceremony with other band members, Malcolm Young ripped into him in an interview with
Classic Rock
.

“Mark actually got picked by our manager,” he told Dave Ling. “We never wanted him; we didn't think he could play properly. We could all hold our own, and so could [
AC/DC
bass player in 1974] Rob Bailey. What we thought was that when we'd kicked on a bit more we could override the manager and get in a good bass player.”

It was a disgraceful comment and demands dismantling: if Bailey were so capable, why, as Tony Currenti has said, did George Young play bass on most of the songs on
High Voltage
and Bailey walk away disgruntled, soon to be sacked? You only need to watch early videos of
AC/DC
—such as the clip for “It's a Long Way to the Top”—or listen to a bootleg of a live performance of “Jailbreak” to appreciate how wonderful Evans really was and how well he suited the group, aesthetically and musically.

Worse, Malcolm also took a cheap shot at Dave Evans. No matter what you think of
AC/DC
with self-proclaimed “badass” Evans out front—and few have kind words for that incarnation of the band—no one deserves to be ridiculed in the manner in which Malcolm spoke of their first lead singer: “The day we fucking got rid of him, that's the day the band started.”

Dave Evans is bemused by it all: “I don't know anything about it as I don't follow them at all. Malcolm is still resentful that I was so popular, especially with the female fans. He never had a girlfriend the whole time I knew him. He was always pissed off that [drummer] Colin Burgess and I always had plenty of female company. As far as Malcolm was concerned they were all molls. He was quite bitter about it.

“He was glad to get rid of Colin and myself. If he still has resentment after all these years and his success then let the public judge his behavior … he was always a hater and seems to still be. People usually put others down to try to make themselves bigger in the eyes of other people. It usually is a sign of insecurity.”

*   *   *

To his considerable advantage, Cliff Williams looked even
more
like a Young than Mark Evans did—and he could play a bit. But the replacement of Evans (and other band members before him) at least firmly debunked one myth about the Youngs. For all their talk of “no bullshit,” how the band looks is important. It's just a less obvious form of bullshit.

Was image a consideration in his being replaced?

“I don't think it was image that was the problem,” says Evans. “I think the change between Cliff and myself was fairly seamless. I've had people send me videos, saying, ‘This is you in England.' Some I've watched two or three times and gone, ‘Fuck.' The only thing that sets you off [on my difference with Cliff] is the bass. There was quite a similarity.”

Evans says he never even thought about whether his replacement was better than he was. They became friends and the pair lunch together when Williams is in Sydney. Did Williams ever express to Evans how he felt about taking over the role from him in the circumstances?

“That never came up. We never spoke about that. Basically because it didn't really matter. I'm sure he didn't think and I know I certainly didn't think it was relevant.”

Did Evans ever wonder to himself, “Hang on. Why the fuck did you guys replace me? What's Cliff offering that I'm not?”

“That's interesting. Honestly, I've never thought about that.” He pauses. “Because of the way Angus and Malcolm are and the way they do things, it was so damn final when it happened. It wasn't a surprise; it was a shock. It's like a death in the family. It just goes
bang
. And you go, ‘Well, okay, there's nothing I can change about this.' So it's not worth revisiting. There's really nothing you can do about it. If I were to ask, ‘What's Cliff got that I haven't got?' I think that would only come forward if you were thinking, ‘Well, how can I get back in?' or ‘What can I do to change this at all?' Because of the finality of it and the large bucketful of relief that came along with it, it was just like, ‘Oh, okay, fine.'”

But in Williams the missing link had been located, according to Mark Opitz: “They wanted someone who could really hold down Phil Rudd, and Cliffy did.”

“Phil's four-on-the-floor style with little embroidery is the root of it all and Malcolm's rhythm playing is at its heart,” argues Phil Carson, who famously played bass with them on stage in Belgium in 1981. “When Cliff joined the band, the rhythm section completed the ultimate puzzle. As an ex-musician myself, I know how difficult it is to bury one's ego for the good of the band and those three guys did exactly that. To this day, if you watch an
AC/DC
concert, the rhythm section does what it's supposed to do. It gives space to Angus and to Brian, and the result is an overwhelming juggernaut.”

Says Tony Platt: “Cliff is the perfect bass player for
AC/DC
because he does the job. He's a great bass player. Quite underrated in a lot of respects because it isn't easy to do what he does and keep it absolutely solid. He's a great singer as well, so he helps out hugely with the backing vocals. And of course he looks the part.”

Adds Rob Riley, with typical forthrightness: “Fuck me. Cliff Williams, well, he drops right in with Mal and it's all simple and accessible. Nice, solid and fucking stompy.”

*   *   *

In August 1977,
AC/DC
went to Florida where, thanks to Bill Bartlett, Jacksonville had already been conquered. But the Australians had bruised a few egos, none bigger than those in Lynyrd Skynyrd. The popular tale is that the two bands were great mates, hanging out at the local group's compound in the backwoods, Skynyrd even inviting
AC/DC
for a ride on their private Convair CV-300—the same plane that crashed killing Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines and Cassie Gaines and three others that coming October.

Yet Bartlett has another story.

“
AC/DC
was so big in Jacksonville that they
outsold
Lynyrd Skynyrd,” he says. “I'd known Skynyrd since I was 13 years old, as I went to school with several of the members of the band. I remember at the time that Ronnie was not all that happy that they had been upstaged by this Aussie band.

“One night, I made a statement on the radio that
AC/DC
was outrequesting and outselling hometown boys Lynyrd Skynyrd. Ronnie immediately called me up on the radio and said he was coming out to ‘talk' to me. He came to the station and I showed him the sales data and request data that I collected and he was baffled. His last words to me that night were, ‘
AC/DC
huh
?'”

With Atlantic now right behind them, American audiences beginning to fall under their spell and their most exhilarating album yet under their belts,
AC/DC
's long way to the top was rapidly shortening. But, according to Riley, it was mostly credit to Alberts not Atlantic.

“They were the rock company of Australia and that's where
AC/DC
got their liftoff,” he says. “They had support from Alberts that gave them the ability to go on tour, relentlessly, all through England and Europe.”

Interestingly, Chris Gilbey, who arrived in Australia from England in November 1972 and started working for Alberts in January 1973, says that while the company's commitment to
AC/DC
was substantial it wasn't because Alberts had a mission to be the rock 'n' roll record label from hell.

He evokes an image of Alberts that is at odds with its reputation as the Mordor of Australian hard rock, recalling how when he turned up in a cheap but elegantly tailored Penang white suit, about to head up their publicity and marketing, the offices were “all oak panels and elderly ladies walking softly across deep pile carpets, keeping as quiet as they could” and “like a gentleman's club: leather overstuffed chairs, bookshelves, an antique tooled leather desk.” It was largely Gilbey's industry and his versatility—he'd recorded three singles in his own right in England with a band called Kate, would go on to manage The Saints and produce The Church's first album—combined with the creativity of Vanda & Young and the passion and deep pockets of Ted Albert that gave
AC/DC
that initial liftoff. Gilbey would leave Alberts in 1977.