Free Youngs : The Brothers Who Built Ac/Dc (9781466865204) by Jesse Fink

“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.”
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    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.
    â€œThat’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.”
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    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,