Youngs : The Brothers Who Built Ac/Dc (9781466865204) (23 page)

In another booklet photo, one from their first US tour, his replacement, Williams, has been cropped out. For the
Let There Be Rock
reissue,
AC/DC
effectively is a band without a bass player.

What does Evans make of his being omitted?

“It doesn't surprise me all that much.”

Why?

“That's the way it is.”

But there are photos of the band on stage and we can't see you.

“I've got to be honest with you. I didn't even know that [before you told me]. It's not something I pay attention to.”

You weren't aware of that?

“It doesn't bother me one bit. It's a non-issue.”

Cliff's been taken out of some photos, too.

“Well, there you go,” he laughs. “Really, I'm surprised.”

There's no photos of you. There's no bass player.

“Oh really? Like The Doors?”

In the other reissues, you're there, but in
Let There Be Rock
, it's like you don't exist.

“There you go,” he laughs. “Was I
really
there?”

*   *   *

Mark Evans wasn't the only person who worked on the album to be denied due recognition. The man who designed
AC/DC
's iconic logo, Gerard Huerta, saw it used on the US issue of
Let There Be Rock
for the very first time. It was, he claims, a one-off commission specifically for that album.

“I still have the purchase order and invoice for the job,” he says. “I was paid what was fair for an album lettering job at the time. It was done for a specific album. They used something else for a follow-up album [
Powerage
], then came back to this.”

But ever since it's been used on anything to do with the band. It is a huge part of their appeal, immediately identifiable, religiously worshipped, commercially
extremely
lucrative.

In papers filed in 1996 and registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office in 2003, a Dutch company called Leidseplein Presse B.V. (a name commonly seen in the fine print of
AC/DC
products) makes a trademark claim for the logo on such products as “pennants made of paper and mounted on sticks,” “decals and windshield decals strips,” “corrugated cardboard storage boxes,” “beach coverup dresses” and “diaper sets.” Similar claims have been made on the name and design around the world. Leidseplein Presse B.V. even successfully appealed to the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board after Angus's well-known caricature of himself as the devil was initially rejected as a trademark.

Who or what exactly is Leidseplein Presse B.V.?

There are few clues but a 1981 article in
Billboard
mentions
AC/DC
“was establishing a Netherland [sic] Antilles corporation, Leidesplein [sic] B.V.” More interestingly, in a typed 2004 letter from Leidseplein Presse B.V. to the United States Commissioner of Trademarks, the name Stuart Prager has been written, in pen, over the top of
AC/DC
manager Alvin Handwerker. It is signed by Prager.

The letter begins: “Stuart Prager declares that he is a proxyholder of the managing director of applicant corporation and is authorized to make this declaration on behalf of said applicant.”

In 2004 Prager, of New York law firm Clark & Prager, was
AC/DC
's attorney. Leidseplein Presse B.V. gives its address in tendered documents as being in The Netherlands, suggesting that if it was originally created in the Caribbean, it had since moved to Europe.

But why a Dutch entity in the first place? One explanation could be tax. Or rather, little or no tax. The very same reason
AC/DC
had recorded
Back in Black
in The Bahamas, a country with virtually no taxes. It was in
AC/DC
's interests to stay out of England to avoid “tax resident” status.

Writes Martin Van Geest, author of the Dutch book
Het Belastingparadijs
(in English,
The Tax Haven
), for Amsterdam magazine
The International Correspondent
: “Earnings derived from intellectual property such as royalties are taxed at rates close to zero in The Netherlands. This makes it extremely lucrative for artists to transfer a part of their assets, such as the copyright on songs, to a Dutch entity.”

The Rolling Stones is one such act.

“Arguably the most tax-savvy band of all. According to legal documents that were made public a couple of years ago, three band members, Keith Richards, Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts, have channeled over 340 million Euros through their Dutch ‘headquarters.' All in all, they have paid just 5.6 million Euros in taxes on those earnings, or 1.5 percent. Makes you wonder what their song ‘Gimme Shelter' was really about.”

And it may possibly account for why the Youngs have spent so much time outside of Australia, given its oppressive tax dragnet.

*   *   *

Even when their records stink, there are still fans willing to fork out $20 for an
AC/DC
T-shirt because, well, they look really fucking cool because of Huerta's logo. Chicks dig it. Wimps can walk tall wearing it.

Huerta hasn't received a dime.

“No royalties. Although it would be nice to have earned a bit on the merchandising so I can get my last kid through college.”

In Murray Engleheart's biography of
AC/DC
, the logo is credited to Bob Defrin, Atlantic's creative director, but Defrin only came up with the cover image for the album. The logo, one of the most important and recognizable in music if not design history, was the invention of Huerta, then a 25-year-old from Los Angeles who'd also come up with the lettering for
High Voltage
's US release in July 1976.

“Bob put together the visual of the band and sky for the cover,” says Huerta. “Typically he would hire me, as most record art directors did, to produce multiple sketch ideas and then one was chosen for a final. I produced [the
AC/DC
logo] as finished full-color artwork, a combination of India-inked outline, color overlay film and airbrushed gouache.”

For a man who has contributed such an important element of
AC/DC
's branding, and consequently could be seen to have helped make the Youngs and their record companies a fortune in merchandising sales, you would think Huerta would get a royalty, especially when the logo was designed for one album, not for
AC/DC
's use for perpetuity. Not so. He only ever got his original commission fee. Nor has he ever had any contact with the band. Not a phone call.
Nothing
. He hasn't got lawyers involved; he's just let it be. The original artwork is stored away in a box in his archives, untouched.

“It was April 25, 1977 when I completed that artwork,” says Huerta, who's also designed logos for Boston, Foreigner,
Time
magazine and Pepsi. “I was living and working at 210 East 53rd Street in New York City. My studio was a second bedroom and I had been freelancing for a little over a year; this was after a year and four months' employment at CBS Records as an album-cover designer.

“I came to New York right out of school. I had a portfolio that reflected more of a Los Angeles influence, and that included the record business out there. In New York most of the lettering solutions tended to be more conservative or corporate, and my solutions tended to be more experimental, something certainly suited to the record-business art departments that were always looking for something unique.”

Assuming it was purely coincidental, there's a touch of
AC/DC
's font in Meat Loaf's
Bat Out of Hell
font by Richard Corben, which was released in October 1977.
Let There Be Rock
was released in June. How did it come about?

“I had produced a lettering design for a live Blue Öyster Cult album in 1975 called
On Your Feet or On Your Knees
. The cover showed a distorted ominous photo of a church with a limousine in front. It was photographed by John Berg, the creative director at CBS, and with some multiple photo composition and retouching it was great. As I viewed the photo and began sketching, it occurred to me that Gutenberg-inspired letterforms might make an interesting look for this fire-and-brimstone photo. Being influenced by the limo, I combined the letterforms with a car marque metallic beveled-lettering style and was happy with the result. A couple of years later when sketching up the
AC/DC
lettering, again the Gutenberg style seemed to work with the art of the band and the dark ominous sky on the cover.

“So the letterforms are based on the first printed book, which was the Gutenberg Bible. You can see many samples now on Google Images, although it took a bit of research in those days. Gutenberg developed movable type and alternate characters of letters so that his work would replicate the hand-lettered work that scribes produced. This style was certainly German but I think in both cases where I used the type style, the twist in making it a car marque on BÖC or the dimension and tight packing together of the letterforms on ‘
AC/DC
' gives it a different context.

“The drawing of the
AC/DC
lettering, with its less than generous letter spacing and the lightning bolt that is drawn as if it is a letterform, makes it read not as five individual characters but one complete symbol or mark. Its perimeter is serrated and sharp. A traditional ‘A' is a triangle shape, a traditional ‘C' is based on an ellipse or circle, and a ‘D' is a combination straight and curve. All of these letterforms have been forced into a perfect vertical and slightly adjusted 45-degree angle. One comment I make about this lettering: it is the only piece of lettering I have done that is made entirely of straight lines.”

And one that has gone on to be almost a cliché. Hard rock and Gothic-style logos go hand in hand.

“I have not found anything predating this style for a band but I could be wrong,” he says. “I did not intend that it should be the look for certain kinds of rock, as I was just designing what I thought would work for an album cover and a band. But when I saw the Blue Öyster Cult–influenced Spinal Tap logo in the '80s, it was clear this look had become the classic rock parody.”

Surely it irks him that he hasn't got the acclamation and financial reward that some would argue he is due? I ask him how he feels about the logo being used on virtually all of
AC/DC
's albums and merchandise when it was done for a stand-alone album.

“You did these jobs, then another, and another, and so on. There was a break in the use of that art and by that time I was on to other work. You see, that same year, 1977, just a few months later I worked on another four-letter word, the masthead for
Time
magazine, which paid probably 10 times what a piece of lettering for an album did.

“I was moving into other areas and was pretty much out of the record business by 1979. Technically, Atlantic did not own the rights to use it on other albums but I am not one to go after people. Art never paid well enough to even hire a lawyer. It takes too long for what you are paid.

“You can't copyright fonts because you can't copyright a letter of the alphabet. So you do your art and move on. Besides, the effect to my own business of having done that art is difficult to calculate, but certainly positive. For every
AC/DC
there are quite a few more that are much more beautiful and interesting to me, but didn't have the legs for whatever reasons.”

When you see how big
AC/DC
have become do you feel a sense of satisfaction that you were part of creating their image?

“In a word, yes,” he replies. “But one must understand that there are two components to a successful brand identity. One is the design. The second is the exposure. This band is still touring after more than 40 years and you now have generations who have seen and associated the band with this logo. That has more to do with the success of the logo than its design.”

Maybe so, and it says a lot about Huerta that he can show such equanimity having potentially been denied a fortune, but his stroke of inspiration was still a part of the Youngs' success. He deserved more from
AC/DC
and their record company.

But arguably so do many others in the
AC/DC
story who have similar tales of lack of recognition or under-appreciation.

For all their wealth, fame and success, that questionable treatment, and the bad reputation that comes with it, is the Youngs' cross to bear—Glasgow mentality or not.

*   *   *

Manhattan, New York, early 2013. I walk down Mott Street from Nolita into Chinatown, a teeming,
Blade Runner
–like warren of supermarkets and pushy old Chinese ladies. Here it's normal to be confronted by buckets of live frogs and hacked crocodile arms, but instead I come across something more exotic: an old-school video-game parlor.

Right out the front is an
AC/DC
pinball machine.

New York had seen
AC/DC
play at The Palladium on East 14th Street and legendary punk club CBGB on The Bowery in August 1977, on the same night, but both venues had been demolished and closed down respectively by the time I got there. CBGB had been swallowed up by a John Varvatos store.

Atlantic's Steve Leeds was in the club the night
AC/DC
played.

“At The Palladium they announced: ‘For those of you who want more
AC/DC
, we're going to be over at CBGB afterward.'
Oh my God
,” he recalls. “I think it was the last time and only time CBGB was clean because the sound just shook all the spiderwebs and dust out of the place. There were lines around the corner. People couldn't believe
AC/DC
were playing CBGB. It was an abbreviated set but it was so packed. You couldn't move.”