Youngs : The Brothers Who Built Ac/Dc (9781466865204) (28 page)

“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 several 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.”

I tried to corroborate this account with Calder but was given a firm no by the office of Neil Portnow, the president/CEO of The Recording Academy, the Los Angeles home of the Grammys: “The response we received was that the projects you mention took place more than 30 years ago, and he will not be in a position unfortunately to be of any assistance.”

Calder, who started out in A&R for EMI in South Africa, was ranked by
Forbes
as the 521st richest person in the world in 2012 and #1 on the
Sunday Times
Rich List of Music Millionaires the same year, ahead of Sir Paul McCartney. He got his first big payday selling the Zomba Group, which he founded with Ralph Simon in 1975, to BMG for almost $3 billion in 2002. Simon and Calder had earlier split in 1990 over an “ethical disagreement” and, in Simon's words, it “did not finish on a good note … Calder's ego had just gotten out of control.”

Despite Simon's criticism, Greenberg defends Calder as “one of the all-time, great,
great
record men,” and Cedric Kushner goes further: “He's probably the most successful entrepreneur in all of the music business in the entire world. A very brilliant guy.”

As for Klenfner, Greenberg says he gave him the option of announcing that he had resigned rather than been fired.

“His answer to me was: ‘
Fuck you
. I want everybody to know you fired me.' And I told him to leave the building, which he did.”

In January 2013, Klenfner's collection of rock memorabilia, most of it from his years at Atlantic, was auctioned in Bloomfield, New Jersey. A cherry-red Gibson SG signed in silver pen by Brian Johnson, Malcolm Young, Angus Young, Phil Rudd and Cliff Williams sold for $860. Angus had even drawn a caricature of himself and signed it “To Klef.” A
Powerage
tour jacket went for $176. A fire sale: an unfitting fate for the treasured possessions of a man who'd given so much of his best years to
AC/DC
, even if he had got it wrong over Lange.

Michael Browning nominates Klenfner as the most important figure inside Atlantic for
AC/DC
. Again, it's a surprising sentiment given he is so unflatteringly portrayed by the band's biographers.

“He shouldn't be,” says Browning, who can take credit for being one of the very few people who has previously sung his praises, having done so in the Wall biography—even if the English author couldn't return the compliment to Klenfner and spell his name right. “He was one of the great supporters.”

I ask Klenfner's widow, Carol, how her husband felt after what happened at Atlantic. Does she think he was unfairly treated?

“Michael was always a fierce advocate for what he believed in and not afraid of speaking his truth and stepping on toes, so he was aware that going with his gut had ramifications,” she says. “And he paid the price at Atlantic. I remember how upset and devastated he was about the selection of Mutt Lange as producer. He was passionately committed to the band and thought they could be huge. He loved them. He saw something special in them early on and fought tirelessly for them like a lion.”