9

AC/DC

“You Shook Me All Night Long” (1980)

Lyrically, it’s the strongest song on Back in Black. Musically, despite undeniable flecks of Head East’s opening riff in “Never Been Any Reason,” it’s become the good-time anthem of a band that can’t help writing them: a perfect combination of straight-ahead rock and melodic pop that by AC/DC’s already peerless standard is so exceptionally radio-friendly it’s been covered by middle-of-the-road divas Celine Dion and Shania Twain.

“Just so much going for it. How could any rock song be better?” says Terry Manning. “It’s got a great beat. It’s just so incredibly simple. There’s so much space around the punctuations that start it off. And then when it all comes together and the chorus starts with the bass coming in and everything, it just rocks. It’s rock ’n’ roll. Every time I hear it I’m excited by it. I could literally listen to that song a hundred times in a row and not be tired. It keeps you going.”

Yet when Tony Platt presented “You Shook Me All Night Long” to the marketing team at Atlantic Records at 75 Rockefeller Plaza he was shocked to discover those who liked it were outnumbered by those who didn’t. The head of the department dug it but he was in a minority.

“I remember two or three of these marketing guys going, ‘Nah, I don’t see that as a single at all,’” he says. “That’s one of the biggest rock singles of all time. So that framed my idea of marketing people within the music industry, that’s for sure. It’s a song that stands up for itself.”

“Head and shoulders above everything else,” agrees Phil Carson. “It epitomizes rock ’n’ roll that embodies lyrical humor, along with a musical construction that surrounds a great melody. Hearing it in strip clubs all over the world doesn’t hurt either.”

But it’s a song that dogs Angus and Malcolm Young like Banquo’s ghost. Is it, along with other songs on the record, actually one of Bon Scott’s?

*   *   *

Certainly the best lines (and song titles) on Back in Black and their punchy brevity have all the hallmarks of Scott’s handiwork and it’s very tempting to make a case for it on that basis alone—despite Malcolm’s declaration to Classic Rock magazine in 2003 that the mere suggestion was “complete bollocks,” the repeated assurances of the band that the whole album is “a tribute to Bon” and the uncredited but generally widely accepted lyrical contributions of Mutt Lange and even Tony Platt, who says, “Lots of lines used to get put forward. They just came from everybody.”

First up, Angus and Malcolm themselves have confessed that right before Scott died they were working on some songs (barely more than titles at that stage) that found their way onto Back in Black and that the late singer had jammed on drums with them in a rehearsal studio on bare-bones versions of “Have a Drink on Me” and “Let Me Put My Love Into You.”

It certainly tallies with Doug Thaler’s recollection of how the band operated as a songwriting unit around the production of Powerage.

“From the early days when I was down there in Australia, I know that what the band did was sit around and come up with titles. And then they would write the song after they had the title to it. ‘Kicked in the Teeth,’ onward and onward. And Bon would work on the lyrics. Before they wrote any music or any lyrics they had a list of titles. And then they would figure out what song they could write behind the title.”

More compellingly, though, there are the “scraps of paper” or “notebooks” containing lines for songs that allegedly appear on Back in Black. Depending on whose version of events you’d rather believe, they were either found in Scott’s flat by Ian Jeffery and production manager Jake Berry or left behind at Jeffery’s flat by Scott.

I ask Jeffery where they are now.

“I think I still have them somewhere,” he says.

In an interview with Classic Rock in 2000 Malcolm further admitted he took possession from Jeffery of “a note with some scribblings of Bon’s” with “a couple of little lyrics on there” but “nothing with a title or that would give you any idea of where his head was at.”

Startlingly, Angus contradicts him in the same magazine in 2005. While conceding “a lot of ideas, choruses, song titles and lyrical snippets were already in place before Brian arrived” he also says “there was nothing from Bon’s notebook” on the album.

“All his stuff went direct to his mother and his family. It was personal material—letters and things. It wouldn’t have been right to hang on to it. It wasn’t ours to keep.”

The brothers can’t have it both ways.

In any case, we know now for a fact that Jeffery claims to be in possession of something that was Scott’s. Not everything went back to the Scott family. Which begs the question: if there were lines from those scraps of paper or notebooks on Back in Black, why are they still being held by Jeffery?

“Bon used to come round to mine every Sunday for dinner and then [go to the] pub and would quite often leave stuff at my place,” he says. And then he starts backtracking. “Not totally certain about Back in Black but I seem to remember a couple of words, lines [of Bon’s being on there]. Maybe not.”

Berry supports Jeffery’s account for this book. Speaking about the day he entered the apartment of the dead AC/DC singer, Berry says he didn’t see any notebooks in Scott’s flat. “I never saw anything like that. Never saw any books.”

But, all that aside, what really gives weight to the theory that Scott may have contributed to Back in Black, even the unforgettable title track, is what was going on in his personal life and his disenchantment with life on the road.

“On the last tour [he did] of the US, Bon was in very bad shape,” says Thaler. “He was at a point where he’d drink till he passed out and he’d wake up and start drinking again. And the shows were suffering. The guys in the band were getting upset with him because he’d always been more of a leader, but his life had really started to take a bad turn. I think he was depressed. He had an Italian girlfriend named Silver [Smith], who he was living with in Sydney when I came down there in the winter of ’78, and a story he told me was that they had a little savings account and she just up and took off and cleaned out their bank account. He wasn’t quite right after that.”

Anthony O’Grady has a similar memory: “Bon was reeling from the effects of age, excess and pressure. But some say he’d written close to half the album that would become Back in Black. He’d started out thinking, ‘Thank God I’ve got a gig with young rock ’n’ rollers and I’m not with old farts like Fraternity any more. I’m 28, or whatever he was at that stage, and I’m hanging out with 17-year-old kids and getting 15-year-old girls and I’m so grateful for this second chance in life.’

“But by the time 1978 came around, and he was on his umpteenth tour of America, he was starting to really feel his age. From what Vince Lovegrove was telling me about Bon in 1980 when he met up with him in Los Angeles, the clock was winding down.”

He had started to call old friends out of the blue.

Recalls Thaler: “I know the last time I spoke with him it was strange. About a week before he died I got a call from him, and he was in England, and he never used to call me from England—I mean he’d call me when he got to the US; when he’d come to New York he’d come over and hang out at my apartment—but I got a call from him and he sounded like he was in good spirits. I said, ‘You’re finally going to the bank.’ He goes, ‘Well, I gotta tell you, mate, nothing’s changed for me. I’m still rubbin’ two nickels together.’”

A reading of the lyrics to “Back in Black” suggests it is not a memorial to Scott but a paean to money, a favorite Scott theme, and even references a Cadillac. The American car is first mentioned in “Rocker” off TNT, but more significantly on Powerage in “Down Payment Blues,” a song about being poor. “Back in Black” is its logical sequel: a song about being rich, of fortunes turning around. In his book Dirty Deeds, Mark Evans revealed Scott had wanted to record a solo album of Southern rock, of “Lynyrd Skynyrd kind of stuff, but really ballsy, something that swings.”

If indeed he’d written “Back in Black,” was it his fantasy of cashing in and perhaps even getting out?

Scott’s late mother, Isa, told Lovegrove in 2006: “He always said he was going to be a millionaire. I just wish he’d been alive to see it and enjoy it, you know? Almost every Christmas, Ron [Bon’s real name is Ronald] came home to visit. The last time we saw him was Christmas ’79, two months before he died. Ron told me he was working on the Back in Black album and that that was going to be it; that he was going to be a millionaire. I said, ‘Yeah, sure, Ron.’”

The line held by the Youngs has never deviated. As Angus told Guitar World in 1998: “The week he died, we had just worked out the music and he was going to come in and start writing lyrics … I wouldn’t say that he was disgruntled. He was itching to go … basically, the music had been finished before he died. The bulk of the tracks were the same.”

The credit on the album is final: “All songs written by Young, Young and Johnson.”

*   *   *

Lyrically, a better case can be made for Bon Scott’s involvement in “You Shook Me All Night Long.”

When he got chosen as AC/DC’s new singer Brian Johnson hadn’t even been to America, let alone toured it with the band, so why was he getting all hot and bothered by his memories of “American thighs?”

Johnson, by his own explanation, was fantasizing about what he hadn’t had.

In an interview with a Finnish website (no longer available online), he said: “We were in [The] Bahamas [recording Back in Black], and I had seen a couple of American girls. They were just so beautiful. They were blond, bronzed, tall … so I was just using my imagination; what I would do if I could. But Bon had done it all.”

He changed his tune slightly for VH1’s Ultimate Albums: “I’d seen them [American women] on the TV. And I’d always wanted to fuck one! They just looked fab. Everything pointed north on them.”

In the same interview Johnson speaks of being possessed by something unexplainable when he wrote the song in his room at Compass Point.

“I was just sitting working on a song and I was a little worried about it being up to the standard of AC/DC and was it good enough and who the hell am I to try to follow in the footsteps of this great poet. He was a great poet, was Bon Scott, not just a songwriter. And something happened to me and I don’t like to talk about it. But something definitely happened to me and that’s all I’m going to say about it. And, uh … er … it was good. It was a good thing that happened.”

The tale is expanded in the 2013 book Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal: “I don’t believe in spirits and that. But something happened to me that night in that room. Something passed through us and I felt great about it. I don’t give a fuck if people believe me or not, but something washed through me and went, ‘It’s all right, son, it’s all right,’ this kind of calm. I’d like to think it was Bon but I can’t because I’m too cynical and I don’t want people getting carried away. But something happened and I just started writing the song.”

Possessed by Scott’s ghost? Johnson’s a lovable figure but it stretches credulity.

More curiously, Malcolm Dome, a British AC/DC biographer, wrote in Classic Rock in 2005: “I can personally attest that Bon did indeed write some lyrics in preparation for the record, having seen a few sheets myself. This was just a couple of days prior to the man’s death, at a venue called The Music Machine in Camden, North London … one line sticks in my mind as being on one of those sheets: She told me to come but I was already there.”

The best line in “You Shook Me All Night Long,” if not the best line on the whole album.

It’s more than enough for Thaler.

“As a comrade in the band, as a good guy, someone that has the right temperament and disposition to fit into the band, Brian Johnson was a great choice,” he says. “As far as a singer, I thought he was a very strong choice that way. Where he lacked, I think, was that Bon Scott—to my mind, for the kind of music that they did—was a great lyricist. And I don’t care who tells me anything different: you can bet your life that Bon Scott wrote the lyrics to ‘You Shook Me All Night Long.’

“It’s Bon Scott’s lyrics all over the place. As you got further into [AC/DC’s career], by the time you got to For Those About to Rock the lyrics weren’t clever any more. They weren’t the tongue-in-cheek tough-guy lyrics like ‘Whole Lotta Rosie.’ Bon had a style. Brian couldn’t really match that. And by The Razors Edge you see that Brian’s not even part of the writing team any more.”

Mark Evans is not so sure.

“My idea about it is that there was this crossover of lyrics,” he says. “I’ll underline that I don’t know either way. But what I will say is that with Angus and Malcolm, they had a history of writing lyrics before Bon came along. If you go right back to ‘Can I Sit Next to You Girl’ and even ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Singer,’ that’s their lyrics. The lyrics of ‘Can I Sit Next to You Girl’ are great. People think that’s a real Bon-esque lyric. That’s actually Angus’s and Malcolm’s writing. ‘TNT’—Angus used to walk around reciting that; it used to be his catchphrase.

“To me, the lyrics on Back in Black, it’s not a big stretch for me to think that it’s Angus and Malcolm writing them. Because they wrote great lyrics; they came up with a lot of the titles.”

So what about Brian Johnson writing those lyrics?

“I dunno,” he says, fixing me in the eye. “Has he written much after that?”

*   *   *

The other eight songs, then?

There was the claim made by Anna Baba, Bon Scott’s Japanese girlfriend at the time of his death, that “Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution” was a title he’d been playing around with and, in the words of Clinton Walker, was “inspired by the time when the caretaker at Ashley Court [Scott’s apartment building in Westminster] complained about loud music late at night.”

In 2005, Walker told Australia’s Rolling Stone magazine: “There are trace elements of Scott all over the album; titles and couplets that, if he didn’t write, certainly do him proud.”

Consider the lyrics in “Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution” about taking a look inside a bedroom door and a girl looking “so good” lying on her bed. It’s a natural companion piece to Highway to Hell’s “Night Prowler,” with its lines about a girl lying naked on her bed and the protagonist slipping into the room. You can hear Scott singing “Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution” even if it’s another guy, Johnson, getting the words out.

“I think that’s where the confusion comes from,” says Evans. “People look at Bon’s lyrics and hear that really cheeky scallywag attitude. And ‘Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution’ really fits that premise. But it goes back to prove my point. People also connect ‘TNT’ and ‘Dirty Deeds’ to that Bon thing. But I know both were ideas from Angus, the actual lyric. He didn’t write the whole thing but TNT/I’m dynamite and the lyric Dirty deeds/Done dirt cheap were all Angus’s influence. So, for me, being inside the tent at that point, I do see it flowing on.”

Which would support what the Youngs have said about the song. Malcolm told VH1 in 2003 he and Angus “bopped it down in about 15 minutes” when they needed a tenth song to round off the album. Said Angus to Classic Rock in 2005: “The last track we completed was ‘Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution,’ which Malcolm and me actually wrote [at Compass Point] … we spent a few days writing it in between guitar overdubs and the other things we were doing on the record.” And Malcolm again: “The song was about London’s old Marquee Club when it was in Wardour Street. It was in a built-up area and there was this whole thing about noise pollution in the news, the whole environmental health thing. That’s where it came from.”

More recently, though, there was a startling allegation made on Sydney radio by Mark Gable that Scott wrote the lyrics not for just one or two songs on Back in Black but for the entire album.

“I did get this from the inside,” he tells me. “My understanding, from several sources of people who were with Alberts back in the day who were close to the band, is that even though Brian Johnson is credited with writing lyrics on Back in Black, Bon Scott’s estate gets one-third of the publishing royalties. This is becoming more common knowledge throughout the music industry.”

So not just the one song? The whole album?

“Apparently.”

Is that as far as you can elaborate?

“What I was told was that it was the whole album, yes.”

Even Isa Scott supported the Gable story in Walker’s 1994 book, Highway to Hell.

“They were going to hit the top this time,” she told Walker. “They called it Back in Black. They had to give it a name, you see, but Ron, I think, did all the words.”

Not convinced yet? Oddly, the 1980 vinyl edition put out by Alberts doesn’t even have a lyric sheet.

So if Ian Jeffery has the infamous/apocryphal notebooks, and he’s on the record as telling Wall that “a few lines” of Scott’s “are in there” on Back in Black, what songs are they?

“Tough one,” he says. “Can’t really remember.”

Right. An odd statement for someone who said in the same book that being sacked by the Youngs was the “darkest day of my life.”

With time, has that hurt eased at all? How does he regard the Youngs now? Does he stand by his words?

“Was and still is [the darkest day of my life]. I was giving them 100 percent as I always did. No, it has not eased. I still wish I was with them. I just feel really sad. They were my whole life. They say time is a healer; maybe so. But it does not take away the sadness I still feel every time I hear an AC/DC song. Especially Bon.”

*   *   *

Yet so much of the Back in Black conspiracy theory doesn’t wash.

Where Bon Scott’s lyrics were known for being naughty, sly and mischievous with accompanying melodies, in the words of John Swan, “narrated, tugged, pulled and almost spat out with venom,” Johnson’s lyrics are too frequently the opposite: obvious, graphic and crude. And so many of the songs on Back in Black are just that.

If Johnson was possessed by Scott’s spirit and managed to write the lyrics to “Back in Black,” “You Shook Me All Night Long,” “Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution” and “Hells Bells” off his own bat, then great—all power to him and any royalties that flowed his way. Because that creative eidolon conspicuously deserted him on “Shake a Leg” and “Shoot to Thrill.”

Outside those four standout tracks, too many of the other songs on Back in Black are steeped in a kind of juvenile chauvinism that Scott, a rogue but one who loved women, was careful not to allow to cross over into outright crassness. That, in all honesty, can’t really be said for “Givin’ the Dog a Bone.” (The original spelling in the title—“Given”—remains on the band’s website, though has been changed for some reissues.)

Anthony O’Grady remembers that his early interviews with the Youngs “tended to degenerate into smutty tales.” He spent some time with them on the road, where what he quaintly describes as “adventures of the day” were plentiful.

“They were very typically Scottish-Australian and blokish in the sense that they only had time for one sort of girl: and that was the groupie mold, the sort that didn’t mind being a possession and thrown around. They would accept groupies from other bands when they were touring in the country and in different cities and they would roll up one of the groupies or a couple of them in a carpet and give them to bands who were coming to Sydney.”

Phil Sutcliffe, who had spent time with AC/DC in 1976, wrote eloquently of the band’s view of women for Classic Rock in 2011.

“They stand for everything I disagree with about our chauvinist view of the woman’s role, yet they’re so totally honest, open and funny about it that I got carried away with liking them, and became aware again how life, for all the fine ideals we raise and cling to, insists on turning out like a seaside cartoon postcard. A belly laugh is often the sanest reaction. And that’s what AC/DC are into.”

David Mallet, who directed the second 1986 video for “You Shook Me All Night Long”—featuring a blonde bimbo in black leather astride a mechanical bull—played consciously on this “seaside cartoon postcard” humor.

“The same humor was in the lyrics and the delivery as was in the videos,” he says. “I just think the videos were an extension. You call a record Stiff Upper Lip, for instance, you can quite easily go away and make a sex-comedy video. When everybody else approaches sex as it’s sexy, we approached it as it’s funny. I think a very significant part of the ‘no bullshit’ thing [with AC/DC] is that if you look at some of the lyrics and some of the song titles, it’s pretty obvious that a comedy video made like that is suitable.

“You go right back to Mae West in the 1930s. Her humor was exactly the same as AC/DC’s humor: ‘Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?’ That was Mae West’s version of ‘You Shook Me All Night Long.’ It was a particular type of humor that was in vogue in the 1980s as indeed it was in the ’30s. Nowadays people would jump all over it and say it’s not correct or it’s not this or it’s not that. Normally those people have no sense of humor whatsoever.”

So what is AC/DC’s secret?

“It’s some sort of musical genius and a totally unique, and I’m glad to say very out of date, sense of humor.”

And “You Shook Me All Night Long” itself?

“It’s an obvious song, it’s an easy song, it’s an easy chord progression, and yet the way it’s played, the little breaks, the way that a bar is split up, not into four, but into about 16, is beyond any subtlety of any other rhythm section that I know. I do not understand it. I don’t understand how they are as good as they are.”

Manning also praises it for its simplicity: “So many other bands, even if they had been able to come up with that song and tried to record it, would have had a lot more ‘stuff’ on it from the beginning. It would have lost the power when everybody came in together.”

*   *   *

Phil Carson won’t have a bar of any conspiracy. He says the very notion that Johnson didn’t write the lyrics for “You Shook Me All Night Long” and indeed the whole album is preposterous tosh.

“All the lyrics on Back in Black were written by Brian, with a little gentle nudging by Mutt,” he says. “As a lyricist, Bon nailed the elements of rock ’n’ roll, and there was more than a little humor in his approach to writing. When Brian assumed that mantle, he carried on the tradition. Brian’s lyrics embodied the spirit of the band. His lyrics have balls and wit.

“I thought it was something of a disgrace when he was excluded from the writing in later years. He recently played me some new songs he had written. They were far superior than anything that appeared on the last AC/DC album.”

So why, when Johnson would appear to have the faculty to be able to knock together a song about an incident he didn’t even witness (1983’s “Bedlam in Belgium,” based on a fracas involving a brandished weapon that broke out onstage at a gig in Kontich near Antwerp in 1977, when overzealous and aggressive police tried to shut the band down for breaking a noise curfew), did Angus and Malcolm exclude him from the writing? Was any reason given?

In a 1990 interview with Kerrang! magazine reproduced in Howard Johnson’s Get Your Jumbo Jet Out of My Airport, Angus claims that he and Malcolm relieved Brian of his duties to help him through some personal issues and free him up to concentrate on giving his best performance. It would appear that the suggestion, made by Johnson himself, that he simply ran out of ideas for lyrics should be treated with some skepticism.

Carson has his own ideas but gives a cryptic, albeit heavy hint: “I have never discussed the thinking behind this, except to draw your attention to the fact that the people who write the songs get most of the money.”

Who wrote what? Who owns what? Who gets what? How did AC/DC manage to write four of their career-defining songs and the second-biggest selling album of all time in the space of a matter of weeks and without their single biggest influence, Bon Scott, yet write only one song approaching the same quality (“Thunderstruck”) in the following 33 years? No one inside the Youngs’ inner circle wants to talk about it—at least publicly—and why should they? Who can prove anything anyway? Does it really matter?

Yet again it comes back to Rashomon. One band. So many different versions of an unobtainable truth.