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

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