PREFACE

“Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution”

In January 2013 I found myself in a kilometer-long line outside the Museum of Modern Art in New York to see Edvard Munch’s 1893 painting The Scream. The line, remarkably orderly, stretched city blocks. It was a Friday night, free admission, and bitingly cold. Well below zero. Even with layers of clothing on, I had to stamp my feet to keep warm. But the discomfort was more than worth it. I was seeing The Scream. An iconic piece of art. Not something you see every day. Especially for free.

After about an hour I finally made it inside and went up to the fifth floor where all the heavyweights had been collected: Dalís, Modiglianis, Cézannes, Picassos, Van Goghs, Matisses, Monets, Klees. The blockbusters. And there, just 3 ft by 2 ½ ft, was The Scream, one of four versions Munch had made and which had recently been sold to a banker for $120 million at Sotheby’s. It was hard work getting anywhere near the painting. While some of the most notable artworks of history hung in nearby rooms unloved and ignored, The Scream was being mobbed.

The huddle around it was a hundred thick with locals and tourists, not absorbing it, not pondering its message, but photographing it with their iPhones to put up on Instagram or standing in front of it for happy snaps to load up on Facebook. I waited patiently to stand in front of it, but when I got my chance I was disappointed. The only thing that elevated what I superficially took to be a fairly rudimentary and not that interesting pastel work were the anguished figure’s famously haunted eyes. Never mind that in other rooms meters away there was much better art hanging on the walls and no one was standing in front of those to get their picture taken. This painting had just sold for $120 million. It was important. It was expected of me to be in total awe and then shuffle along. This was serious art.

I wanted to have it bore into my bones. To be swept away. To be moved. But I felt nothing. I left the building to disappear into the bustling streets of Midtown, untangled the headphones for my iPod and put on Back in Black, just $9.99 on iTunes. Even though by then I’d heard the album a thousand times, it took one simple riff by AC/DC to do what one of the most celebrated paintings of history could not.

Jerry Greenberg, president of Atlantic Records from 1974 to 1980, the executive who can take credit for overseeing the band’s rise to the top in America, felt exactly the same when we talked weeks later: “Buh, buh da da, buh da da—it’s absolutely incredible.” I had to pinch myself that the man who signed ABBA, Chic, Foreigner, Genesis and Roxy Music was singing AC/DC to me down the phone from Los Angeles.

The piousness of art, its inherent elitism and suffocating snobbishness is everything the Youngs—Angus, Malcolm and George—rail against but what these remarkable Scottish-Australian brothers have done is more than get lucky with a formula. What they’ve achieved with their music over the past 40 years through dedication, unwavering self-belief and a smattering of musical genius is no more and no less than art in its own right. But you don’t find this art displayed in museums. This isn’t art that was created to be bought and sold by moneyed families or hedge-fund managers. It’s art that doesn’t even want to be called art. It doesn’t need to be called art. It just is.

It’s this world-class talent combined with their astonishing humility that makes the self-effacing and fiercely private Youngs—three Hobbits of hard rock from a big family of eight: seven boys, one girl—so enduringly compelling.

The brothers have composed not only some of the most stirring rock music—if not music—of all time but amassed a body of work more diverse and creative than they are ever given credit for. Their impact on the history of rock and especially hard rock has been nothing short of immense. Remarkably, a fourth musical brother, Alex, who was a young man in 1963 when George, Malcolm and Angus left Cranhill, Glasgow, with their parents, William and Margaret, for Australia, stayed behind to eventually get signed as a songwriter by The Beatles’ Apple Publishing and saw his band, Grapefruit, come under the wings of John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

In fact, I would argue no set of brothers, not even the Gibbs of The Bee Gees or the Wilsons of The Beach Boys, has had such a profound impact on music and on popular culture around the world as the Youngs. Their songs have been covered by superstar acts ranging from Shania Twain and Norah Jones to Santana and Dropkick Murphys. Their music has been so penetrative that Australian palaeontologists named two species of ancient arthropod after them: Maldybulakia angusi and Maldybulakia malcolmi. “They are both diminutives,” explained Dr. Greg Edgecombe of the Australian Museum, “and are related and have gone and left the shores of Australia to conquer the world.”

Their tedious critics—and to this day there are many; they’ve never quite gone away, but eased off in recent years, having realized the more they complain, the more AC/DC makes fools of them—contend that all their songs sound the same. Some of them do. The Youngs don’t want to fiddle with what is clearly working for them. But those critics fail to understand a very important point. It’s their very lack of boundary pushing that is a form of boundary pushing in itself.

Mark Gable of The Choirboys, an Australian band given their start by George Young and best known for their hit “Run to Paradise,” gives the best description I’ve ever heard of what the Youngs manage to do in their music: “Before I wrote ‘Paradise’ I decided to use only three chords. This restriction or boundary, if you will, creates better art. If you’re allowed to do anything at all, invariably you will show your weaknesses. But if you work within the bounds of what you know best, its expansion seems to go on forever.”

That AC/DC doesn’t touch on different styles of music, one could argue, is a form of laziness. Then again, you could say it’s a form of brave creativity of its own. Not many musicians could work within such narrow music parameters yet come up with songs that sound new and fresh every time you hear them. But the Youngs do. Consistently. AC/DC never, ever sounds stale.

Says former Atco Records president Derek Shulman, probably best known for signing Bon Jovi and for reviving AC/DC’s flagging career in the mid 1980s: “I agree, 100 percent. They have no need to further push boundaries. They have set up their very own boundaries, to which no other band can come remotely close. They were and are leaders and have never been followers and this is something that 99.9 percent of other rock bands should realize and understand if they really want to become a legend, as AC/DC surely are as a band.”

*   *   *

The Youngs’ songs—they have written and recorded hundreds between them over close to half a century—have their own stories. Why have they endured and resonated with hundreds of millions of people and inculcated such fierce loyalty and outright fanaticism? AC/DC concerts are not just concerts. They are rallies held under a band logo that is as powerful as any flag. What has made “It’s a Long Way to the Top” a virtual national anthem in Australia? Why is “Thunderstruck” routinely played at NFL games in the United States and soccer matches in Europe? Why, above all other bands in the world, did a festival in Finland elect in 2006 to have AC/DC’s entire catalog performed live by 16 acts (including a military band) for 15 hours straight? What prompts cities—Madrid, Melbourne—to name lanes and streets after them? Why are there legions of Angus Young impostors on Facebook? Why is “Back in Black” frequently sampled (without permission) by hip-hop artists and mash-up DJs; used in network television, commercials and Hollywood films; licensed to gaming and sporting corporations; and played in helicopters and tanks on the battlefield? At the Battle of Fallujah in Iraq in 2004, American Marines blasted “Hells Bells” from giant speakers to drown out the call to arms coming from the city’s mosques.

What is it about AC/DC’s music that is so regenerative and restorative? That transmits that power to make us change the way we feel, alter our outlook, give us the strength we need to get through our darkest moments?

There’s even a tour operator in Port Lincoln, South Australia, who’s found that playing AC/DC to sharks attracts them like no other music. Matt Waller told Melbourne’s Herald Sun: “We know AC/DC’s music works best by trial and error … I’ve seen the sharks rub their faces on the cage where the sound is coming from, as if to feel it.”

The answers to these questions, whatever they are, strike at the heart of what makes the Youngs’ music exceptional.

*   *   *

And it all began with the brother who rarely shows his face in public.

George Young, who turned 68 in 2014, stopped playing on his own records with Flash and the Pan, another project with longtime writing and producing partner Harry Vanda, in 1992. He has kept his hand in with production, most recently helming AC/DC’s Stiff Upper Lip in 2000 to add to the music he co-produced for the band with Vanda between 1974 and 1978 and again in the late 1980s. Most famous as rhythm guitarist for The Easybeats, he was also co-producer with Vanda for Rose Tattoo and The Angels (aka Angel City), and co-wrote with Vanda songs such as The Easybeats’ “Friday on My Mind” and “Good Times,” Stevie Wright’s “Evie,” John Paul Young’s “Love Is in the Air” and Flash and the Pan’s “Hey St. Peter,” “Down Among the Dead Men,” “Walking in the Rain” (covered by Grace Jones) and “Ayla,” the latter memorably and erotically used for a dance scene in the Monica Bellucci movie How Much Do You Love Me?. The sight of Bellucci gyrating to it is not a memory easily erased.

“I keep many records at home and I try various pieces of music as I work on my films, which sometimes throws up surprises,” says the film’s director, Bertrand Blier. “I like ‘Ayla’ very much.”

George is the “sixth member” of AC/DC, the leader, the coach, the stand-in bass player, drummer, backup singer, mimic, percussionist, composer, business manager and svengali. AC/DC is as much his band as it is Angus’s and Malcolm’s.

Anthony O’Grady, Bon Scott’s friend and founding editor of the 1970s Australian music newspaper RAM, spent several days on the road with AC/DC throughout 1975–76. When we meet in Sydney’s Darlinghurst he’s wearing a newly minted replica of AC/DC’s first T-shirt, circa 1974, on which the band’s name had been daubed in white house paint.

“George used everything he’d learned—mostly to his detriment—from The Easybeats,” he says. “It’s one of those stories about, ‘You can be in a band that has an international hit and end up in crippling debt. This time is going to be different.’ And it was. He would like to have done it himself, I’m sure. But, by God, he certainly programmed Malcolm and Angus to do it without surrendering control to record companies, management or agencies.

“Don’t deviate. That’s what he drilled into Malcolm. Angus was the electricity and George and Malcolm were the power station. They directed the flow. And they were never distracted by musicianship. A number of times Malcolm has said to me, ‘Angus can play some really clever jazz stuff, but we don’t want him to play really clever jazz stuff.’”

As for George’s two younger brothers in AC/DC—Angus, lead guitarist, who turned 59 in 2014 and Malcolm, rhythm guitarist, who turned 61—not much needs to be said. They are so recognized, so adored all over the world that they are almost above introduction, having come up with some of the best songs and most memorable guitar riffs in rock. It’s impossible to separate them. They are, as they are with their guitars, utterly symbiotic while dedicated to very specific roles. It wasn’t always so. They started out trying to outgun each other, according to AC/DC’s original singer, Dave Evans.

“They always had a healthy rivalry between them on stage,” he says. “In the beginning both Malcolm and Angus played lead and the duels on stage were great to witness as they would go head to head and try to outdo each other. Angus was finally given the sole responsibility of the lead guitar and he relished it. The early songs especially have so much energy and that never diminishes.”

Indisputably, Angus is the star. The “atomic microbe,” as Albert Productions, or Alberts, AC/DC’s Australian record company, once described him in a print ad in the American music press. A diminutive talent so freakish and whose “crunchy, humbucker-driven sound” is so distinctive Australian Guitar magazine anointed him the best guitar player Australia has ever produced.

As a showman he is almost without peer, one of the most enduring live attractions in rock ’n’ roll. David Lewis, music writer for the late British music newspaper Sounds, evocatively described Angus’s “frenzied schoolboy lunacy as he traverses the stage, making Chuck Berry’s duckwalk look like a paraplegic’s hobble and oozing sweat, snot and slime like some grotesque human sponge being savagely squeezed by the intensity of his own guitar playing.”

Or as Bernard McGovern said in the London newspaper The Daily Express in 1976: “Angus is not a schoolkid but a crazy Scots rocker. His onstage antics … include throwing tantrums, smashing things, tearing up school jotters, smoking, ripping bits off his school uniform and tossing them into the audience, falling down and skinning his knees, sticking pins through voodoo effigies of teachers, and playing a very effective rock ’n’ roll guitar while lying on his back shrieking and kicking.”

Lisa Tanner, a former Atlantic Records staff photographer who contributed some exceptional AC/DC images from the 1970s and ’80s to this book, remembers Angus putting so much into his performances that he would literally vomit.

“After or during the first song of the set he would come offstage and hang his head in a trash can and puke while still playing guitar,” she says. “The first time I saw him do it I was with [Atlantic Records promotion executive] Perry Cooper and I was like, ‘Is he okay?’ Perry replied, ‘Yeah, he does that every show.’”

Even today, though quietened down by age and creaking joints, in televised interviews there remains something almost child-like about Angus. His dedication to practicing and playing his guitar has been the obsessive habit of a lifetime, according to O’Grady: “He was the precocious kid. He could express himself on guitar far better than he could express himself through schoolwork or language, and he was encouraged to do so. [It was always a case of:] ‘Don’t bother Angus; just let him play.’”

Says David Mallet, who has directed AC/DC’s videos and concerts since 1986: “Pink Floyd is about a spectacle. Each song, each number in concert has a different type of spectacle. AC/DC is about the same spectacle every time. Called Angus Young.”

But it’s the middle brother who is the king of AC/DC. And he’s not a benevolent one. Mark Evans, the band’s bass player from 1975 to 1977, described Malcolm rather unflatteringly in his autobiography, Dirty Deeds: My Life Inside/Outside of AC/DC, as “the driven one … the planner, the schemer, the ‘behind the scenes guy,’ ruthless and astute.”

A description not far off an early Atlantic Records press release but for an important rider: “Not only is he a great guitarist and songwriter, but also a person with vision—he is the planner in AC/DC. He is also the quiet one, deep and intensely aware. This, coupled with his good looks, makes him an extremely popular member of AC/DC.”

Curiously, none of the other band members had their physical appearance appraised.

Malcolm is the brother who calls all the shots, who directs the band and drives the rhythm. Even when private issues have forced him to stop playing, AC/DC remains his band.

“Malcolm and Angus were brought up in an environment where George was a massive pop and rock star,” explains Evans, now a little thinner on top in his 58th year but still fit and as handsome as he ever was, over a coffee in Sydney’s Annandale. If anyone had the good looks in AC/DC it was Evans. “It’s not a big jump for them to think we’ll put a band together and take it overseas. It wasn’t like a dream, ‘I want to go and play for Glasgow Rangers’ or something. The dream was inside his house. It was a tangible thing. Malcolm picked up a lot from George. George and Malcolm are very similar in a lot of ways. Although I do believe Malcolm is the most driven of the lot of them.

“One of the things that’s amazed me over the years is that Angus and Malcolm, not so much George, are portrayed as not being all that sharp—maybe because it’s their persona. But, man. I haven’t met too many guys in my life that have been sharper than Malcolm.”

Where his younger brother duckwalks, moons, spins and does whatever the hell he pleases, Malcolm, stiff and twitchy, immovable as a menhir, can be relied upon to stay anchored down the back of the stage in front of the Marshall stack.

“Live, they put on a great show but it’s not flash,” says their longtime engineer, Mike Fraser. “It’s amazing for me. You sit there and watch Malcolm play. He’s actually leading that whole band from standing there beside the drums. Everyone watches him for the cutoffs. ‘Let’s do another round.’ He’s got all these little nods. Little flicks of his hand. Everybody’s got their eyes on him. Even Angus, as he’s flying around, flipping around backward. He’s watching Mal for everything. It’s quite awesome to watch.”

John Swan, a fellow Scot, venerable rock figure in Australia, one-time singer with Bon Scott’s old band Fraternity and to this day a close confidant of the Young family, agrees: “Everybody looks at Angus as being the man, but for me, Malcolm’s the man. Take ‘Live Wire.’ He’ll play the chords in that song and the dynamics he uses all the way through are really quite brilliant. And he’ll change one little pattern. Rhythm players play it and then play that same pattern over. He’ll change that one thing that’s so subtle you have to be a fan of Malcolm’s playing to be able to get into what he’s actually done there. It’s that one little piece that’s different that makes it rock just that bit more and makes the musician who’s listening to it love it a bit more. He and Keith Richards are the best rhythm players in the world.”

ZZ Top and Led Zeppelin engineer Terry Manning, co-owner with Chris Blackwell of Compass Point Studios in The Bahamas, where Back in Black was recorded, goes further, contending that the only comparable rhythm players are Ritchie Blackmore of Deep Purple and blues legend Steve Cropper, “but when you look at just distilling the essence of rhythm guitar I think Malcolm has it better than anybody.”

Together, though, they don’t need to be compared to anyone. The light strings of Angus’s slim-necked Gibson SG and the heavy-gauge strings of Malcolm’s Gretsch Firebird manage the seemingly paradoxical feat of being a single force yet remain remarkably distinct. No other pair does what they do as well as they do. They are inextricable.

So much so that Joe Matera, an Australian rock guitarist and internationally published guitar journalist for magazines such as Classic Rock and Guitar & Bass, says they would cease to be effective if separated.

“It is a chemistry where one needs the other and vice-versa for it to have such an explosive sonic effect,” he argues. “It’s such a strong combination that without the other, the result would be most non-effective.”

Georg Dolivo, lead singer of California rockers Rhino Bucket, the one band among a rash of imitators that has probably got closest to the sound of Powerage-era AC/DC and which even had ex-AC/DC drummer Simon Wright play with them for a time, tells me: “The interplay between the guitars and the bass and drums is second to none. Every note counts. Angus and Malcolm both play off each other so well that it almost sounds like one massive wall of power.”

Joel O’Keeffe, frontman and lead guitarist for Airbourne, a group that live is about as close to AC/DC at the Glasgow Apollo in 1978 as it is possible to get, explains the AC/DC sound as a process of reduction and austerity: “It’s as much what the Youngs don’t do as what they do. It’s those precision-timed spaces in the riff, like the small space after the first three A chords in ‘Highway to Hell,’ or the ‘ANGUS!’ chant space in ‘Whole Lotta Rosie’ that makes the hairs stand on edge. And when they’re both in it’s not just two guitars, it’s guitars to the power of.”

“The Young brothers are two of the best guitar players I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with,” says Fraser. “Not only are they talented, they are very hard workers as well. In the studio they know exactly how to play dynamically to make the song rock. This is often hard to do in a studio, as the atmosphere can sometimes be clinical and uninspiring. It is tough to play in the studio with the intensity you would when playing live, but to make a great record that’s exactly what you have to do. Malcolm and Angus have that ability down to a tee. It’s truly remarkable to witness.”

*   *   *

Scores of bands, with varying degrees of success, have tried to replicate part of the sound and “no bullshit” ethos of AC/DC: Guns N’ Roses, The Cult, Airbourne, The Answer, Mötley Crüe, Krokus, Kix, The Four Horsemen, The Poor, Dynamite, Hardbone, Heaven, ’77, Starfighters, Accept, Rhino Bucket, Jet, the hard-rockin’ and French aristocrat-dressin’ The Upper Crust and more. Many indulge in pastiche. Then there are the straight ripoffs. Listen to “Dr. Feelgood” by Mötley Crüe against AC/DC’s “Night of the Long Knives” off For Those About to Rock (We Salute You). Or David Lee Roth’s “Just Like Paradise” against “Breaking the Rules” off the same album. Or The Cult’s “Wild Flower” against “Rock ’n’ Roll Singer” off TNT.

Not that AC/DC didn’t consciously or subconsciously pinch from others when it suited them earlier in their career. ZZ Top’s “Jesus Just Left Chicago” is all over “Ride On” and Them’s “Gloria” (covered by Bon Scott with his first band, The Spektors, in 1965) forms the basis for “Jailbreak,” both songs off the original Australian release of Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap. Illinois band Head East’s middling 1975 hit “Never Been Any Reason,” written by guitarist Mike Somerville, also informs—if that’s a polite way to put it—1980’s “You Shook Me All Night Long.” Intriguingly, AC/DC supported Head East for one show at the Riverside Theater in Milwaukee in August 1977.

But they still make everything they do their own. As Tony Platt, mixing engineer of Highway to Hell, recording engineer of Back in Black and co-producer of Flick of the Switch told me from London: “You wouldn’t believe how many AC/DC-sounding bands came along after Back in Black was successful, wanting me to work with them. When someone says, ‘Can you get me Angus Young’s guitar sound?’ the only answer I can give is, ‘Yeah, of course I can, but first of all we’re going to need a vintage Marshall cabinet, a vintage Marshall head, a Gibson SG and, of course, don’t forget we’ll need Angus.’

“You do get quite a lot of bands, especially in the rock genre, where the idea of being a rock musician is a little bit more important than getting it right. Whereas these guys were, ‘Let’s get this right, let’s make sure it’s the best that it can be and if we get to be rock stars afterward so much the better.’”

Fraser, who’s engineered Aerosmith, Metallica, Van Halen, The Cult and Airbourne, agrees the task of matching up to the Youngs is futile: “While there are bands that certainly may have borrowed elements from AC/DC’s sound, I would say AC/DC’s powerful simplicity would be difficult to replicate. A lot of bands will double their guitar parts to try to make them sound big and fat. The end result, as good as it may be, will be a different sound to AC/DC.”

Terry Manning, who shaped the sound of Rhino Bucket and The Angels, knows all too well the danger of too much hero worship. He was offered the chance to produce what became the Who Made Who sessions (recorded at Compass Point) by AC/DC’s then managers, Steve Barnett and Stewart Young, but due to a scheduling clash with Fastway at Abbey Road could not commit.

“I was forced to turn that down. I will always regret that,” he says. “No one has ever completely duplicated the AC/DC ethos. Nor should they. A good artist can certainly borrow elements, or be even heavily influenced, but somewhere along the line they must make it their own, put their own personal style and stamp on the music. I know with both Rhino Bucket and The Angels I kept this in mind at all times: never clone, but do not hesitate to accept influence. And always help the artist to be the best of themselves that they can be at that moment.”

Manning has never worked with AC/DC but they’ve been a boon to his business and the economy of The Bahamas. Compass Point was booked solid for years by all sorts of rock bands hoping some Back in Black magic would rub off on them.

“How can it possibly hurt to have what will end up being the biggest selling album of all time recorded under your banner? It had to inspire people: Anthrax recorded at Compass Point, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest.”

*   *   *

There’s a good reason why a band that has sold over 200 million records yet slowed it down only once or twice over a 40-year period became the biggest in the world while others that looked like they might claim the mantle—Guns N’ Roses chief among them, whom the late Danny Sugerman, The Doors’ former manager, praised in his eccentric biography, Appetite for Destruction: The Days of Guns N’ Roses, for “their devotion to the ecstatic omnipotent state of rocking” and in conjuring “the raging sound of Dionysus resurfacing”—fell away into artistic redundancy and ongoing acrimony.

The “Gunners,” led by Axl Rose, had a lot of similar qualities to AC/DC: authenticity, vision, gang mentality, a sound pretty much their own that wasn’t going to be fucked with by anyone and an almost feral hostility to the world and outsiders. They covered “Whole Lotta Rosie”—astonishingly well—in their prime. They played “Back in Black” over the PA in some of their shows. But they didn’t have the juice in the tank to last the distance. AC/DC didn’t allow the partying, drugs, sex and money to affect the music.

Matt Sorum of Guns N’ Roses and later The Cult and Velvet Revolver believes AC/DC has something special “that starts with the Young brothers’ classic riffs and below-the-waist grooves … they know when to play and when not to.”

“Less is more with AC/DC,” he says. “Always supporting the song is the message. The power is in the simplicity and it is subliminal in tone. Not much distortion on the guitars. The low end of the bass and groove make it swing. Each member has a job to do which makes that work perfectly. It’s that old expression of ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.’ Working-class boogie rock ’n’ roll at its best. Guys dig it and girls love to dance to it. Hearing great bands go back to their roots is always refreshing. I wish more great rock bands stuck to their instinct and weren’t wavered by trends.”

This coming from a man who played all those repetitive fills on “November Rain” (one of Rose’s ideas, according to Sorum). He should know. Guns N’ Roses’ detour into pompous balladry was really the beginning of the end for the most exciting rock band since AC/DC. Apart from the egregious miscalculation of “Love Song” in 1975, AC/DC has never done an out-and-out ballad. They just come up with flat-out rock songs anchored in feel, melody and groove. A perfect alchemy—like AC/DC’s other holy trinity of guitar, drum and bass—that anyone can understand and to which we all respond by rocking, a state Sugerman cannily describes as an “impulse every bit as instinctual as a child putting his finger in the fan.”

“I think playing in The Cult was the closest I came to playing an AC/DC style,” continues Sorum. “Songs like ‘Wild Flower’ and ‘Lil’ Devil’ I would always think of Phil Rudd in my approach. Guns N’ Roses and Velvet Revolver always looked to all the great bands as influences, AC/DC at the top of the list. But at the same time we were trying to do our own thing.”

Rob Riley, the Falstaff of Australian rock and a man Mark Evans anoints as Australia’s greatest living guitarist (no small praise considering he played in concert and in the studio with Angus and Malcolm), is an avowed fan of the Youngs: “Most people can understand AC/DC. It’s not fucking complicated. It’s people friendly. You don’t have to be a fucking fantastic musician to get your head around it. It just rocks. And they were and still are the exponents of rock. It makes me tap my foot and bang my head.”

Says Stevie Young, the Youngs’ nephew and the only man at time of writing who has ever taken Malcolm’s place on stage: “They’re honest about what they do. That’s why they’re a great band.”

*   *   *

But that is still not enough for some people.

The critics, especially in the United States, long ago would have preferred these rough-looking, guitar-slinging homunculi crawled back under the Gorbals rock from whence they’d sprung.

Robert Hilburn is one. The Johnny Cash biographer and rock writer for the Los Angeles Times from 1970 to 2005 once cut them viciously: “Someone ought to pull the plug on AC/DC.” But when contacted for this book he shows some remorse.

“The review was a live show and I must have been disappointed by it,” he says. “I felt the band was slipping or something—because I wasn’t an anti-AC/DC critic. I had written approvingly of them before and have them—in my mental list of bands—on the positive side, though they were in no way on my top shelf, which was reserved for bands that had more literary sensibilities and uplifting messages: The Band, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks, U2, Nirvana, The Replacements, Rage Against the Machine, Nine Inch Nails, REM, The White Stripes and Arcade Fire.

“Every artist or band that I’d call truly great in rock history has pushed boundaries because the artist and/or band should reflect life’s experience, and life changes as time goes by. The music should reflect those changes. Their curiosity as musicians, for instance, should lead to opening new doors—look what The Beatles and U2 did in that sense: The Beatles going from ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ to Sgt. Pepper’s, U2 going from The Joshua Tree to Achtung Baby. Similarly, the lyrics and themes should change to reflect new ideas and emotions.

“AC/DC deserves credit, most certainly, for not simply recycling its music; it didn’t just play the same record or song over and over again, like lots of big commercial forces. But I think the group’s history would have been better served if they moved from their early energy and fun to something more substantial … as it is, they are a band you think of fondly, but don’t hold in awe—a band of its time, so to speak, rather than a band of the ages.”

Dave Evans concurs with Hilburn. He claims he’s never owned an AC/DC record since splitting with the band—and is perhaps well entitled to have completely turned his back on them, given the treatment he received when he was sacked in 1974 and the disparaging comments made about him since then by the Youngs. The fact is, though, he has a healthy career out of his association with the band and plays it up for all it is worth.

“They have kept to the original and unmistakable AC/DC simple sound and it’s amazing that it has been so popular for so long,” he says. “I like music to give me different feels and messages even though the band will still have its own style. It’s like rap, which is the same-old, same-old but is highly popular, and hip-hop, which all sounds the same to me and is also huge. I don’t understand it. Being an avid Beatles fan, what I loved about them was that they kept evolving and exploring music and feels and took the whole world for a fantastic musical ride with them and influenced so many bands and their audiences too with new and exciting sounds without losing The Beatles sound. Whatever it is, AC/DC is the most popular rock band in the world today.”

In 1976, the year a repackaged High Voltage featuring the killer chugalong single “It’s a Long Way to the Top” hit American record stores, Rolling Stone’s Billy Altman slagged off AC/DC as “Australian gross-out champions” who had “nothing to say musically (two guitars, bass and drums all goose-stepping together in mindless three-chord formations)” and a singer, Scott, who “spits out his vocals with a truly annoying aggression which, I suppose, is the only way to do it when all you seem to care about is being a star so that you can get laid every night. And that, friends, comprises the sum total of themes discussed on this record. Stupidity bothers me. Calculated stupidity offends me.”

Altman, still a music journalist but now also a teacher in the Humanities Department of the School of Visual Arts in New York, doesn’t back down when I ask him if he thinks he was too tough on the Australian band.

“I didn’t think I was being tough,” he says. “Just doing my job. And in the context of 1976, that is exactly how they struck me. So, yes, I’d certainly stick by what I wrote—at the time.” He then proffers a review he wrote of Stiff Upper Lip for MTV/VH1’s website in 2000 as an example of coming to the party. “It’s all a matter of perspective, yes?”

Once feral against AC/DC, the American music press has come to begrudgingly accept that this band won’t go away and started to tolerate its existence, even given praise to albums that really aren’t a patch on the product they mercilessly slagged in the 1970s and early ’80s. Damn the good stuff. Praise the crap: Stiff Upper Lip is one example. Black Ice another.

Altman’s new review was hardly a music critic’s mea culpa, though he’d managed to detect that Angus could play guitar a bit. A degree of contempt for AC/DC is still there, but it’s disguised through caveman metaphor (“pointy little arrested-development heads”) and intellectual ridicule (“recalcitrant yokels”).

What was once “calculated stupidity,” Altman now recasts as “organic rock … as in two-guitars-bass-drums, verse-chorus-verse-chorus-solo-verse-chorus-chorus, screaming banshee-vocals, stoopid lyrics, riffs-from-Stonehenge rock.” AC/DC, he posits, “can now probably lay claim to the title of longest playing broken record in the entire history of rock. All their songs sound the same—yes!—and what a damn good song it’s been.”

The same begrudging charity didn’t extend to “It’s a Long Way to the Top,” one of the greatest rock songs of all time, when it mattered. Not nearly enough, way too late.

Like most critics, Altman and, to a lesser degree, Hilburn just don’t recognize the cleverness of AC/DC.

It’s a shame that Angus never cut a jazz or blues record, sure. But AC/DC is not in the music business for the purpose of pushing boundaries, even though that’s what they do so well by not giving in to trends and fashion. It’s a primal thing. Catchy hooks and boogie rhythms are essential for primal music. But primal doesn’t sit well with critics.

Clive Bennett in The Times used the very same word in a review of one of AC/DC’s shows at the Hammersmith Odeon in late 1976: “My objections are to their music, not their words, which simply express without inhibitions what most of us have discussed innumerable times with equal frankness in private. Music of any sort must surely require more from performers than just the capacity to mindlessly bash their instruments into oblivion. It is in this primal state that AC/DC exist.”

So. The. Fuck. What.

Says Tony Platt: “If you manage to strike the seam of that, the last thing you want to do is go messing it up or covering it up or confusing it by dressing it up in any different way. You’ve got to keep returning to that really raw, primal core. The critics are not really understanding the essence of AC/DC; what’s at the core of the music.”

Mike Fraser also shares that opinion.

“As long as I have known the band, they have always played their music as they wanted to do and are never worried about what critics think. As Angus once said to me: ‘We play music that we like and want to play. If the fans like it and want to buy it, that’s just a bonus.’ So I think it is very important to the boys to do work in a vein they love. In all of the records they’ve done, they have never done a song trying to keep up to an era or fad. No keyboards, no disco beats, no horn sections. When you buy an AC/DC record you know what you’re getting and I agree with your argument: this is really them pushing a boundary. And I think only AC/DC can pull it off because they never get boring to listen to. Who could get bored of the passion they play with?”

Their hundreds of millions of fans don’t, as Angus once pointed out.

“We’ve got the basic thing kids want. They want to rock and that’s it. They want to be a part of the band as a mass. When you hit a guitar chord, a lot of the kids in the audience are hitting it with you. They’re so much into the band they’re going through all the motions with you. If you can get the mass to react as a whole, then that’s the ideal thing. That’s what a lot of bands lack, and why the critics are wrong.”

Says John Swan: “I don’t think AC/DC are capable of changing their format because they have no desire to. It’s a work in progress. As long as my arse points toward the floor, AC/DC will be AC/DC and they will never be anything else.”

It’s really as simple as that.

*   *   *

One man who understands what AC/DC are about, Sounds journalist and later band biographer Phil Sutcliffe, wrote in 1976: “The rhythms hit your heart like a trip-hammer … the two Youngs’ music is like a forge in a black night, beating heat and energy together into something almost beautiful it’s so strong.”

There’s an exceptional passage in Mark Evans’s Dirty Deeds, to this day the only autobiography written by a member of AC/DC, which perfectly conjures the palpable, totally unique energy of the band. They’d arrived in London in 1976 after packing pubs in Sydney and hadn’t played for a month. The five members—Angus Young, Malcolm Young, Mark Evans, Bon Scott and Phil Rudd—were busting to play and landed a booking at the Red Cow in Hammersmith. A free gig in a tiny pub in front of maybe 30 punters, soon to be blown away.

“We opened with ‘Live Wire,’” Evans remembers. “My bass intro drifted in the air, Mal’s ominous guitar chords joined in, Phil’s hi-hat cymbals tapped away and then the song exploded when Angus and the drums absolutely fucking erupted. I felt like I was lifted off the ground, it was that powerful. It just sounded so much like AC/DC. That may seem a ridiculous thing to say, but we hadn’t played a gig for ages and we were ready to make a statement. There was that great feeling of power; not the chaotic, noisy, out-of-control power that is very common in bands, but the AC/DC brand of power. Loud, clean, deep, menacing and full of rhythm. We were back and firing and Bon hadn’t even opened his trap yet.”

Evans was lifted off the ground. That’s what the music of AC/DC is supposed to do—and he was playing it.

Says Barry Diament, who mastered a suite of their albums for compact disc: “I think it is precisely in the relative simplicity of the music that Malcolm and Angus achieved the power of their music. I’d use the word ‘primitive,’ not in any pejorative sense but as a positive attribute, describing the rawness I hear in their music. It is an ‘in the gut’ experience the listener can feel immediately.”

*   *   *

There’s nothing wrong in what AC/DC does or with the music they make. They’ve just been victims of lazy journalism and, at a base level, class prejudice. The music of the Youngs, and more generally, rock ’n’ roll, deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as any great painting, book or example of architecture, because it is a form of art—which I would define as any craft elevated to another plane because of skill, creativity, talent and imagination—that makes you feel alive. That it is considered lowbrow, beneath serious appreciation, because so many of AC/DC’s devotees get around in black T-shirts, drink cheap beer and buy their CDs at Walmart, is contemptuous bullshit. No other act on the planet has brought as much good music into stadiums, arenas, bars, cars, truck stops, nightclubs, strip clubs, bedrooms, living rooms and sports fields than AC/DC.

Says Phil Jamieson of Grinspoon, who performed on the remake of the Vanda & Young song “Evie” in 2004 to raise funds for victims of the Boxing Day tsunami: “The Youngs are tenacious. They don’t lie down. Among the great hits, the great songs, it’s their ability to just get up without any sort of embellishment, plastic surgery, strobe lights, smoke machines—they don’t need any of that. They just need four amplifiers, a voice and a drum kit. That’s what makes me adore them. They don’t play the backing tape. This is a true rock ’n’ roll band. Nothing really beats it, in my opinion, when you witness something that powerful. That’s what it does for me. It makes every guy with a guitar amp and a drummer and a mate believe maybe they can do it. It’s not defined by people that go to music conservatoriums and can read sheet music; it’s for everyone.”

“As a rock producer you’re looking for the human reaction,” says Mark Opitz, engineer on Let There Be Rock and Powerage. “The emotional reaction. The connection. Lyrics are incredibly important but melody and rhythm, that’s the secret. It makes you dance. It’s a release of energy. It keeps you going. The tempo’s perfect for your heartbeat in most cases. It doesn’t push you too far, not like thrash. It’s got intensity. It’s got that fucking ‘heart feel’ rhythm. And by dance I don’t mean dancing. I mean moving. Stamping your foot like an African. Just moving side to side. Nodding your head. That’s ‘guy dancing.’ That’s testosterone being put out. When you add all that together that’s what happens from it. What is the chemical reaction in the brain that adds it all up? I’m not quite sure. But I know what the result is. Melody and rhythm.”

Tony Platt agrees with the thrust of Opitz’s hypothesis but makes an important observation: AC/DC’s music is also steeped in humor, joy and light.

“There’s a lot to be said for this notion that it’s the resonances of our own body. It’s something that gets the endorphins going. It’s the same as drinking a nice glass of wine or going and doing exercise. It gets right to the core of you and lifts you. AC/DC’s music is not depressing music. It’s fun. It doesn’t take itself too seriously. You take, for instance, Iron Maiden. One of the things I’ve always found quite bizarre about Iron Maiden is how seriously they take themselves, for starters. It’s very difficult to stop laughing some of the time. Their fans take it really, really deadly seriously as well.

“And then there are a lot of those kind of darker heavy-metal bands. You look at how many of those darker heavy-metal bands have had accusations that they’ve been the catalyst that’s caused some poor young adolescent to end his life, and there have been lots and lots of circumstances like that. There is music that has this darkness at its heart. AC/DC’s music doesn’t have that darkness at its heart. It doesn’t take itself too seriously but, by the same token, it’s going to make you jump about a bit.”

There is some credit to that argument, but it has holes. No one could ever claim AC/DC advocated violence, but their disingenuous explanation in the wake of the Richard Ramirez “Night Stalker” murders in the mid 1980s that “Night Prowler” off Highway to Hell was just about a bloke sneaking into his girlfriend’s bedroom in the middle of the night convinced very few people. As Joe Bonomo writes in Highway to Hell, his excellent book-form essay on the album, “Bon Scott’s more treacherous imagery pushes the song into regrettably mean places. I’m not sure that the band can have it both ways.” Ramirez, a fan of the band whose name has unfortunately come to be associated with the song, died of natural causes in June 2013 while awaiting execution.

But what Terry Manning tells me cuts to the secret of AC/DC’s success and is a testament to the intelligence and brilliance of the Young brothers: their capacity to edit themselves.

“I think that somehow, whether they know it at the top of their brains or not, they innately know what just the basic, most simple rhythm of humanity is. It’s something gut level, primitive almost. It goes right to the human condition. Basic fight-or-flight emotion. They somehow tap right into that. It never gets too fast. So many bands are too fast, too full, they try to do too much. I don’t ever hear AC/DC try to do too much. They just do what’s necessary. And that’s such an amazing talent that is so hard to find and so overlooked.

“To me it’s like a tom roll or a guitar solo. If you had the toms playing a roll through the whole song, they don’t mean anything. If you have a guitar solo from beginning to end it doesn’t mean anything. It becomes garbage, unlistenable. But if you have the toms come in with a loud, simple roll at the very right spot it just lifts everything. It excites you. If the solo comes in only in the middle or the end of the spot that it’s really needed it lifts everything up; it just takes it to another level. So you have to learn the ability to put the embellishments in the right place. And AC/DC are the masters at doing that.”

When the band played its first Bristol concert in 1976, at Colston Hall, even the venue’s owners were dismayed by just how much AC/DC’s music had an unstoppable effect on its patrons.

“The management were rather perturbed to find a normally passive audience leaping out of their seats,” wrote a snippy local reviewer.

*   *   *

Bon Scott never got the fame and riches he was due while he was alive, but the Youngs have achieved more financially and in terms of celebrity than even they would ever have dared to imagine and perhaps even wanted. As far as your standard rock-star narrative goes, their success has been counterintuitive. They’re by most reasonable measures unattractive, short, eccentric and highly combustible and good taste has been known to frequently desert them: for some reason they have approved or been behind some of the worst album-cover designs in the history of music (Fly on the Wall, Flick of the Switch, the original Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap). For so many reasons they shouldn’t be as big as they are. But they’re going to get bigger, even after they’ve stopped playing music.

It’s almost a contradiction of their enormous drive to make it that they are private, almost obsessively so. One could make an argument it’s a form of aggression born of inferiority complex because of their stature, modest background and lack of formal education; the Youngs spent a lot of time in their early days fighting among themselves and with others and telling anyone within earshot to fuck off. In the public realm, only a few photos exist of all three of them together; one of those is from 1978’s Powerage sessions by Australian record-company executive Jon O’Rourke, at the time a music journalist who’d been invited into the Youngs’ private realm by Alberts’ house drummer Ray Arnott. A number of O’Rourke’s photos are published for the first time in this book. The most ubiquitous picture of the three, by Philip Morris in 1976 and the cover image for The Youngs, was taken during the Dirty Deeds sessions.

“I didn’t realize at the time the significance of it,” says Morris. “I haven’t seen any photos that have got them together that close. It was hard to get.”

Four decades later, nothing much has changed. They are frustratingly inaccessible to anyone outside their super-tight circle of trust.

Unlike the relatively amiable Gibbs of The Bee Gees (only one of whom remains alive), the Youngs have a reputation for being brusque and as short with their temper as they are in their stature. George, who’s been characterized as “very volatile” by his own music partner, Harry Vanda, and “a genius with the extreme character that goes with that” by Mark Gable, is a recluse who rarely speaks to the media. So reclusive that for years an Australian man was able to impersonate him and swindle gullible concert promoters and investors. But he remains active in the affairs of AC/DC. One anonymous insider described his work to me as “the equivalent of being the chairman of the board of whatever network of structures is in place to maximize the revenues to the band and the Young family … he has an extremely canny business brain.”

“George is definitely a recluse. Not a recluse from everything, but a recluse from the past,” says Mark Opitz. “He’s a recluse from things he doesn’t need to be involved with any more or that aren’t interesting to him. Before Pete Wells from Rose Tattoo died in 2006, they had a concert for him at the Enmore Theatre in Sydney, and George was in the third row, standing down the front by himself. Came out of nowhere and disappeared just as quickly. I wouldn’t say he’d be a recluse from anything that’s interesting to him because he’s got too big a brain and values his life too much.”

Gable’s first encounter with George lasted just about as long as the great man’s appearance at “the Enmore.”

“When I first met George I was in awe of him; I had idolized him for years,” he says. “Even though he was short in stature he was a giant creatively. As I got to know George I realized there was a dichotomy: unbelievably talented with amazing business acumen on one hand and yet there was this other side. There’s more to him than meets the eye. It’s something that I only understand now that I’m older.

“I remember going to the Bondi Lifesaver either in late 1978 or ’79 and a very young Sam Horsburgh [the Youngs’ nephew] came up to me and said, ‘My uncle George is at the back; come up and say hello.’ I trotted up to the back of the room to find George at a table by himself holding what looked like a glass of scotch. At this time I was a complete teetotaller, so alcohol did not impress me at all. It wasn’t so much that George had a glass of scotch in his hand; it was that he seemed to have maybe 20 in his guts. As I approached he lifted both his right hand and the glass in recognition of me. As soon as he had half-lifted his hand, it and his upper body collapsed forward onto the table.”

Reclusive or with 20 scotches in his guts, he remains a pivotal figure in the direction of AC/DC, according to Opitz.

“They’re brothers. The older brother is the older brother and always shall be. Particularly when you get a close-knit family of Scots. They’re like Italians. Family is everything. When you’re struggling in Glasgow and your father’s working down the mine you have a fucking shitload of respect. The women work hard at home, cleaning or doing other things, and the kids do it tough. Running around in the streets. The brawls. These guys came out here for a fresh break and they walked into fucking sunshine, thinking, ‘Can you believe this is here? Can you believe this? And all these fucking fat Aussies aren’t doing anything about it because they’re so used to it. Fuck that.’ Just like the Italians and the Greeks who got out here and went, ‘Fuck. I can’t believe it. Let’s go.’ It’s a hard choice to take in life to follow your dream. But that was something they did because they came from nothing. And when you come from nothing you want to go to somewhere.

“I can remember walking into the A&R offices of Atlantic Records in New York, at that time the biggest record company in the world with the Stones and whatever else on its roster, and talking to the head of A&R and I said, ‘How big are AC/DC to you?’ and he said, ‘Who do you think pays the fucking rent for the Rockefeller Plaza?’”

*   *   *

As for George’s younger brothers, their aversion to any form of public exposition outside what they can dictate is legendary.

Clinton Walker, who wrote Highway to Hell: The Life and Death of AC/DC Legend Bon Scott and got no cooperation from the Youngs, was damning: “A closed shop, uniformly suspicious, paranoid almost, possessed of the virtual opposite of Bon’s generosity, prone to sullenness. Just as nobody can find a bad word for Bon, few of the people who have had dealings with the Youngs can find a good word for them … Angus and Malcolm had this incredible tunnel vision where no one else counted … insularity bordering on paranoia. Malcolm and Angus were not blessed with many social skills.”

Evans was scarcely more charitable in Dirty Deeds: “Mal and Angus were very guarded guys, almost to the point of suspicion … there was a coldness about them that I hadn’t experienced before. It did have me wondering about them; matter of fact, still does.” Most of the time, though, they were “morose, grumpy, sullen and generally not too much fun to be around.”

So what kept Evans looking so happy all the time? There’s scarcely a photo from those halcyon days of the band where he isn’t smiling or having a lark with Angus or Malcolm.

“That was one side of them,” he says. “They could actually be a lot of fun. There was a sense of humor around that band. While we were all very serious about it, for God’s sake: you’re playing in a band with some fucker up the front dressed as a schoolboy. We’re not trying to be Pink Floyd here. There was a certain attitude—a lightheartedness—to the band when Bon was in it, owing to his lyrics. There were a lot of fun times in AC/DC and to be around was a lot of fun. But by the same token there were darker times too.

“It was just a normal relationship. Being in a rock ’n’ roll band on the road playing with that intensity is never going to be a bowl of cherries. I think in all great bands there’s a fair amount of internal angst. The Stones. The Who. Aerosmith. Metallica. There’s a friction inside the band that becomes believable.”

But in his dealings with the brothers, Atlantic Records president Jerry Greenberg didn’t find them difficult, instead finding them “kind of, like, shy.”

Jay-Z’s and Justin Timberlake’s engineer Jimmy Douglass, who got his start as Atlantic’s in-house engineer, remembers them being “cordial and responsive … freaking cool human beings.”

It’s a softer side of their personality few people get the privilege of seeing.

Opitz recounts a story of Malcolm delivering “four or five quick jabs to the head” of a much taller concert promoter over a dispute in Detroit in the late 1970s.

“They were tough customers, the Youngs,” he says. “They knew what to expect and weren’t afraid of it. You didn’t cross Malcolm. Great guy. No question about it. He’s a strong-minded fellow. He’s like George. He’s got that determination—I can move mountains if I so wish—without the bullshit attached to it, because they’re working-class Gorbals boys, so they’ve got that innate toughness that gets born into you if you’re Glaswegian.”

That aside, though, Opitz also describes the Youngs as a regular family unit: “I remember going to a Christmas party at the family’s place in Burwood. Playing table tennis. Having a few beers out in the sun. A barbecue. Normal as bloody anything. Just great. I remember thinking, ‘How well has this migrant family done that’s just popped up, stuck together, stuck it out and they’ve had success in ways they couldn’t have imagined?’ And this was in the ’70s.”

Says John Swan: “Margaret [the Youngs’ sister] was like a big sister to all of us. She would have a big pot of soup on and she’d always make sure you had a feed and a bed to sleep in. They were much more family-oriented than most other musicians were. Most other musicians would do that if it were you and your girlfriend, but they wouldn’t do that if it were just you. [The Youngs] took everybody in.

“That’s why you’ll find not just for AC/DC but for the Youngs they certainly lived the Glaswegian style of family communication. Everybody lives together. If it’s your mate, it’s our mate. They wouldn’t bring an idiot to the house. They’d bring someone who was a fellow Glaswegian or a fellow Scot or somebody who had a problem that Margaret could help with.”

They’ve also maintained, at least outwardly, no traces of ostentatiousness, despite fabulous, almost undreamed-of wealth. When getting around they’re sticklers for the Glasgow-style “gallus walk”—head down, hands in pockets, huddling up, a protective instinct—and it’s not a rare thing wherever they are in the world to see them down at the local shops clutching a packet of smokes and wearing cheap clothes as if they’re just average Joes.

Anthony O’Grady and Angels guitarist John Brewster were members of the private Concord Golf Club in Sydney’s inner west. Several times they linked up with Malcolm and George for a social round. During one such outing, George told O’Grady AC/DC had sold “over 10 million albums” with Back in Black and were now the biggest band in the world.

“Soon after George had said that, Malcolm, in all seriousness, said to me, ‘This is a really good golf club, isn’t it? How much do you pay to belong to this in a year?’ I forget what the fees were then. I said something like $1500. And he went, ‘Aw, you must be rich! I belong to Massey Park [a nearby public course].’ And I just looked at him and he was a man that could buy half of Florida and all the golf courses on it. They were very aware of being observed not to be putting on the Ritz. Very, very, very aware.”

Swan relates a similar story about Angus, who was living in Kangaroo Point in Sydney’s southern suburbs. He was driving around in a Mercedes that had plenty of miles on the odometer and Swan, living in neighboring Sylvania, had bought a new Jaguar. Swan asked Angus why he was driving something so “fucking old” when he could afford anything he liked.

“He said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with that car. What are you talking about? It’s a perfectly good car.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but you’re fucking rich now.’ He said, ‘That’s got nothing to do with it. It’s a good car. I like it.’ They don’t need to drive around showing everybody what they’ve got. Same goes with their shoes. They used to take the piss out of me for wearing flashy runners because they wore Dunlops. Seventeen bucks a pair. And I’d walk in with a $200 pair of fucking shoes on. And they’d go, ‘Ah! Look! Somebody’s in the money!’”

“They’re really good people,” says Opitz, “but they’re very private people.”

*   *   *

For those readers seeking a conventional biography, the Youngs’ life stories have been dealt with (or at least attempted to be dealt with) adequately in books such as Walker’s Highway to Hell, Evans’s Dirty Deeds, Murray Engleheart’s AC/DC, Maximum Rock & Roll: The Ultimate Story of the World’s Greatest Rock Band, John Tait’s Vanda & Young: Inside Australia’s Hit Factory, Phil Sutcliffe’s AC/DC, High-Voltage Rock ’n’ Roll: The Ultimate Illustrated History, Susan Masino’s Let There Be Rock: The Story of AC/DC and Mick Wall’s AC/DC: Hell Ain’t a Bad Place to Be. There’s a bunch more of them, in different languages, of varying quality, mostly straightforward chronologies or illustrated guides with little or no critical examination (some verging on journalistic fellatio), even less actually written about the music and why it works the way it does, and most containing some major howlers.

For instance, in the Wall book, there’s a photo of an old man in a schoolboy uniform hanging out with AC/DC in London in 1976. It’s from Dick Barnatt’s well-known sequence of photos in which Angus Young is drinking milk straight from a bottle. The mystery man is captioned as being Phil Carson, one of the most important figures in the AC/DC story: the man who signed them. So it’s a crucial detail to get right, especially when he’s interviewed for the book. But the man in the photo is in fact Ken Evans, an Australian who was program director for Radio Luxembourg and formerly of pirate radio stations Radio Caroline and Radio Atlanta. He’d recorded an interview with AC/DC to help promote their music and they were there to help celebrate his birthday. Still kicking around in his late 80s but in declining health, he lives in Mona Vale on Sydney’s northern beaches. He remembers little of the day but confirms it was “the one encounter” with the band he had.

In a brief email exchange, I remarked to Stevie Young, who filled in on rhythm guitar for the American leg of 1988’s Blow Up Your Video tour, when Malcolm stood down to get on top of his drinking, that there was a lot of misinformation out there in books and fan sites about the band. I fell victim to it myself, thinking Stevie’s father was Alex Young because of what I’d read. He replied: “There is. But I like it … my dad was Stevie Young, their eldest brother.” Stevie Sr. was the first of eight siblings in the Young family, born in 1933. Alex’s son, he says, is called Alex and lives in Hamburg.

There you go. Like father, like son. Hopefully I have avoided making a few mistakes of my own.

So familiar details don’t need to be rehashed here; retelling the already-told story is not what this book is about. Bigger is not necessarily better. I didn’t want to relentlessly plunder old music magazines for secondhand quotes to fill pages or go over old ground with people who have been interviewed already ad nauseam or those who were sick of talking and would only open up under sufferance. Nothing is more dull, and so many books written about AC/DC have been just that, even the mercifully shorter ones such as Why AC/DC Matters by Anthony Bozza. The American writer says of Australia that the band was “raised there and imbued with the idiosyncratic cultural confluence that makes that island unique,” ventures “theirs is a wild-eyed cry of unruly youths from a country founded by convicts,” that “AC/DC came from the trenches” and that the band “have not reinvented the wheel—they’ve spun it like a motherfucker.”

You get the drift. Even a slimline 160 pages is hard going with that amount of fanboy guff. The well-intentioned Bozza later admitted he’d done the book in the hope he’d be anointed as AC/DC’s official biographer. It reads as such: verging on hagiographical. All the same, the title of the book deserved answering. Bozza can be commended for having a crack.

The thing is, and it’s a point that needs to be strongly made, not everything AC/DC has done has been good. In fact, some of it has been downright crummy (from individual songs such as “Hail Caesar,” “Danger,” “The Furor,” “Mistress for Christmas,” “Caught With Your Pants Down” and “Safe in New York City” to forgettable albums such as Fly on the Wall, Blow Up Your Video and Ballbreaker). Some of it has been crass (“Let Me Put My Love Into You,” “Cover You in Oil,” “Sink the Pink”). But even when the lyrics are bad or in dubious taste the music always manages to sound good—the riffs never let you down.

For a group that Bon Scott once described as an “album band” it’s ironic that of AC/DC’s 15 originally released, non-compilation studio albums at time of writing, only four (Let There Be Rock, Powerage, Highway to Hell and Back in Black) are truly essential. Their last great album was recorded in 1980.

As the Australian music critic Robert Forster writes in his book The 10 Rules of Rock and Roll: “The reduction that goes into an AC/DC song, and the tight palette of influences the band has always worked with, gave the early work precision and power, but three decades later it acts less as a liberator and more as a noose.”

Tony Platt agrees they’ve got themselves stuck in a musical corner of sorts from which there can be no escape: “Their biggest strength, the simplicity and directness of their music, is also their biggest weakness because there’s only so much you can do with that. Where do you go? If you’re David Bowie you can reinvent yourself on a regular basis and nobody bats an eyelid. But if AC/DC reinvented themselves, they would lose their fans overnight. You’d be hearing the outrage from millions of miles away.”

That said, the Youngs might not be reinventing themselves with each new AC/DC record, but that has never been the point of what they do. It’s sticking to a basic palette.

Phil Carson, who signed them to Atlantic Records in 1975, says: “I guess that the Youngs had a realization that rock music should be a driving force that shouldn’t be overburdened with complexity. AC/DC has a unique sound, and the space within it was created by the Young brothers as musicians and producers.”

Says Mike Fraser: “Everybody kinda says, ‘Well, they never change.’ Yeah, but that’s hard to do. [They’ll do] B, G, C; three, four chords in a song. They play it in such a way that it’s simple but it grabs you and really sounds powerful. I find with a lot of other bands—Van Halen, Metallica, for instance—they’re different types of bands in that they create a soundscape. A very nice, complex picture. Great songs. But with AC/DC, it’s red, white, black and that’s it. I think your brain absorbs it better.”

Sure, it’s possible. But then there is the view that trying to divine the secret of what they do is simply pointless.

“I’ve never heard a band so tight in my whole life,” says David Mallet. “Never anywhere. They play and they are tight and the subtleties of rhythm in those riffs and the way they are put together, you could analyze them from now for the rest of your life and you’d never know the way the riffs are played. It’s certainly beyond what 99.9 percent of the population can begin to understand.”

But, hell, it’s worth a shot.

*   *   *

As The Scream was to the history of modern art—redolent of what had come before it, but just a bit heavier—those AC/DC albums released between 1977 and 1980 were to hard rock. No other band has come close to what AC/DC achieved during that four-year period and nobody has been able to replicate the fury of the Youngs’ guitars. When they come in together—whoomp—it’s like a spark igniting a bushfire.

“I don’t think there’s been a better guitar duo ever,” says Mark Evans.

Perhaps only Guns N’ Roses or Nirvana came close to matching AC/DC during those years in blowing apart the rock paradigm. But AC/DC are still in their own league. They delivered four absolute belters in a row and even in the lean period that followed released the occasional knockout track, like 1990’s “Thunderstruck,” not to mention a slew of unappreciated gems off “lesser” albums: “Spellbound,” “Nervous Shakedown,” “Bedlam in Belgium,” “Who Made Who,” “Satellite Blues” and “All Screwed Up,” among others.

Rob Riley, who should have conquered America with Rose Tattoo but instead inspired Guns N’ Roses to do what his band of illustrated bad boys could not, says he has “nothing but respect and fucking love and admiration for the boys from Acca Dacca.”

“Most people I know reckon, ‘Oh, but that fucking album sounds the same as the fucking last and they sound the same all the time’ and I go, ‘No, I don’t think that at all.’ I think they’re fantastic just for the simple fact that they can come up with that fresh sound. I think they’re great. I love ‘Riff Raff,’ ‘Thunderstruck,’ ‘Ride On,’ a shitload of stuff. Great stories. Like ‘It’s a Long Way to the Top.’”

Even one of their most strident critics, Radio Birdman guitarist Deniz Tek, pays them respect: “I think AC/DC’s strength was singlemindedness and unwavering adherence to a signature sound that millions of fans loved. They stayed true to it, within a narrow operating range. Most bands veer off course after the first few recordings, usually not in a good way. AC/DC never went off the track.

“It’s not my taste in music but their incredible success and worldwide impact cannot be overstated. I appreciate their sticking to their vision and doing what they do best, giving their fans all over the planet exactly what they want over an amazingly long period of time. They certainly are great at it. They obviously worked very hard for their success and they clearly deserve it. They are one of the few handful of bands that have put Australia on the map as a center of uncompromising hard rock.”

George brought a similar lack of compromise to shaping his brothers’ musical and financial destiny. He made it plain very early on that AC/DC should not fall into the same trap The Easybeats did by stretching themselves too thin into different styles of songwriting, muddying their identity and confusing the message of their music.

“Malcolm and Angus were born to be in that band,” says Mark Evans. “A lot of it has to go back to being exposed at a very young age to what George went through. Without The Easybeats I don’t think you’d have AC/DC.”

As Doug Thaler, AC/DC’s first American booking agent, who went on to manage Mötley Crüe and Bon Jovi, puts it succinctly: “The Easybeats were a world-class group but they didn’t have world-class results.”

George, the mastermind, made sure his little brothers were never going to fail in that regard and was happy to get them horribly tangled up in Forster’s “noose” in the process.

It was a price all three were willing to pay for the riches that would follow.

*   *   *

The Youngs wouldn’t cooperate with Clinton Walker for his pioneering book about Bon Scott, just as they haven’t for the shelf of AC/DC books that followed and I set out writing this one fully expecting not to be given any help at all. It seems anybody who’s wanted more out of them than a few far-from-enlightening soundbites for magazine or TV interviews and goes the official route to contact them gets short shrift from their minders, who are notoriously protective.

“You’re setting yourself a hard task, as you know,” Walker warned me before I’d even started.

Emails were exchanged between myself and Fifa Riccobono and Sam Horsburgh, the trio’s gatekeepers in Australia. Riccobono poured cold water on my chances from the outset but at least asked me to send through some written questions for George Young and Harry Vanda. But it didn’t get me anywhere. Nor did an approach to Vanda’s new studio, Flashpoint Music. I even walked past Vanda on Sydney’s Finger Wharf one day but as he was sitting down to lunch with his family and it being a public holiday, I thought it best to leave him alone.

“I have sent this through several times but it hasn’t been picked up,” Riccobono wrote back to me after a long hiatus. “I’m sorry I can’t be of help … I told you in the beginning that it would be a long shot.”

Horsburgh, the point man for Angus Young and Malcolm Young at Alberts, replied: “I will forward your request explaining that you are approaching [your book] from a different angle but they—Angus, Malcolm and George—usually decline book requests.”

Nothing eventuated. I made a follow-up inquiry and got no response. How to explain the shutout?

“Once AC/DC became a printing press, they really closed ranks around the family,” is how one insider explains Alberts’ almost paranoid protectiveness of the band.

In New York, I emailed then called the office of their manager, Alvin Handwerker, and explained what I was doing. Again, there was no response.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Musicians, even the best of the lot, aren’t always terribly articulate about what it is they are doing in their work. The Youngs, though fantastically astute operators and smart men, even if Angus and Malcolm were once described by their former British booking agent and now One Direction manager Richard Griffiths as “thick,” aren’t renowned for their erudition. They like a bit of blue language and got to the top amid a whirl of stewed tea, groupie sex, bar fights and a few too many long drags on cigarettes. As Melbourne’s The Age said in its review of the Engleheart biography of AC/DC, when not enclosed in their “famous dome of silence” Angus and Malcolm deal in “foul-mouthed, grammatically garbled quotes” and are “hardly the most eloquent commentators for this legend.”

“AC/DC remain as guarded and uncooperative as ever, leaving their loathed biographers to join the dots with old magazine interviews and whichever witnesses dare talk.”

Conversely, though, there is the argument that music doesn’t need explaining. It’s a fair call yet one I have tried to resist. But writing this book was made doubly difficult by the fact that many people still within or that used to have a place in the AC/DC universe outside of the Youngs are either dead, declined interviews, didn’t respond or eluded contact, didn’t feel they had anything worthwhile to contribute or won’t talk to anyone. Formal approaches were made to interview the three non-Young members of AC/DC but I didn’t get anywhere through Handwerker. Trying the backdoor approach, I got a typed letter personally presented to Brian Johnson through a friend in Barcelona. It had to be printed out or he wouldn’t read it. Again, no dice. As my disappointed mate had warned me beforehand, “If he doesn’t do it, it will be the Young issue.”

The Young issue. It became abundantly clear to me that not everybody who’s worked with the Youngs wants to talk about them, for a variety of reasons. Even members of their own band.

As for the Switzerland-based Robert John “Mutt” Lange, the great thinker/obsessive behind the megaplatinum success of Foreigner, AC/DC, Def Leppard, Shania Twain, The Cars and Maroon 5, it was futile to approach him, according to two of his friends, Terry Manning and Tony Platt. Like Guus Hiddink, the Dutch soccer manager, Lange subscribes to a very particular style of dealing with the media: say nothing, ratchet up your mystique and increase your asking price. It’s paid dividends. He’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Yet the producer of Highway to Hell, Back in Black and For Those About to Rock is the elephant in the room of the Youngs’ story, the one they’d probably prefer you didn’t know yet the one who was fundamental to the development of their sound and their fortunes. The fact is AC/DC did develop a sound. They weren’t static from the outset.

“It won’t happen; I can tell you that for sure,” laughed Manning when I told him I wanted to interview Lange. But I went ahead anyway and emailed Manning some questions to forward on.

A few weeks later, Manning got in touch.

“I know for absolute certain he will not answer the first three, but perhaps I might get a comment on the next to last one; maybe the last one as well. Will let you know when and if.”

The first three were about working in the studio with AC/DC. Months rolled by. Nothing came back.

“As I suspected,” Manning eventually informed me, “he preferred not to answer questions in a public way.”

*   *   *

Fortunately, though, I spoke at length with five men who between them have engineered AC/DC’s best records, worked with them at close quarters and know their sound perhaps better than anyone else alive outside Mutt Lange and George Young himself: Mark Opitz (Let There Be Rock, Powerage), Tony Platt (Highway to Hell, Back in Black, Flick of the Switch, Let There Be Rock: The Movie—Live in Paris), Jimmy Douglass (Live from the Atlantic Studios), David Thoener (For Those About to Rock) and Mike Fraser (The Razors Edge, Ballbreaker, Stiff Upper Lip, Black Ice, Backtracks, Family Jewels, Iron Man 2). Their humor, technical insight, knowledge of music and generosity to me during what often felt like a quixotic project won’t be forgotten.

Other people involved with the project proved to be illuminating or vital: Easybeats icons Stevie Wright and Gordon “Snowy” Fleet; rock producers Terry Manning, Shel Talmy, Kim Fowley and Ray Singer; AC/DC mastering engineer Barry Diament; AC/DC’s first vocalist, Dave Evans; AC/DC, Marcus Hook Roll Band and Stevie Wright session drummer John Proud; AC/DC and Stevie Wright session drummer Tony Currenti; AC/DC bassist Mark Evans; AC/DC managers David Krebs, Steve Leber, Ian Jeffery, Michael Browning, Cedric Kushner and Stewart Young; Australian rock musicians Rob Riley, Bernard Fanning, Joel O’Keeffe, Tim Gaze, Chris Masuak, Phil Jamieson, Allan Fryer, John Swan, Mark Gable, Joe Matera, Deniz Tek and the late Mandawuy Yunupingu; rock journalists Billy Altman, Robert Hilburn and Anthony O’Grady; rock photographers Lisa Tanner, Dick Barnatt and Philip Morris; rock promoters Sidney Drashin, Jack Orbin and Mark Pope; Guns N’ Roses, The Cult and Velvet Revolver drummer Matt Sorum; Back Street Crawler vocalist Terry Slesser; John Wheeler of Hayseed Dixie; Dropkick Murphys frontman and bassist Ken Casey; Rhino Bucket lead singer and guitarist Georg Dolivo; record-company executives Phil Carson, Chris Gilbey, Jon O’Rourke and Derek Shulman; and, most of all, the indefatigable Jerry Greenberg: at one point in the 1970s arguably the most powerful man in music by virtue of his position as president of Atlantic Records.

Greenberg in particular was exceedingly generous with his time and his black book and, even after several phone calls from Sydney and New York, went out of his way to meet me in the bar of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles. Greenberg now promotes and tours tribute bands of old Atlantic acts such as ABBA, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones. It’s a growth industry. Through him I got privileged access to a part of the AC/DC story that had hitherto been locked to outsiders and almost completely untold. I am in his debt.

To my knowledge this is the first book that has got both Leber and Krebs of the extinct but powerful Contemporary Communications Corporation (aka “Leber-Krebs”) together on the record about AC/DC; the first to get a comment from Jake Berry, AC/DC’s production manager in 1980, about the events immediately after Bon Scott’s death; as well as the first with the input of Cedric Kushner, Jerry Greenberg and a cast of important Atlantic staffers: Steve Leeds, Larry Yasgar, Nick Maria, David Glew, Jim Delehant, Mario Medious and Judy Libow. For different perspectives, I also talked to decorated American war hero Mike Durant, whose incredible rescue in Somalia in 1993 (with a bit of help from AC/DC) formed part of the story for the film Black Hawk Down, and Australian war photographer Ashley Gilbertson, who was on the ground with US forces in 2004 when “Hells Bells” ripped through the Fallujah night to drown out Iraqi insurgents.

There are so many gaps and holes in the AC/DC story and in what has been written about them previously that even though I purposely set out not wanting to write a biography there were biographical elements that could not be avoided and which deserved exploration. There were details that needed to be filled in, mistakes that needed to be corrected, accepted stories that demanded being pointed out as flat-out wrong or required challenging, as well as unsung figures who were well overdue some credit and recognition: radio identities Holger Brockmann, Bill Bartlett and Tony Berardini; designer Gerard Huerta (the man who came up with AC/DC’s logo but has never received a dollar in royalties from merchandise featuring his graphic masterpiece); late Atlantic Records senior vice-president Michael Klenfner (whose upset over his sacking was revealed to me generously by his widow, Carol Klenfner); neglected session drummers Proud and Currenti; and Doug Thaler, who it would appear from his own and various testimonies worked hard behind the scenes to connect the Youngs with Mutt Lange, a working relationship that would change the course of rock history and bring untold wealth to everybody involved with Back in Black.

*   *   *

The Atlantic Records side of the story, AC/DC’s early American adventure, was of particular fascination. New York–headquartered Atlantic gets a bum rap in a lot of accounts and from the Youngs themselves but it’s an undeniable fact that Atlantic made the band. They also made plenty of mistakes. But without the label and the unrecognized efforts of people inside it AC/DC might well have ended up like Rose Tattoo: a band that could have been and should have been but never quite got there.

This, in my opinion, is what has been missing from previous tellings of the AC/DC story or at least different parts of that story. The Youngs’ success was not achieved in isolation. Their music and their collective drive weren’t enough just on their own. It required the beneficence, vision and separate talent of a whole host of forgotten and unheralded people who saw something in them when others didn’t. This faith in and loyalty to AC/DC hasn’t always been returned.

When I met David Krebs at a diner in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, he was wearing a navy-blue scarf, navy-blue sportscoat and New York Yankees cap. At his peak, Krebs had managed Scorpions, AC/DC, Ted Nugent, Aerosmith and Def Leppard. Apprehensive about being interviewed and wary of the voice recorder on the table between us (he asked me to turn it off after about 20 minutes), he compared managing a rock band to Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, in which four separate witnesses to a rape and murder give accounts that contradict each other. No matter the kind of book I was going to write, he said, there were always going to be people who saw the same event in a completely different way. There was no truth, no definitive AC/DC story, there were many different versions, and I shouldn’t try.

Days later, with Back in Black on my iPod, I went for a jog in Central Park. Hopelessly underdressed for the weather—it had begun to snow—I cut back down East 96th Street to seek refuge in the subway and ran into Krebs again, walking down the street. He was dumbstruck: “You and I could be living on the same block in New York for 20 years and never see each other. How’s that?”

Krebs hadn’t seen the Youngs for three decades.

*   *   *

For all of AC/DC’s Aussie pub posturing, their resistance to backup singers, symphony orchestras, samples and greatest hits albums, their anthems against greed (“Money Made” off Black Ice and “Moneytalks,” an insipid song from The Razors Edge that broke into the top 30 in the Billboard Hot 100, a singular feat for a group that has never seen itself as a “singles band”), the reality is that they own and control one of the most commercial and money-geared brands in the world, right up there with Nike and Coca-Cola.

They do exclusive deals with Walmart. They license their music to game companies, iOS apps and sports franchises. They remaster old records with new packaging—and truth be told don’t sound any better for it. But who cares when they can outsell The Beatles’ back catalog? On November 19, 2012, they finally released their albums on iTunes (plus two iTunes-only box sets: The Collection and The Complete Collection), something they previously refused to do—just like they’d said no to Live Aid in 1985 and big charity gigs in general but turned out for the SARS benefit concert in Toronto in 2003. It was a change of heart with a big payoff. “Highway to Hell” and “Back in Black” entered the British Top 40 singles charts a week later, more than three decades after their original release dates.

The move surprised many, failed to impress others. Anthony O’Grady, for instance, will only listen to them on vinyl.

“AC/DC were made for vinyl. Because vinyl has the bass,” he says, with a wistful look in his eye. “They were a band that used to go into stores and rearrange the racks so that their albums were up the front.”

There will be a time soon, no doubt, when they will give in to hip-hop artists and license samples of their music. It brings the catalog back. It introduces a whole new demographic and market to their music. Public Enemy, Beastie Boys and other acts have tried to use AC/DC’s music officially but been knocked back. Jimmy Douglass, for one, is puzzled by their continued holding out against the inevitable.

“Without a doubt sampling, when it’s done right, is the ultimate flattery,” he says. “It’s a new form of art. That’s all it is.”

They use huge stage sets with bells, cannons, Angus statues and inflatable fat ladies. They repackage greatest hits albums in the guise of box sets and soundtracks. Paramount Pictures used 15 of their songs on a compilation for Iron Man 2.

But O’Grady argues that they haven’t sold out: “They’re always very aware of context. So they would sell their songs to Iron Man because there’s a shared context between Iron Man’s audience and their audience. They wouldn’t sell them for any movie that would use them in an ironic context, for example. If Woody Allen had have come up to them and asked, I think they wouldn’t even answer his letters.”

*   *   *

Go to eBay, type in “AC/DC” and you’re confronted with branded merchandise ranging from light-up red devil horns to baby bibs. AC/DC have their own range of wines, both whites and reds. They have their own self-branded German beer, each can of which contains an “individual code that fans can use to buy attractive devotionalia or bid for prizes.” (The company behind the beer also released an accompanying “High Voltage” energy drink.) They have their own line of Converse Chuck Taylors, their own Monopoly board game and their own high-end headphones. Their most recent tour grossed nearly $450 million, making it the second-highest earning concert series in history, behind only The Rolling Stones. In 2011, they were the first musicians to ever make Australian BRW magazine’s Rich 200 list. In 2013, in the same magazine, they were adjudged the 48th richest family in Australia, with a combined fortune for the previous year of $255 million—the only entertainers on the list.

For brothers who pride themselves on a “no bullshit” philosophy, the reality of what the Youngs do and the mountains of money they make does jar. But like the way ZZ Top and Aerosmith reinvented themselves from loose, raw, “rough and ready” beginnings in the 1970s to become commercial behemoths in subsequent decades, Tony Platt sees AC/DC’s transformation into an arena band as a sign of their character.

“That’s the strength of the guys,” he says. “They reacted to a developing music market. As the audiences’ penchant for bigger, more bombastic, and so on and so forth grew, as good artists, as perceptive artists, they developed to take full advantage of that.”

Phil Carson, who’s put his neck on the line for them several times over his career, doesn’t begrudge their success for a moment, even if it has come at the expense of some relationships: “AC/DC have found a real connection with their fans, and for the Young brothers it has always been paramount that the fans come first. That’s why they kept ticket prices low while all the other bands of their ilk were charging more and more. Musically, they found a formula that worked, and they funneled their creative energy into staying within those parameters. They kept going even through the difficult periods of Flick of the Switch and Fly on the Wall and emerged at the end of it stronger and better.”

*   *   *

But left a trail of blood in their wake.

Witness the way the Youngs have discarded some band members, producers, engineers, managers and anyone else who rubbed them up the wrong way for whatever reason: Dave Evans, Mark Evans, Mutt Lange, Phil Rudd (kicked out for a decade after an almighty blue with Malcolm over a personal matter during the sessions for Flick of the Switch), Chris Slade, Michael Browning, Ian Jeffery, Peter Mensch, Steve Leber, David Krebs and a bunch of others, including a small army of forgotten drummers and bass players from their early days in Australia. The names Colin Burgess, Peter Clack, Larry Van Kriedt, Ron Carpenter, Paul Matters, Russell Coleman, Rob Bailey, Noel Taylor and the late Neil Smith only function in the AC/DC story as index entries or band trivia. When Smith died in April 2013, he didn’t even rate a mention on AC/DC’s official website (29 million “likes” on Facebook at time of writing—and counting).

The body count was not always to the brothers’ advantage. The losses of Mensch, AC/DC’s manager at the height of their fame, and Lange, the best producer the band ever worked with, were for many years catastrophic commercially and artistically.

It strikes me that AC/DC bang on about how much they do it for their fans because the fans, unlike some band members, managers and journalists, don’t give lip. They don’t say no. They don’t ask tough questions. They swallow the hype. Buy the merchandise. Don’t challenge the Youngs’ authority. AC/DC, anecdotally, is as welcoming to outsiders as a Mongol’s yurt. As Mick Wall says in his book, “the heart of the AC/DC story” is that they are “more of a clan than a band.” Yet when an American filmmaker and AC/DC superfan called Kurt Squiers decided to make an affectionate film called Beyond the Thunder, about how their music connected with fans, they didn’t want any part of it. There is an inherent contradiction at play here. At time of writing, the documentary, some years in the making, hasn’t been released. Squiers and his partner, Gregg Ferguson, are hoping to go into a partnership with AC/DC’s management and get the band’s blessing for a worldwide distribution deal.

Dave Evans paints a picture of insularity: “The Youngs were always tight knit and I remember George telling me that when he was with The Easybeats they were millionaires on paper but ended up broke because of being ripped off by management. The brothers closed ranks and none of us were privy to the meetings they often had which did not go down well with the rest of us.”

Anthony O’Grady, who’d been to singalongs at the Youngs’ family home in Burwood, what he called “a genuine, ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’ sort of situation,” also shares this view: “I think the band was representative of the Young clan. I don’t think there’s any doubt at all that AC/DC are the frontline troops of the Young clan and that Malcolm is the general of the band and Angus is the strike weapon of the band and everything else fits around that.”

He saw this at close hand, being asked to leave the house at one point and sit in a car outside with a passed-out Bon Scott to “listen to the pelting rain on the roof” while band business was being discussed inside with their then manager, Michael Browning. O’Grady sat the sozzled Scott upright and patted him on the back a few times when AC/DC’s legendary frontman sounded as if he were choking. (If only he’d been with him in that Renault 5 in South London in 1980.)

But this is a family steeped in the rules of the Glasgow mean streets, in Protestant/Catholic rivalries. A band that started out playing roughneck pubs in front of crowds of “Sharpies”; that right from the beginning attracted the street element and a working-class audience.

John Swan, who was living in a migrant hostel in Adelaide when he met George and saw The Easybeats when they came through town, explains the Glasgow mentality: “Mine is the same philosophy as theirs: if you put it on me or mine, I’ll get you back. It doesn’t matter when. I will get you. If you beat me today I’ll be back tomorrow. That was given to us by generations before us in Glasgow. You’re brought up like that. So you bring that to this country and you tend to live that out. In Australia the average guy that was in a band would come from a fairly stable family, who had reasonable parents who didn’t believe that one’s a Catholic and one’s a Protestant and they should fucking kill each other. If you fuck with someone in our family, then you will wear it.”

Another Glaswegian, Derek Shulman, was struck by how much George continued to play a crucial role in the decision-making of the band. Shulman had performed in his own group, Gentle Giant, with brothers Phil and Ray before becoming a record-company executive and launching the commercial juggernaut known as Bon Jovi into American arenas.

“When I worked with the guys, I realized that the fraternal bond was extremely close knit,” he says. “Having been in a group with my brothers I understood that this ‘bond’ was one that needed trust from all three brothers. Also being born in Scotland myself I knew instinctively where, how and why the Young brothers kept their distance—as the Shulman brothers did in the past. Their ‘clannishness’ really was intrinsically part Scottish reticence and part fraternal insularity.”

Yet this clan loyalty didn’t stop Angus and Malcolm agreeing to ditch George as their producer after Powerage stiffed, even if they did so with his blessing. As long as he continued to pull the band’s strings behind the scenes, it was a compromise they could live with. They are nothing if not pragmatic.

*   *   *

But all of these intrigues are peripheral. They’re a job for AC/DC’s biographers or for the person who writes the Youngs’ inevitable official biography. This is not it. It does not attempt to be. Their personal and family lives are their own business, even if there are some journalists who fail to respect their privacy. This is a book, ultimately, about the power of their music and how they built the colossus of AC/DC. It’s an appreciation of three brothers whose journey with the two greatest rock groups to ever come out of Australia appears to be coming to an inevitable end, with the announcement in April 2014 on AC/DC’s Facebook page and website that Malcolm was “taking a break from the band due to ill health.” Intriguingly, though, AC/DC says it will “continue to make music.” They returned to the studio in May, with Stevie Young the talk of the AC/DC faithful.

The Youngs covers nearly half a century of songwriting. November 2013 marked the 40th anniversary of the formation of AC/DC and the same month in 2014 marks the 50th anniversary of The Easybeats.

Two bands that form the horns of Australian rock.