THE COMPLETE AC/DC STORY
SPECIAL
EDITION
EVERY ERA COVERED EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEWS ROCK'S GREATEST WRITERS THE ULTIMATE COLLECTION
FIFTH EDITION
Digital Edition
100% UNOFFICIAL
FROM THE CLASSIC ROCK ARCHIVES
THE STORIES BEHIND THE MYSTERY OF BON SCOTT'S DEATH THE ALBUMS From Australia to Power Up: every period covered
The inside story of the death of a legend – now updated
THE 30 BEST AC/DC SONGS As chosen by Joe Perry, Billy Corgan, Slash, Billy Gibbons & more
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Features 6 The Ballad Of Bon Scott
Bon’s brief tenure in folksters Mount Lofty Rangers prior to joining AC/DC and a near-fatal premature ending…
10 The First Gig!
The original line-up recall seeing in the new year of ’74 with a bang.
14 TNT
The explosive Australia-only release of their second album.
18 First Steps
Growing up down under: aggro in the arvo.
22 Let There Be Rock!
The band’s first proper album release confirms their status as a definitive force in rock’n’roll.
32 Riff Raff
Laying waste to the UK: on tour in ’77 with Bon leading the charge.
38 Bad Boy Boogie
The last few years of the 70s, AC/DC consolidated their name as the ultimate good time rock’n’roll band – both on record and on stage.
42 Shot Down
Working towards the peak career of the band’s Bon Scott era, AC/DC recruited new album producer Mutt Lange.
44 Highway To Hell
The full story behind the making of the band’s most well-known and enduring album.
48 A Touch Too Much
The tragic passing of the AC/DC frontman and how his death passed into legend – and conspiracy.
57 The Death Of Bon Scott
The mystery surrounding the story of Bon Scott’s death and the mysterious character of Alistair Kinnear.
58 The 80s
The exit of Bon and the entrance of Brian ‘Beano’ Johnson: how AC/DC rose again to reach even greater success.
60 Back In Black
Beano’s debut: the iconic album that saw AC/DC break new ground whilst remaining true to their roots.
65 Hell’s Bells
Exactly how did Back In Black become such a classic album? Geoff Barton of Classic Rock explores its longevity.
74 For Whom The Bell Tolls
How the band built on their success with new guy Beano out front. MARTYN GODDARD/GETTY
77 Every Home Should Have One
Buckcherry frontman Josh Todd on why Back In Black was such an important album for him – and his career.
78 For Those About To Rock, We Salute You
The stress and strain of following up the classic Back In Black uncovers cracks beginning to form within the band.
86 Bring Out The Big Guns The pitfalls of playing on stage with firing cannons.
87 Rock’N’Roll Damnation Dealing with inter-band conflict, surviving the vagaries of music fashion, censorship in the USA… and a serial killer .
90 In The Badlands
How Flick Of The Switch and Fly On The Wall saw AC/DC falter in the decade that saw pop overcome rock.
92 Going Into Overdrive
Drawing inspiration from an unlikely source, AC/DC revitalise their career with Who Made Who and Blow Up Your Video.
94 High Voltage
The resurgence of the band and the cleaning-up of their act.
100 Malcolm Young
The older brother interviewed in 1992, following the release of The Razor’s Edge and Ballbreaker albums.
104 Rock Your Heart Out
Back to basics: the making of Razor’s Edge, Ballbreaker and into the new millennium with Stiff Upper Lip.
106 Dog Eat Dog
The insular and withdrawn world of being in AC/DC.
108 Can’t Stop Rock’N’Roll The renaissance of AC/DC: how the band thrived in the new millennium by outliving their peers from the 70s.
112 Black Ice
For almost a decade with no new music, the band exploded back onto the scene with a “comeback” …then went supernova.
116 Train Kept A-Rollin’
Revisiting Black Ice and Rock Or Bust – the band’s latest (or final?) – two albums that brought the band’s career full circle.
118 It’s A Long Way To The Top…
He’s not bitter: Brian Johnson’s career in full and how he successfully filled the big shoes of Bon Scott.
128 Let There Be Rock. Again Angus Young and Brian Johnson on ressurecting the one of the greatest hard rock bands ever and unleashing Power Up.
138 The 30 Greatest Songs
The all-time classic cuts. From Lemmy to Aerosmith, from Clutch to Kiss, the great and the good choose their favourites.
146 20 Facts
Everything else you ever wanted to know, but were too afraid to ask. CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 5
HELL O WO
HIGH VOLTAGE
1976
RLD!
DIRTY DEEDS DONE DIRT CHEAP 1976
After two Australia-only album releases, it was time to look abroad. A compilation from those two was their first step towards global fame. Words: Geoff Barton Photo: Alamy 16 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM
ear Sounds, ‘Whilst scanning your pages over the past few weeks I have come across pictures of a rather delectable-looking creature who goes under the name of Angus Young and who is apparently the lead guitarist with an Aussie rock outfit called AC/DC. ‘As an ardent fan of punk rock (and schoolboys), I reckon it to be quite possible that I should appreciate their music and wondered if you could get me any further info on this young man and his sidekicks. ‘Surely you’re not going to leave me drooling over the photos and not tell me more about Mr Young and co?’ – Jane Hunt, Lowestoft, Suffolk (Letter published in Sounds, June 12, 1976 edition)
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n spring 1976, an elite hit squad of journos from Sounds music weekly – including yours truly – was invited to the London offices of Atlantic Records to watch a film in the company’s in-house cinema. A film! A real-life motion
AC/DC
‘WE TOOK IMMENSE PLEASURE IN THE SONGS’ LEWD ’N’ LASCIVIOUS LYRICS.’ picture! This was heady, exotic stuff. Of course, there were no DVDs, video streams or mpeg files in those days. Not even VHS cassettes. Atlantic treated us to the full-on celluloid experience, complete with old-fashioned reel-to-reel projector chattering away at the back of the room and everything. Drinks were drunk, smokes smoked and canapés consumed as we watched flickering black‑and-white footage of the label’s new signing – a motley posse of so-called “Antipodean punk rockers” – performing to an audience of sozzled swagmen in a tumbledown shack on the outskirts of Melbourne, Australia. The Atlantic bods were hoping we’d be impressed by this seamy spectacle, because they wanted to bring the band over to Britain for a series of Sounds-sponsored tour dates. And were we impressed? Most certainly. We hugely enjoyed the delinquent nature of the infectious, boogie-strewn music; we took immense pleasure in the songs’ lewd ’n’ lascivious lyrics; we greatly admired the bare-chested machismo of frontman Bon Scott, with his missing teeth and battle-scarred demeanour.
But we had a few misgivings. For starters, we reckoned the bisexual connotations of the band’s name – which, we’d learned, was AC/DC – might put people off. (We were journos, not electricians, okay?) We couldn’t the stop the words of a 1974 song by Sweet, coincidentally titled AC-DC, from buzzing around in our head: ‘She got girls/Girls all over the world/She got men/Every now and then…’ Additionally, we thought the hyperactive schoolkid cavorting about in short trousers – a guitar prodigy called Angus Young, purportedly a mere 16 years old – was a bit of an acquired taste. Finally, apart from the band’s snot-nosed attitude, and the snot on the lapels of Angus’s blazer, we didn’t exactly see where that punk-rock tag came from. Still, we shook hands with the record company toffs and agreed the basics of what would become the 19-date Sounds-AC/DC Lock Up Your Daughters Summer Tour of the UK, to begin on June 11, 1976 at Glasgow’s City Hall and end on July 7 at London’s Lyceum. Admission was £1 – or 50p upon production of a special Sounds money-off voucher. Could we have predicted that just a few short years
later, these Oz larrikins would be well on their way to becoming the biggest, baddest rock band on the entire planet? Could we heck. At this point they seemed more suited to the compact confines of the Red Cow pub in Hammersmith than the Red Bull Arena… A month or so prior to our meeting, Atlantic had cherry-picked songs from AC/DC’s two Australia-only albums – High Voltage and T.N.T., both of which came out in ’75 – to create a brand new nine-track ‘compilation’. In actual fact, the majority of songs on said offering were from T.N.T., with only two – Little Lover and She’s Got Balls – from High Voltage. Even so, the label elected to reprise the High Voltage title for this, AC/DC’s first non-Albert Productions release. Angus – sticking out his tongue in inimitable style, the point of a bright-yellow lightning bolt seemingly welded to the toe of his right sneaker – featured prominently on the cover of High Voltage V2 that most of the world will be familiar with. In Europe, however, it had a different cover image: a garish illustration of Bon and Angus in full flight, the former’s barrel chest bulging like Popeye’s after a marathon spinach bender, the latter depicted as a satchel-slingin’ schoolboy with a gasper in his mouth, on the run from matron’s clutches. And the music? Well, the estimable Jerry Ewing has already put in his two-penn’orth on the previous pages. Suffice to say that revisiting High Voltage for the purposes of this article proved to be an immensely pleasurable experience. The album might be 40-odd years old, but it still crackles with live-wire intensity – pun most definitely intended. The production, by Harry Vanda and George Young, is crisp and simplistic, in its way every bit as good as Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange’s more sophisticated knob-twiddlings on later AC/DC diamonds such as Highway To Hell and Back In Black. And you gotta admire the audacity of including bagpipes on opening track It’s A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock’N’Roll), AC/DC’s Scottish heritage not being widely appreciated at this early point in their career. From T.N.T, complete with Scott’s impeccable enunciation of the hookline ‘I’m dyna-mite’, via the endearingly sordid The Jack, to the libidinous Can I Sit Next To You Girl, this was indeed an international debut to savour. Subtly different versions of follow-up album Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap were issued in Australia and the rest of the world. For the purposes of this piece we’ll concentrate on the latter release, which hit the shops – in the UK at least – late in ’76, complete with cover art by Hipgnosis. Bizarrely, Dirty Deeds wasn’t released officially in the US until March ’81, as Atlantic execs there had misgivings about Scott’s gritty vocal style. They also thought songs such as Squealer, Love At First Feel and Big Balls were somewhat crass and tasteless. Which they were. That was the whole goddamn point! American recalcitrance aside, there’s no getting away from it: Dirty Deeds is a tremendous record, arguably Scott’s best with AC/DC. That claim hinges on a song that’s atypical for the band: Ride On, the best bluesy ballad you’re ever likely to hear. Normal AC/DC service is resumed with the ripsnorting title track and the mischievous Problem Child. But following Scott’s death in February 1980, the desolate, searching spirit embodied by Ride On took on new meaning and significance. And that’s why Dirty Deeds will always be about that particular song. CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 17
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AC/DC
Let there be light! Let there be sound!
Rock! RE BE E H T T LE
When AC/DC’s career stalled at the end of ’76, they were “seriously fucking pissed off”. They responded in utterly explosive fashion… Words: Mick Wall Portrait: Martyn Goddard
C AC/DC 1976: Let There Be Rock promo shoot, Shepperton Studios (note ’DC poster stuck over Zep poster).
hristmas, 1976, summer time in Australia and, according to Michael Browning, their manager, AC/DC “have got the shits”. What’s more, they reckon it’s all his fault. “It was very close to being all over,” Browning says. “Things were progressing very well in London and Europe. We’d been through a whole thing with the Marquee where they broke all the house records. We’d done the Lock Up Your Daughters UK tour and the Reading festival. It was all shaping up really well.” Having moved the band and their operation to London over the previous eight months – during which time their first UK album release, High Voltage, had served warning on an unsuspecting British music scene of the impending explosion of Antipodean rock coming their way – the band’s sudden absence from the domestic scene in Australia had left AC/DC’s live following there diminished. When Browning brought them back to Oz at the end of 1976 for what should have been a triumphant homecoming, they were surprised to discover that things had changed. The young, mostly female crowd that had got to know them through regular appearances on TV shows like Countdown (the Australian equivalent of Top Of The Pops)
had deserted them in favour of stay-at-home poptastic local heroes like Skyhooks. Even the rugged, gig-going blokes who populated the thriving pub and club scene that AC/DC now found themselves back playing had developed a certain grudging attitude towards a band that had “buggered off overseas”, as Browning puts it. Even their hometown crowd in Sydney was diminished: when, after their return home, the band headlined the 5,000-capacity Hordern Pavilion on December 12, the place was barely half-full. “It was a tough tour,” Browning says. “The group didn’t want to be doing it. I copped a lot of shit for making them do it. But it was a financial necessity. We had to do it to fill the coffers up to keep doing what we were doing in England and Europe. But try explaining that to a young rock’n’roll band.” “Our grassroots guys stayed with us,” says AC/DC’s thenbassist Mark Evans. “But we got banned from a lot of gigs too. Angus was dropping his shorts, and we had a problem with the tour programme where there was a quote on top of my photograph which said: ‘I want to make enough money so I’ll be able to fuck Britt Ekland.’ That nearly derailed the whole tour.” It wasn’t all gloom. AC/DC’s had released their second album, the wonderfully alliteratively titled Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, in the UK (it was their third in Australia), and while the band had yet to get a sniff at the charts in Britain, ➻
1979 The Making Of Highway To Hell!
THE DEVIL’S OWN A make-or-break album, Highway To Hell proved to be the fast-track to superstardom for AC/DC, but recording it pushed the band to their limits…
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AC/DC get swept away by both fans and media at The Oakland Coliseum in 1978.
“It was obvious something had to be done,” he says. “George had been fabulous for them but he hadn’t been to America for years and American FM radio had a sound you had to experience to really understand.” The meeting ended with the three men agreeing that AC/DC needed a new producer to crack America. A week later, Michael Kleffner flew to Sydney to break the news to George Young: if he really cared about his brothers and their band, he would have to step aside as producer. George didn’t take the news well, but Kleffner was adamant: for Atlantic to continue investing in AC/DC’s future, they needed new blood with them in the studio. Grudgingly, George Young agreed to step down. So it was in early 1979 that the wheels were set in motion – albeit with no little
“IF WE’D KNOWN MUTT LANGE HAD PRODUCED THE BOOMTOWN RATS, WE’D NEVER HAVE LET HIM THROUGH THE DOOR.” MALCOLM YOUNG
friction – for what would prove to be the most pivotal year of AC/DC’s career, and for the album that would change their destiny: Highway To Hell.
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ven as he was speaking to George Young, Michael Kleffner had a replacement producer in mind: Eddie Kramer. Within a week of their conversation, the latter was on a plane to Sydney to began work with AC/DC. The thirty-six-year-old Kramer was no novice, having previously worked with Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and Kiss, but the sessions were doomed from the start. With all three Young brothers still fuming at George’s unexpected ejection and Kramer’s subsequent appointment by the suits in New York, AC/DC were ready to go to war. The situation wasn’t helped by an upturn in Bon Scott’s drinking. Always heavy, it had become excessive even by his standards. “I went there,” says Kramer, “hung out with them, tried to do some demos, and realised that there was an obvious difficulty with the singer too. He had the most incredible voice but trying to keep him in check from his drinking was a very tough call. But I think more than anything, the band resented me being foisted onto them. It was like sticking a pin into them.” When Kramer insisted that the band decamp to his regular studio in Miami, the resentment grew. The producer’s task was undermined further by the fact that Malcolm and Angus were allegedly sending demo tapes to George back in Australia behind Kramer’s back, which the elder Young would critique – negatively. After a series of increasingly angry phone calls from Malcolm, in which the guitarist threatened bloodshed if Kramer wasn’t fired, Browning realised he needed to make a drastic change, and quickly. He had another producer in mind – thirtyone-year-old hotshot Mutt Lange, who had recently produced The Boomtown Rats’ No.1 hit, I Don’t Like Mondays. Browning approached his manager, Clive Calder, to ask if Lange would be interested in ➻
GETTY X2
bitterly cold January afternoon in New York, 1979: a top-level meeting at the headquarters of Atlantic Records on Rockefeller Plaza. Present are company president Jerry Greenberg, the label’s head of A&R Michael Kleffner and AC/DC manager Michael Browning. Subject under discussion: the abject failure of AC/DC to crack the American market, and what to do about it. Despite their initial success at home in Australia and subsequent career lift-off in Britain and Europe, no AC/DC album had gained any traction whatsoever in America. One of them – 1976’s Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap – wasn’t even released there. Worse still, their recent live album, If You Want Blood You’ve Got It, which Atlantic had banked on “doing a Kiss” – breaking a band with a great live act but zero visibility on mainstream radio, the way Alive had for Simmons and co. – had been a disaster sales-wise. Which is why Browning had been summoned to Atlantic HQ for what he describes today as “the discussions”. Maybe it was the singer, suggested Greenberg, not for the first time. Maybe he didn’t have the right voice for American radio. Maybe they would do better with someone else? “Not in a blunt ‘either do it or we drop you’ type way,” says Browning now. “But there was that kind of conversation going on.” When the manager refused to relent about Bon, it was Kleffner’s turn to chip in. Maybe the band needed a new producer, said the A&R man. Studio svengalis Harry Vanda and George Young had helped steer the band this far but perhaps they had done all they could. The problem was that not only were Vanda and Young still in the production hotseat, but George Young was the elder brother of AC/DC guitarists Malcolm and Angus Young. It was a family business. In the Atlantic boardroom, Michael Browning weighed up the options.
Words: Mick Wall
AC/DC
Smiles and snarls: the now iconic cover of Highway To Hell – minus horns. CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 45
‘WON’T YOU CARRY ME HOME? DON’T LET ME LIE HERE IN ALL THIS BEER.’ FROM THE AC/DC SONG ‘CARRY ME HOME’ MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES
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n o B t t o Sc
AC/DC
A TOUCH TOO MUCH
On February 19, 1980, AC/DC frontman Bon Scott died in tragic circumstances. But mysteries surround the event to this day. Geoff Barton investigates Bon’s last hours, the underworld he moved in, the disappearance of ‘Alistair Kinnear’ – the last man to see Bon alive – and the UFO connection.
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nless a person has suicidal tendencies, no one can choose where he or she dies. Least of all if that person is a rock star with a hard-drinking, fullon party-animal lifestyle. But having said that, there’s something uniquely unnerving about the location of AC/DC frontman Bon Scott’s sad demise. It’s an overcast day in early December 2004, and Classic Rock is making its way to a fateful setting: number 67 Overhill Road, in East Dulwich, South London. This is where Bon died, his body found abandoned in a Renault 5 car parked on the road just outside the address nearly 25 years ago. We don’t plan to rubberneck the scene like a bunch of sickos ogling a motorway pile-up, we just felt that we had to check it out before we began to write this story. You can call us morbid if you like; we’ll just call it research. It takes a while to get to East Dulwich from the centre of the city. You ride the Victoria-line Tube to Brixton and then hop on the single-decker P4 bus. You rumble through posh Dulwich Village, and the best part of half an hour later you alight outside the grim tenements of the Lordship Lane high-rise council estate. You walk a little way up the street, turn left by the Harvester pub, and Overhill Road is the second turning on the right. The first thing you notice is a tatty building on the corner called the Rockbank Hotel, and you can’t help but raise a wry smile. Number 67 is at the top of steep gradient. And it ain’t a pretty sight. It’s a dour, featureless block of flats penned in by ranks of bright-green wheelie bins. It could have been transplanted here direct from the Eastern bloc. There’s a graffiti’d old ambulance parked directly outside the flats, which wipes that grin off your face straight away. To compound the irony, there’s even a Renault behind it (although admittedly it’s a Mégane, not a 5). The trees that line Overhill Road are bare of leaves, but number 67’s front garden is a thriving jungle of roots, weeds and hawthorns. There’s litter all over the place. There’s a wheelbarrow in the corner that had once been full of white paint, but which is now all driedout and crusty. The only evidence of anything remotely rock’n’roll-related is a skateboard propped up in the porch of the house next door. Of Bon Scott’s heritage, there is not a sign.
But hang on a second… There’s a scratchy silver plaque attached to the front of number 67. Tiptoe up the path, look closely, and you can see a handful of scribbled tributes grouped around the legend ‘Flats 1-6’. The messages have been written in obvious haste: ‘To Bon, from Björn in Sweden’; ‘AC-Foxi-DC’; ‘Ronald and Frank from Germany – cheers’; ‘To Bon, Szmery from Poland.’ And that’s it. Nothing else, apart from the drone of an aircraft; the distant sound of schoolchildren playing; brambles rustling dryly. Overhill Road must have changed substantially since 1980, the year of Bon’s death. Opposite number 67 is a big new apartment block called Dawson Heights that plainly wasn’t around two and a half decades ago. The Asian proprietor of a nearby Londis store has been in the country for only three months. He expresses surprise when he hears that a top rock star popped his clogs just down the road. The shopkeeper says he doesn’t know of any local residents who would have been on the scene so many years ago. A tradesman unloading a white van shrugs; he’s only making a delivery, and he actually comes from Bromley. He’s heard of AC/DC, but not of Bon Scott. There’s no reply from pressing any of the door buzzers stuck on number 67’s front wall, just the empty hiss of the intercom, like static from a badly tuned radio. You turn on your heels with an air of resignation and trudge back down the hill. Fine rain fills the air. As you grapple with your umbrella, you notice the silhouette of a bright-yellow dog stencilled on to the pavement. It’s accompanied by a warning to owners not to allow their pets to shit on the pavement: Bag It & Bin It. Try as you might, you can’t prevent a wry smile returning to your lips: Bag It & Bin It? It sounds like a bleedin’ Bon Scott song title. Ronald Belford Scott was born on July 9, 1946, in Kirriemuir, Scotland. He emigrated with his family to Australia in 1952. He left school at age 15, and held a variety of part-time jobs before deciding to ply his trade in music; as a drummer-cum-vocalist, he enjoyed limited success before a motorcycle accident cut short his ambitions. Once recovered, Bon took a job driving a stomping little outfit called AC/DC around: down the streets of Melbourne, across tumbleweed trails, along desert roads and beyond. But Bon always hankered to be a solid-gold-proper AC/DC band member, not a humble roadie. ➤ CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 49
Take Aim…
Coming off the back of what would become the second-best-selling album of all time, the pressure was on AC/DC to provide a worldbeating follow-up. But the cracks were beginning to show in the family business.
A Words: Mick Wall
MICHAEL PUTLAND/GETTY IMAGES
s the razzed-up 1980s arrived like a drunken gatecrasher at the ebbing party that was once the 1970s, the face of rock was changing. It was no longer embodied by the svelte, golden god, tousled mane framing a coquettish pout as he stood astride his mic stand. Nor was it the lead guitarist, swaying like a cobra, hypnotised by his own wasted elegance. Instead, by the summer of 1981 the biggest noise in rock was being made by a 26-year-old man dressed as a schoolboy, complete with bad haircut, skewwhiff cap, and guitar turned to 11, sitting on the shoulders of a screw-faced, flat-capped singer with a voice that sounded like a giant gargling with nails. Goodbye Led Zeppelin, their break-up confirmed the previous year. Hello AC/DC, whose latest album, Back In Black, had reached No.1 in Britain and sold more than five million copies in the US. It was an album with an appeal so broad that it would go on to become the second-biggest-selling of all time (after Michael Jackson’s Thriller). Not that this was a story of overnight success. Back In Black was the seventh album AC/DC had released in six years. Moreover, it was an album that had been made in the aftermath of the drink-related death of singer Bon Scott, the irrepressible frontman who’d helped the band claw their way up from the bush-league of the Australian pub circuit to the theatres and halls of the UK and Europe, and now finally into the arenas of the beckoning world. Against all odds, AC/DC had not only survived the hole beneath the waterline that Scott’s death represented, they had also positively thrived. With Scott’s replacement, Brian Johnson, on board, Back In Black had succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.
Fire!
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AC/DC
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GETTY
AC/DC
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AC/DC
LET THERE BE ROCK.
AGAIN
They’d lost Malcolm. Brian was out. Phil was in trouble with the law. Cliff had retired. Despite a successful tour with Axl Rose, it looked like AC/DC‘s high voltage had been unplugged for good. Not so. Angus Young and Brian Johnson talk exclusively to Classic Rock about the resurrection of the greatest hard rock’n’roll band ever.
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Words: Paul Elliott Photos: Josh Cheuse
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