‘From our background, we were always a band that tried to make a good album. We concentrated on that. Where other bands made pop music or changed their direction, we always stuck to what we do best, which is rock music’
ANGUS YOUNG
Following a decade of the ups and downs that follow the kind of zenith the band had reached with Back in Black, by 1990 AC/DC had built back up to fulfilling their creative potential with the release of The Razors Edge. Right from the album’s opening notes, it showed riffs as sharp as the band’s last commercial peak in 1980. Entertainment Weekly would declare that ‘if you’re a hard-rock addict – if raucous rock ’n’ roll intensity is what you want – this is one album that really delivers!’ Billboard, meanwhile, hailed it as ‘arguably the Australian headbangers’ strongest album in over half a decade … a welcome addition to AC/DC’s catalogue’.
This time the band had secured as producer the Canadian heavy hitter Bruce Fairbairn, whose past successes had included Bon Jovi’s 28-million-selling Slippery When Wet and Aerosmith’s comeback smash Permanent Vacation and its Grammy-winning follow-up Pump. In an interview with rock journalist Martin Aston, Angus recalled that band and producer had been on the same sonic page from the first pre-production meeting. ‘[Usually] when I sit on that side of the world, I always think producers are going to be high-powered – you know, more business than pleasure. But Bruce was really good. I was shocked in a way because the guy said, “I want you to sound like AC/DC when you were 17.”’ Music to the band’s ears.
Angus also told rock journalist Paul Stenning that, from day one, ‘Bruce told Malcolm that he didn’t want us to change AC/DC. And he didn’t want us to do anything that we’d be uncomfortable with. These days it’s hard to find people who are rock producers. A lot of people say they are, but, as soon as you start working with them, they’ll push their ballads at you. The material was all ready to go when we got to Vancouver. Fairbairn just brought out the dynamics a bit. Bruce was a big fan of our older albums; he said he liked the excitement, rawness and lack of production on them. He wanted to capture that in-your-face sound again and did a good job doing it. There were very few overdubs.’
As excited as the band was about stepping in the studio with Fairbairn, the teaming almost didn’t happen. As engineer Mike Fraser recalled, ‘AC/DC had already started Razors Edge with George Young in the UK, and there had been a family illness, so they basically had everything but vocals and lead guitar overdubs recorded. So when they got to Little Mountain, initially we thought it would be a breeze because all we had to track was Brian’s leads and the other overdubs.
‘Well, when Brian started singing, we quickly discovered that the keys of the songs were in the wrong key for him, so we started re-recording the guitars on them to change the key and bring it down a whole step. Well, the band liked the sound and process of that better than what they already had tracked, so we wound up doing everything again, down to even cutting two or three more drum tracks with Chris. We kept a lot of the basic bed drum tracks.’
In an early 1990s cover story, Billboard was offered an exclusive look inside Little Mountain Studios. ‘This bustling West Coast city [Vancouver] of 1.5 million residents is on the international map largely because of one recording studio,’ it reported. ‘Little Mountain Studios is the storied, almost mythic facility. Bruce Fairbairn, Bob Rock and Mike Fraser are the producers, and the combination has turned Vancouver into a hard-rock mecca for Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, Motley Crue, David Lee Roth and AC/DC … More significantly, the extraordinary track record of Little Mountain Studios … has spurred Vancouver’s growth into what is arguably Canada’s foremost studio centre … [It] continues to attract big names to the facility’s two main studios that together generate $1 million in revenue annually.’
Equally important to the sonic attraction of Little Mountain Studios, as producer and manager Bob Brooks recalled, was the role of its designer, the late John Vrtacic. ‘I’ve been asked many times following the extraordinary success track of Little Mountain Studios who I credited most if not all those hits and acclaim. It was always expected that I would name people like Bob Rock or Mike Fraser; and truly their role in the fame of the studio is known by everyone. But my answer was always swift and emphatic –
John Vrtacic was the key man to that success. ‘John sought perfection. He was the stickler for pre-maintenance – he actually believed in warding off Murphy’s Law before it struck! – and always kept an eye toward making everything work better every time and all the time. Little Mountain was one of the first studios in the world to work with the then-new Sony 3402 tape machines and then there was all of the blood, sweat, and tears that we went through with software glitches and anything else that could go wrong. The phone and Telex bills went through the roof as John conversed with Sony about the software glitches, and he’d work crazy hours with no extra compensation to get those machines to perform as they were designed to do – working optimally in the “real” world that we lived in every day. John beat down the problems and made those machines cook!’
‘One day, my receptionist called to say that there were some gentlemen in the foyer. A lot of them. And they were all Japanese. Sure enough, they were from Sony and they were in Vancouver at Little Mountain Studios not to see me, but John Vrtacic. By the way, the Japanese pronunciation of “Vrtacic” was priceless – I really wish I’d recorded it. What a meeting as they finally greeted the man that had saved Sony’s technical buns. They expressed over and over their gratitude to John and to us for allowing him to actually work for Sony, and showed their gratitude by virtually giving us three $75,000 machines for next to nothing.’
‘John, just the way he always was, couldn’t figure out what the fuss was all about. He was just doing what he thought he was supposed to do – make everything work perfectly. John was always so gentle and quiet; a true gentleman in every sense. But he always knew when he was right and when he was right there was no argument. End of debate – he was right.’
Telling Billboard about what had attracted his multi-platinum ears to the studio for album after album, Fairbairn explained, ‘Little Mountain isn’t a first-flight studio compared to some others. It hasn’t got the best gear and it’s certainly not a fancy place. But it does have a unique sound to it that only four or five people in the world can capture … There’s a certain, unpretentious feeling there, a certain something you can’t define, that is conducive to making great rock records.’
Fairbairn’s manager, Sandee Bathgate, who booked Fairbairn and AC/DC into the studio in 1990, added of the studio’s magic atmosphere that ‘basically any studio is four walls and a tape machine. It’s the chemistry that happens between a band and producer and their engineer.’ Offering an additional compliment to engineer Mike Fraser, Bathgate said, ‘Little Mountain has to be commended for hiring exceptional assistants. When you’re working with the likes of Fairbairn, you’ll learn through osmosis alone.’
Of the sonic strengths that Fairbairn brought to the console, engineer Mike Fraser recalled, ‘In one way they [AC/DC] are a tough band to produce because they already know what they want and how to get it. They just need that third member of the band, so to speak, to help guide them to those ends. In the dynamic between Bruce and the band, they liked his approach in general. Bruce is a take-charge kind of guy, and so he was the perfect guy for them. He was a great producer, first, because he had a good musical background – he was a horn player and understood music – and, while you don’t usually have to read music doing the rock thing, he could understand and read that stuff. One of his greatest qualities is he was sort of like a coach, and could come in and play referee – if some of the band members were having a disagreement, he could get all of that smoothed out.
‘Second, he always had an agenda, so every day he’d walk in and say, “OK, at noon, we’re going to record a guitar part, at 2:35 we’re gonna do this,” so he’d have the day laid out and wouldn’t let it get out of hand. Because sometimes musicians, when everybody gets creative and are working out a guitar part, can get a little micro-focused. Bruce would give them a couple tries, and then say, “OK, nope – that needs to be developed more. You need to go home and work that out, and we’ll move on to something else and record you tomorrow.” So he never allowed too much time to be wasted in the studio, was always very efficient, and with that approach you tend overall to get a lot of great stuff done, because you don’t get bogged down on exploring something out. You just come in and capture the magic.’
That magic, Fraser recalled, was captured ‘on an SSL 4000 console in Studio B, which is a fairly small room’.
The band had the advantage of having already completed songwriting for the record, courtesy of Malcolm and Angus. The brothers had taken the creative helm – including penning the lyrics – due to what Angus described as the distraction on Brian Johnson’s part of a divorce. ‘Mal and I thought it would ease the pressure on him if we wrote the words,’ he told rock journalist Paul Stenning. ‘We’ve always contributed in the past anyway. We’d sit down, the three of us – me, Mal and Bon – sometimes four of us with my brother George, and we’d have this big shoot around. We always gave Bon a helping hand in the past; same with Brian, because if you have some lyrical idea while you’re writing it can save you a lot of heartache and trouble at the end of the day.’
Indeed, after dealing with the stresses and pressures the divorce put on his collective energies, the vocalist himself told Stenning, ‘I just ran out of ideas. I just can’t think of enough. I don’t want to write the same thing again. And Angus and Malcolm helped Bon with a lot of the lyrics in the earlier days. Mal and Ang have this songwriting in their blood – they are very good at it. They just let go. I just felt terrible when we were doing an idea – I didn’t have much ideas-wise. I thought I’d wait to see the boys and hear them playing the riffs. I was having a real tough time thinking up lyrics. That just happens sometimes: you just dry up. Well, the boys said, “We’ll give it a try,” and the boys gave it a thought, and it was great. It was from a different angle.’
‘And Angus has the craziest ideas. Angus is way out there – he comes back, gets these crazy things in his head and they are great. Angus and Malcolm are just that talented. But what I still do, and what I love very much, is to meet Malcolm and Angus in London. They’ll say, “Come on, Brian, we have a few ideas.” And that’s the best part of it, because I know I will be the first person in the world to hear them. And I help them to shape the songs. We just sit down there, and it’s lovely. You’re with your pals, drinking lots of coffee – I just love it.’
Against that backdrop, Angus felt the band had plenty of time for pre-production in planning what would unofficially be considered their comeback album. In contrast to past albums, he told Stenning, ‘we had plenty of time, which was good. In the past we’ve always been committed to something. Sometimes we’ve even been committed to touring, with the dates set and we wouldn’t even be finished with the record. This time, there was no pressure on us, which was great. We could write songs, take some time and listen to them, and say, “That’s good,” or “That needs help.” Maybe change a piece here or there. We don’t really like to go into the studio with nothing and try to do it there. We like to have it done and worked out, so that when you’re recording you can concentrate on the performance and the sound.’
In an interview with journalist Martin Aston, Angus added that, with The Razors Edge, ‘instead of being riffmakers all the time and thinking we could make tunes out of them, we started from the other end of the scale and concentrated on coming up with full songs … You always make the best album you can for that period. We never have, never would, put something out unless we felt confident about it. This time, we kept pushing the deadline for completion further and further back so that the record was right.’
That said, once inside the studio, Brian Johnson told Juke there was a much more focused environment. ‘Malcolm and Angus are real workaholics. As long as you pull your weight, you’re OK. Once you become a lightweight, you suffer their wrath.’
Offering fans a peek into the brothers’ writing process, Malcolm told rock journalist Murray Engleheart that he and Angus worked well together because ‘we can bounce off each other – that’s the good side of it. And guitar-wise, we know each other. We’ve been playing together longer than AC/DC has been around, as far as knowing what each other does and how to play guitar with each other. That’s the thing that’s just evolved from being brothers. At the other end of it, basically when we’re out on the road and recording, we’re working together as well as being brothers, so it’s a typical brotherly relationship, I guess. We know the band’s bigger than anything. We always call musical differences small because nothing’s worth ending everything over. So we’ll never bother; we’ll get over it quick if we have it out or whatever. When it happens, we usually know we’ll sort it out. After 20 years, I think you’ve got to do that.’
Though Malcolm and Angus brought in the album’s songs largely written, Brian recalled one experience that ‘reminded me of the old days when we would experiment with the arrangements and just try things out for the fun of it. In the back of our minds we realised that there is a whole generation of fans that has sprung up in the three years since our last album was released. I want them to see what all this noise and fun is all about.’
One aspect of their recording process that the band kept unchanged – as newly installed drummer Chris Slade recalled to journalist Stenning – was tracking live off the floor. ‘It’s inconceivable, say, for Angus to stop by [at the studio] two weeks after the rest of the band to record his guitar parts. And they always keep the first takes. On every track of every AC/DC album, there’s always some element of a first take somewhere.’
Engineer Mike Fraser recalled that the setup at Studio B at Little Mountain was ideal for tracking the band live off the floor because it didn’t have a doorway into the loading bay. ‘So you had more of the small room sound, which works with AC/DC, because they like the tighter, closer-sounding drums. The drum miking setup, on the snare drum, was [to] mike the top and bottom with a Shure 57, and on the kick would be a Sennheiser 421, and on the toms, I again used a Shure 57 on the top skin, and on the bottom, miked it up with a Sennheiser 421 as well.
‘I like the Sennheiser because it’s got a really good sort of attack quality to it, and I use the Shure mics because they can take a lot of abuse and you can even hit them with a drumstick and they’ll keep on working. The only difference in the mic I use for maybe a real heavy hitter is maybe not mike the drums as close, to get a little more distance on it. Because, when you hit a drum really hard, the sound jumps up so fast that it sounds like a smack, so you’ve got to catch that sound wave a little further away from the instrument, because that’s where the tone comes back in.’
While listeners might have expected new drummer Chris Slade to be as heavy a hitter as he looked on video or on TV, Fraser recalled that recording him in the studio was funny ‘because Chris is actually quite a light drummer – he doesn’t hit very hard. When you watch him on videos, it looks like he’s really laying into them, but, in the studio, when he hits the cymbals they barely move. That’s sort of the clue, and some of those drummers who hit with a little bit more finesse, it’s actually an easier sound to record, because the drum skins react a little better. They don’t shut down with the force going on. So especially on overheads, I’d mike him a little closer because he doesn’t put all his weight into it – he’s more of a finesse guy. The overheads I used on Chris were probably AKG 452s – they don’t get too thin. It’s still warm, but has a nice silky top-end – that’s why I like those.’
Angus told Stenning why he felt Chris Slade was an ideal drummer for the group’s sound: ‘His style is just perfect for the band – it is as solid and powerful as you can get. Chris is a bit similar to Phil Rudd – they both smash the drums as hard as they can. But Chris can be frightening to look at – you look at his bald head and it could scare you.’
When attention turned to tracking guitars, Fraser said that ‘on Razor’s Edge, it was a little different from later records I made with them, because the songs were already recorded, so we were just doing overdubs. So on that one they didn’t play at the same time. We set up the amp heads in the control room, and Angus would sit there with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and play. I miked him up with 57s on his Marshalls, not much of a room sound on them, because both he and Malcolm like a little bit tighter, close-miked type of sound.’
‘Angus, as a lead player, has just this great, singular knack for coming up with stuff in the spur of the moment. Again, when we were doing Razor’s Edge, we were doing his solos, and I remember he’d done a pass on one song. I said, “Hey, that’s great – let’s just do another one just to have an alternate,” and he played a completely different solo. Then we did a third one and it was an entirely different solo, and they were all three competitively great. So now it was like: “Great – how do we choose between these?!”’
When they got to the album’s lead single, ‘Thunderstruck’, Angus recalled of its creation to Stenning that – as with many of music’s most inspired moments – ‘I was just fiddling around with my left hand when I came up with that riff. I played it more by accident than anything. I thought, “Not bad” and put it on tape. That’s how me and Malcolm generally work. We put our ideas on tape and play them for each other.’
‘[The lyrical concept came to me while] I was in an airplane over East Germany and the plane got struck by lightning. I thought my number was up. The stewardess said we were struck by lightning and I said, “No, we were struck by thunder, because it boomed.”’
When it came time to track what would become the band’s biggest international hit in almost a decade, Fraser recalled that ‘on “Thunderstruck”, that was so cool, because Angus said, “Well, we have this little intro thing,” and whipped out that little opening part, and it was only going to be on the intro. So, as we start recording, Angus goes through the intro, and then, as the first verse came up, he was still playing and Bruce went, “OK, let him roll, and see where it goes.” He wound up continuing to play it throughout the whole song in one take! By the end, he had this big long ash of a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, that he’d smoked throughout that one take.
‘If you listen to the finished song, you can notice in the mix we faded it in and out, so it sort of disappears a little bit in the verses and choruses, and comes in and out, but it’s played top to bottom, all the way through, one pass – it was awesome!’
For the album’s title track, Angus told Stenning that ‘we had the main riff and there was something really ominous about it. And for that reason alone we decided to go ahead with it. In the past we’d stay away from things that sounded too musical.’
As attentions turned to the album’s vocals, the band kept the same musical principle in mind, with Brian adding that ‘there’s a lot more melody on The Razors Edge and we’ve always been wary of melody. A song like ‘Moneytalks’ or ‘Thunderstruck’ – there are real melodies in those songs. I had to learn what to do again with that.’
For what Brave Words/Bloody Knuckles hailed as ‘possibly the greatest live show opener ever – period’, Fraser focused on the song’s sing-a-long backing vocals. ‘We had Brian all sung and the main vocal comp done,’ he recalled, ‘and for the big gang “Thunder” vocal, that was Angus, Malcolm and Cliff. We never get Brian in there for backing vocals because his voice is so distinct that, if you add him to the backgrounds, it will kind of take over. With any harmony-type parts, it’s usually Cliff who does all those.
‘We use an 87 or 414 for the backgrounds, because you don’t want to load up all similar sounds on the vocals – you want a little bit of variety. So, for instance, because the 58 mic has its own characteristics, if you did all your backgrounds with that, it would start clouding in the way of the lead vocal.’
For Brian’s lead vocals, Fraser added that ‘the vocal mic I like using best, especially with singers like Brian Johnson, is a Shure 58. They just use it as a hand-held, as they would live on stage. It handles the force of their voice, and has a great sound to it that’s nice and crisp but still has body. I find with guys like that, if you use a really nice tube mic, say, it doesn’t really handle their force or sibilance as well as a 58 will do.’
When the band tracked ‘Moneytalks’ – a massive hit single that Kerrang! hailed years later as a song that still took ‘the piss out of 99 per cent of rock bands’ – Fraser singled it out as one of those lightning-in-the-bottle moments of studio magic. ‘I remember it all coming together really fast. They’re a really fast band in the studio – even if they’re not rehearsed, they’re such a great band at what they do after playing together all these years. So they come in, and there will be a quick bass, drums two-guitar set-up and away we would go, and after a couple hours, there’s the song.’
Discussing the song’s lyrical focus, Angus explained to Stenning that the words were the band’s attempt to convey the idea that ‘money’s the big divider. Places other than America are not necessarily like that. In Europe, they think you’ve got to be born with class. In the US, they think you buy it, it comes with the tux. So it’s just our little dig at the lifestyle of the rich and the faceless.’
Angus recalled to journalist Aston that, when recording wrapped and the band turned to choosing the album’s title, ‘we wanted a title that sounded tough, to cut the bullshit … Because that’s what we are, in our music, though not as people. We aren’t Mike Tysons! But the music we’re playing comes in for a lot of fire – not from the public, but it’s never been the media’s most favourite music.’
But in this case, it would be. As the band debuted at No. 2 on the Top 200 Album Chart, Billboard celebrated the album’s embodying the ‘quintessential AC/DC – rowdy, abrasive, unapologetically fun metal full of blistering power chords, memorable hooks, and testosterone-driven lyrics’. Blender magazine’s later overview would declare that, with Razors Edge, ‘AC/DC reclaimed the old spirit on their first album of the ’90s’, and even the typically conservative National Review were won over enough to declare that ‘the Johnson years are best represented by 1990’s The Razors Edge’.
The album’s crown jewel with fans and critics alike – ‘Thunderstruck’ – was the sort of hard rock that everyone felt AC/DC excelled at, with Blender hailing it ‘as anthemic as anything from Scott’s golden age’. Entertainment Weekly best summed up the achievement of song and album – which went on to sell five million copies – with their observation that ‘AC/DC explodes on its new album’s first track “Thunderstruck” with enough coiled fury to make you think it invented the genre’.