Youngs : The Brothers Who Built Ac/Dc (9781466865204) (34 page)

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

Mark Evans is not so sure.

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

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

So what about Brian Johnson writing those lyrics?

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

*   *   *

The other eight songs, then?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So not just the one song? The whole album?

“Apparently.”

Is that as far as you can elaborate?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what is
AC/DC
's secret?

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

And “You Shook Me All Night Long” itself?

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

10

AC/DC

“Hells Bells” (1980)

John Wheeler of Hayseed Dixie is in no doubt.

“Maybe the greatest melodic guitar signature line ever,” he says. “And yet it's not particularly difficult to play. But that's part of its genius. Something doesn't need to be technically difficult in order to be stunning; in fact the contrary is often true. Beethoven's most famous piano piece isn't one of the very difficult sonatas, but rather ‘Für Elise,' which was just a little trill study he tossed off in five minutes so his student, Elise, could practice her third and fourth finger trills. Yet it's so simple and catchy that everybody knows that melody. ‘Hells Bells' is the same sort of brilliance. You hear it once and it bounces around the inside of your skull for the rest of your life.”

It was certainly a song that American soldier Mike Durant will never forget. Durant was piloting
Super Six-Four
, a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, during the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993 when its tail rotor was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. The chopper crashed in the middle of the city, badly injuring all four crew members on board. Durant broke his back and right femur. He remained trapped in his seat before two Delta Force snipers that had been dropped into the crash site pulled him out. In the ensuing firefight with militiamen and angered locals, they were killed. Durant never saw his crew alive again and was himself beaten with the severed arm of one of his comrades before being taken hostage. The events of the botched raid on Omar Salad and Abdi Hassan Awale, associates of warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid, chronicled in Durant's memoir,
In the Company of Heroes
, formed the basis for Mark Bowden's book
Black Hawk Down
and the Ridley Scott film of the same name. In all, two Black Hawks went down, 18 American soldiers died and 73 were injured that day: October 3, 1993.