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

juggernaut known as Bon Jovi into American arenas.
    â€œWhen 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.
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    1
    THE EASYBEATS
    â€œGood Times” (1968)
    It took a teenage vampire movie and nearly two decades for “Good Times,” The Easybeats’ maracas-driven thunderclap off 1968’s Vigil album, to break into the charts, reaching #2 in Australia, #18 in the United Kingdom and #47 in the United States. The only other song by the band to break the top 50 in all three markets was “Friday on My Mind,” and that had happened round about the time it was supposed to: in 1967, not 1987.
    There has never been any rhyme or reason to success in the music business, especially the fortunes of The Easybeats, and this confirmed it. The movie was The Lost Boys , starring Kiefer Sutherland and directed by Joel Schumacher, and easily the best thing about it was the Australian song, a duet for Jimmy Barnes, former lead singer of beer-soaked pub giants Cold Chisel, and the late Michael Hutchence of INXS, featuring the backing of his five bandmates.
    Containing three talented Australian brothers of its own—Andrew, Jon and Tim Farriss—INXS was on its way to becoming an arena act with 1987’s megaplatinum Kick , while Barnes was pushing hard to do the same thing with the self-titled and radio-geared Jimmy Barnes , a repackaged version of the For the Working Class Man album that had gone to #1 in Australia.
    But unlike INXS, he had failed to fire in the States. Now, though, the Glaswegian shrieker had an accidental American smash on his hands. A hit no one involved with the recording saw coming, “Good Times” having been initially covered to promote Australian Made, a loss-making Australia-only summer concert series conceived by Barnes’s manager, Mark Pope, and INXS manager Chris Murphy as a means of showing that a homegrown festival featuring homegrown acts could compete with big international tours for bums on seats.
    That all