The Youngs: The Brothers Who Built AC/DC tells how the band got to the top It's A Long Way to the Top If You Wanna Rock "n" Roll, recorded by AC/DC in 1975. Singer Brian Johnson performs during the AC/DC concert in Australia as part of their Black Ice Australian Tour. THE Youngs: The Brothers Who Built AC/DC is unlike any AC/DC book you've read before. Less a biography, more a critical appreciation, it tells the story of the trio through 11 classic songs and reveals some of the personal and creative secrets that went into their making. Here is an extract from the new book: AC/DC 'It's A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock 'N' Roll) ' (1975) For a band that has so singlemindedly forged its own brand of rock, AC/DC's influences since its beginnings in 1973 are surprisingly many: Free, Mountain, ZZ Top, Buddy Guy, Billy Thorpe, The Coloured Balls, Cactus, T. Rex, Ike Turner, The Rolling Stones and - you can hear it clearly on 'Shake A Leg' on Back In Black - the odd echo of Eddie Van Halen (though Angus Young was tapping before Van Halen cut a record; it's there on 1976's 'Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap'). They are nothing if not a product of many outside forces, though you won't often hear the Youngs admitting to it beyond the usual, predictable nods to Chuck Berry or Little Richard. Just as you won't hear them talking too much about their Australian roots. The Youngs' formative years in the western suburbs of Sydney are something that they seem to have gone out of their way to play down, preferring to talk up their Scottish heritage. AC/DC in concert in Australia. Angus Young in a schoolboy outfit. Picture: Marc Robertson Source: News Limited All three brothers spend a great deal of time outside Australia at their homes in England or Europe. Those days in Burwood are long gone, literally and figuratively. AC/DC is no longer a pub band. It is now, in the words of Derek Shulman, 'the quintessential rock/punk band of the 20th/21st century'. Yet there was a time when the Youngs embraced their past. Malcolm was asked by a French TV interviewer in 1983 if AC/DC had opened a door or erected a bridge internationally for other Australian acts, such as INXS and Men at Work. 'Not really, maybe The Bee Gees or something,' he said, guffawing. 'We formed in Australia and it's something you can't get rid of. But we're proud of the fact we formed in Australia.' Then there was Angus, who told an Australian TV interviewer in 2008: 'Everyone knows we started from Australia. [AC/DC] was formed there and it probably wouldn't have come out of any other country. Because the music of that time, it was the right climate, the right time, the right people. Australia's got that kind of rawness about it; it's got that kind of rough edge about it. And if anything we've always had that rough edge.' Angus Young of AC/DC performs in the US. Or did. When Mutt Lange took over from Vanda & Young, he filed those rough edges. What was once light, carefree and rebellious gradually became dark, bombastic and commercial. The success Angus and Malcolm desperately craved came not just without their big brother behind the mixing desk but at the expense of something intangible that had made the band unique in the first place. And that was the sound that took AC/DC to the top, the sound that came before the Lange-shampooed Highway To Hell and Back In Black. As much as it tries, AC/DC cannot shrug off where it came from because the music of that period doesn't lie: it sounds Australian. And more so than with any other band - more than Daddy Cool, more than Billy Thorpe - it is hearing AC/DC's songs from that 1974-78 period that makes Australians feel Australian. In 1976 British music newspaper Record Mirror listed Australia's top exports thus: 'Tinned peaches, cuddly koala bears, imitation kangaroos, sheep, stuffed ducked bill [sic] platypus, souvenir boomerangs, cold lager, Rolf Harris paintings of billabongs and AC/DC.' Book cover of The Youngs: The Brothers Who Built AC/DC Picture: Supplied Source: Supplied The sound of AC/DC's best music is Australia, in all its lack of adornment, its primitivism and its contempt for authority: on their own, appealing qualities. A sound that George Young, Harry Vanda and, to a lesser extent, Bon Scott coaxed out of Angus and Malcolm with complete singlemindedness and lack of interest in what the critics made of it. 'Bon was the biggest single influence on the band,' Malcolm once admitted. When he came in, it pulled us all together. He had that real "stick it to 'em" attitude. We all had it in us, but it took Bon to bring it out. Says AC/DC's current engineer, Mike Fraser: 'I know their roots began in Scotland, but for me their sound has always been Australian. Maybe that's because Australia was where they defined it? Hard rocking beats. Whereas American and British rock is very processed; more soundscape than honest. A word you cannot escape when it comes to discussion of the Youngs. And no song is more honest in their story than 'It's A Long Way To The Top'. Singer Brian Johnson performs during band AC/DC concert in Australia as part of their Black Ice Australian Tour. The subject matter is grist for any rock band's mill. But AC/DC put in the hard yards more than most. Three gigs a day at times, over a hundred gigs a year at a minimum. Just pausing to go home to Burleigh Street, shower, get a feed and then go out there and do it all over again. 'It was their lifestyle,' explains John Swan. 'It wasn't just their job. They were writing about being in a rock 'n' roll band. If you think it's easy doin' one-night stands/Try playin' in a rock 'n' roll band. Listen to the banter. It's just like being a f**king football fanatic, you know.' AC/DC's first international release - it's still one of the greatest songs the two junior Youngs ever wrote, with considerable input from their older brother and Bon Scott - 'It's A Long Way To The Top' is so identified with Melbourne, where the band first took off, where the film clip was shot and where a laneway has since been named after them, that it's used before matches by Australia's biggest sporting organisation, the Australian Football League. Touring shows, books and documentaries have borrowed its name. Most recently it was added to the Australian National Registry of Recorded Sound, a repository for 'sound recordings with cultural, historical and aesthetic significance and relevance' that 'inform or reflect life in Australia'. It is also Fraser's favourite AC/DC song. Rock band AC/DC. The melody of it. It's got a really cool build to it and when the bagpipes kick in and start wailing it gives me goosebumps every time.' He and millions of others, including Jack Black, Motörhead, Nantucket, WASP, Dropkick Murphys, John Farnham, Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins and former Pantera vocalist Phil Anselmo (who covered it as a spoken-word poem). Because more than the crunchy opening riff - which is as good as 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' or 'You Really Got Me' - or the bagpipes or Scott's rapier-slash vocal performance or the storm of bass, drums and guitar that builds in the fi nal stanza, it is the way 'It's A Long Way To The Top' trails off, like a car on a highway going to a place unknown, that is its true power, that uplifts. AC/DC performing in concert in Australia. Says the man who played bass on it, Mark Evans, it's what you don't hear as much as Malcolm's rhythm guitar that makes it so memorable. 'It's the guitar intro, it's the set-up of it, it's Malcolm, plus the actual sentiment of the song.' 'It's A Long Way To The Top' is one of those rare pieces of music that leaves you with a question you need to ask yourself: What do you want and how much do you want it and how hard are you prepared to work for it? The Youngs answered it themselves 40 years ago. Holger Brockmann claims he was the first disc jockey on radio anywhere in the world to play 'It's A Long Way To The Top'. In 1975 he was certainly the fi rst man to say anything on 2JJ, Australian national broadcaster ABC's youth-oriented music station, so the idea holds some water. Now almost 70 and still working in radio, he spends most of his time on a farm in the Upper Hunter Valley of New South Wales with his wife, Marianne, and, for relaxation, blasts AC/DC into his cow paddocks. 'Joooom,' he says, throwing his hands into the air for effect. Up to 11! Brockmann first saw AC/DC at the Hornsby Police Boys Club in Sydney. AC/DC in concert. 'It was late 1974 and I got dragged along to the Police Boys, didn't know much about it, must have been after their first record came out, and it seemed like there were 12 people there. There were probably more. I went on from night shifts to breakfast in '75 and I remember somebody bringing in "It's A Long Way To The Top" and saying, "Have a listen to this," and I just played it, and it was so f**king good that I just played it again and again. Five times in a row. Did people call the station in protest? 'Saying more, yeah!' he laughs. But why five times in a row? 'Why wouldn't you if you heard it the first time? Can you imagine? The very first time? The bagpipes got me. All of a sudden the bagpipes come and phoooom. Bagpipes! It's this have to play as a virtuoso like Jeff Beck, or speed along like Eric Johnson. He puts his own thing in there, always doing just enough, never quite too much, and always with fervour. But Derek Shulman explains it best: 'Usually the rhythm section of the band - the bass and drums - drives a rock band. However, with AC/DC it is Malcolm's rhythm guitar that drives the forward movement of the songs. The drums and bass are completely spare and only play four to the bar without fills or frills. Hence the space and the ability of Angus to shine when he rips his lead guitar solos. Other bands can try to recreate the feel of AC/DC but only AC/DC can actually pull it off with such ease and brilliance. This way of driving the band from the top down rather than the rhythm section up is completely unique. There is no wasted chord, drum fill or notation. The complexity in its simplicity cannot be recreated by other bands. That doesn't stop them from trying; and that, in itself, is a tribute. 'It's A Long Way To The Top' was released in Australia in December 1975. The film clip, directed by Paul Drane, came out three months later: either an unintended or unashamed rip-off of The Rolling Stones' promo for 'Brown Sugar' on a flatbed truck in New York earlier in '75. That had been Charlie Watts's idea. As Mick Jagger explained: 'Jazz in the old days in Harlem, they used to do promotions for their gigs on flatbed trucks.' At least the Rats of Tobruk Pipe Band was a wholly original idea. Executives from the band's future American record company, Atlantic, had not heard anything like it. They were about as stunned as Holger Brockmann had been at 2JJ. After Coral Browning played Phil Carson of Atlantic's UK arm a film of the band, he signed them to a worldwide deal. He had no misgivings at all. 'From the moment I saw it, I knew that I could make the band work in Europe, and that was my initial goal,' he says. This was in the days before videos, but Coral brought along an audiovisual invention by Fairchild. It was a briefcase that opened up to reveal a screen on which I viewed AC/DC performing 'It's A Long Way To The Top', I believe, in a nightclub. It was electrifying and that's what sold me on the band.' Lead singer Bon Scott and band AC/DC entertain the crowd at Moorabbin Town Hall in Melbourne in 1974. The clip was actually 'High Voltage', recorded at Melbourne's Festival Hall and directed by Larry Larstead, an advertising industry friend of Chris Gilbey's who by his own account 'just happened to be in Melbourne with a crew directing for Coke' when he got the call to see if he'd be interested in shooting AC/DC. He was and enlisted four cameramen (not five, as claimed in some accounts): Guy Furner, Ron Johanson, Paul Williams and Peter Willesee, the latter pair now deceased. They shot three clips that night: 'High Voltage' for AC/DC, Stevie Wright's 'Black Eyed Bruiser' and John Paul Young's 'Yesterday's Hero'. 'The brief was simple,' says Larstead. 'Even though we didn't have sound for our cameras, we were to get as much wild footage as we could. AC/DC was headlining and when they came on the crowd were already pumped. They were there to party and nothing was going to detract from the night becoming something special. But even with four cameras it didn't all go to plan. 'Larry hadn't been able to get decent close-ups of Bon Scott and needed a further studio shoot to do the cutaways,' says Gilbey. 'It wasn't expensive, so we did it, ensuring that the lighting was perfectly matched, that the amount of sweat on his face was perfect, and that he sang as hard as he could in order to make sure that the throat muscles looked like they were straining.' AC/DC in concert in Brisbane. Laughs Larstead: 'We had a fantastically fun time shooting all those close-ups. It ended up being an all-out contest between the guys in the band to see who could out "rage" the other guy. Angus had thrown his schoolboy hat into the crowd halfway through the live set, which we had missed on camera, so I was faced with the dilemma of only being able to use "hat on" or "hat off" footage of Angus when cutting the final images to their studio soundtrack. That was going to be hard, since I was trying to use all the great shots taken from that night. Anyway, Angus and I worked it out where we thought the hat should come off in the final clip and he played that particular part on his guitar and threw his hat off into the imaginary crowd in the studio with the great AC/DC attitude you can see in the final clip. We had a make-up lady on the day that was in charge of sweat continuity. Hers was a tough job, since every time she sprayed some water on Bon's face the whole band would yell for more.' Extra special effects were to come. On stage at Royal Oak Theater, Michigan, 1978. Angus and Malcolm both play off each other so well that it almost sounds like one massive wall of power, says Rhino Bucket's Georg Dolivo. Picture: Thomas Weschler Source: Supplied 'We needed audience noise,' says Gilbey. George Young wanted to have control of creating the audience track and went in the studio to try to put something together. It didn't really cut it for Larry, so he asked me if I would mind if he used some audio that he thought would work better. I told him to make the video as compelling as possible. Which Larstead dutifully did by pinching audience noise off George Harrison's Concert For Bangladesh live album. The record was a gift given to me by a friend and it turned out, with a little extra looping and doubling, to be just what I needed. I think Chris was the only other person at the time who knew about that little bit of editorial skulduggery, so don't blame it on the band. Many thanks to George Harrison, belatedly. From The Youngs: The Brothers Who built AC/DC by Jesse Fink Copyright © Jesse Fink 2013 Reprinted by Permission of Random House Australia All Rights Reserved RRP $34.95 by Ebury Press. Available from booksellers, online retailers, and as an ebook from November 1, 2013 Reader Offer: Buy The Youngs: The Brothers Who Built AC/DC by Jesse Fink for $29.95 including delivery. Call 1300 306 107 from 10am Monday or post a cheque to Book Offers: P.O. Box 14730 Melbourne Vic 8001.