P E R F O R M E R S

By BradTofinski— 3 D —

SOME SAY THAT ROCK & ROLL IS DIRTY, THAT IT’S THE

devil’s music. The members of AC/DC might add, “only if it’s done right.” For close to thir­ty years, these Australian hard-rock hooli­

gans have been spreading their gospel o f cigarette smoke, drunken debauchery and power chords with such skill and exuberance that one enraptured critic was moved to proclaim them “the Coleridges of cock rock, the Tennysons of testosterone, the Shakespeares o f salacious, schoolboy smut.” W hile AC/DC m ight be surprised to find them ­selves in such rarefied company, the composers of “Big Balls,” “Hard as a Rock” and “Let Me Put My Love Into You” clearly understand as well' as anyone the primal truths that lie at the heart of great poetry.

“People c;jin go out and hear R.E.M. if they w ant ‘deep’ lyrics,” says M alcolm Young, one of AC/DC’s guitarists. “But at the end of the night, they w ant to go home and get fucked. And that’s where AC/DC come into it. People w ant more fu ck in g— f think that’s what’s kept us around so long.”

A lth o u gh M alcolm ’s explanation for AC/d J § | lo n gevity rings true; there’s m ore to it than sex.

The band’s success m ust also be attributed to at least two other factors: its eighteen devilishly craft­ed, crunchy, hook-filled album s - in cludin g the forty-one-m illion-selling Back in Black - w h ich have sold an astonishing 140 m illion-plus units w orldw ide, and its live shows, am ong the m ost electrifying in rock.

W ith leather-lunged Brian Johnson on vocals, brothers Angus and Malcolm Young on lead and rhythm guitar, respectively, and the hard-hitting rhythm section Q fjf j f f W illiam s on bass and Phillip Rudd on drums, AC/DC are tighter than a pair o f teenage girl’s knickers, At each show, the band achieves the seem­ingly impossible: sounding heav­ier than a Union Pacific Big Boy steam locomotive while maintain­ing the sense o f space and swing essential to all good rock & roll.

But think of AC/DC in concert and the first thing that comes to mind is the Suit - the navy blue school­boy ensemble Angus has worn at every one of the band’s shows for the past three decades.

“My sister came up w ith that idea back in 1973, w hen I was fifteen,” says Angus. “As a kid, I’d come

AC/DC shortly after vocalist Bon Scott’s death: Cliff Williams, Malcolm Young, Brian Johnson, Angus Young, Phillip Rudd (from left)

Original vocalist/wildman Bon Scott howls at the moon, while Angus Young checks out his package and a bemused Cliff Williams watches the proceedings.

right home from school and pick up m y guitar without chang­ing out of m y school uniform. At dinnertime I’d still be in the suit, playing away. She thought it was cute - it would give peo­ple something to look at.”

That it did. But little did Angus realize w ay back then, the “cute” suit would become the band’s univer­sally recognized trademark and his personal mojo. More than a stage costume, it has come to embody the sniggering, rebellious, sex- obsessed essence of AC/DC.

Clad in his blazer, white shirt, tie and short pants, the forty-four-year-old guitarist i t nightly transformed into a stomping, leering feral child, w ho whips his audience into a blessed state of frenzy with his head banging and spastic jitterbugging. His performance reaches a climax w hen he trashes his uniform, pulls down his pants and, to thunderous applause, moons his audience. The fans approve not because he has bared his bottom but because he has succeeded in becoming what every adult and teen longs to fees eternally young and free, forever riding on the highway to hell.

“W hen people ask me to describe AC/DC, I often say, ‘It’s five musicians and a gimmick,’ ” Angus says of the Suit. “You don’t think m uch about these things w hen yo u first start out. But then, after a while, you’re playing in front of people and they want to see that. It’s like Yosemite Sam says in the Bugs Bunny

cartoon: ‘I paid to see the high-diving a c t and I’m gonna see the high-diving act!’ ”

A lthough Angus wears his suit to please his audience, he shrewdly sees its value in terms of a personal safety net.

“The great thing about the school suit is, you can take it. off and leave it all behind w hen you leave the stage,” admits the gui­tarist. “If you mess up, you can think, ‘Oh, it wasn’t me, it was the guy in the Suit.’ ”

AC/DC were formed in rcjj|r§ in «Sydney by Malcolm Young after his band the Velvet Underground - no rela­tion to the seminal New York group - collapsed. The band enjoyed some immediate local success, partly due to the sting­ing, vibrato-drenched lead guitar and emerging schoolboy per­sona of his brother Angus.

I They spread 1 i the gospel of I cigarette smoke and ¡1 debauchery |Til 1111111111111111111111111111111111F

W hile still in Sydney, the original lineup (w hich featured singer Dave Evans) cut a single called “Can I f i t Next to You,” w hich was produced by two veterans of the Sixties hitm aking group the Easybeats, Harry Vanda and George Young, M al­colm and A ngus’s elder brother, But the band didn’t really catch fire until it moved its operation to Melbourne later that year .after replacing Evans w ith the streetwise and volatile vocalist Bon Scott.

Bon’s high, gritty howl, suggestive double entendres and gen­erally rotten reputation added a previously missing air of palpa­ble danger to the young rock & roll band. W ith several minor criminal convictions under his belt and a rejection from the Aus­tralian army for being “socially maladjusted,” Bon was unques­tionably gangsta.

“Accepting dares was Bon’s favorite party trick,” says Angus. “I remember a time when somebody said to him, ‘I’ll give you ten bucks if you leap out the w indow into that pool downstairs.’ Mind you, this was in an apartment building.. . and he did it.”

W ith wildman Bon in the fold, AC/DC released two albums in Australia: High Voltage, in 1975, follow ed by T.N.T. The best of both albums was combined and repackaged in the United States in 1976 as High Voltage, a highly concentrated blast of stripped- down blues rock. Unleashed during the early days of Sex Pistols mania, the group’s raw, uncluttered music was categorized by many critics as “punk rock” or “heavy metal.” AC/DC strenuous­ly rejected both tags, aligning themselves with the forces of pure, good old-fashioned rock & roll.

‘W e weren’t a punk band, but they’d put us on the same bill as a punk band,” says Angus. “And the audiences sure got a shock when they started spitting at us and we spat back. The heavy- metal thing? I immediately think of men in armor. We started as a rock & roll band. That’s what we play - what we do best.”

To prove its point, the band recorded four albums that sound­ed like Chuck Berry on anabolic steroids. Let There Be Rock(i 9 7 f t Powerage( 1978), I f You Want Blood You’ve Got It (197 8) and its first m illio n -file r, Highway to Hell (1979), perfected the AC/DC recipe: Start w ith an instantly memorable guitar riff, add a hard­hitting rhythmic groove, throw in a couple of ribald jokes and a raucous chorus, and then top it ail off w ith an orgasmic guitar

Unbelievably, Brian Johnson managed to replace the inimitable Bon Scott.

solo. It’s a formula, yeah, but on adrenalized party classics like “Girls Got Rhythm” and “Problem Child,” it never felt like one.

After painstakingly building their reputation for the better part of the Seventies, AC/DC were poised on the brink of rock stardom. Then disaster struck. On February 19, T980, the seem­ingly indestructible Bon áéütt.died after a night of hard party­ing and serious alcohol consumption. The coroner recorded a verdict of “death by misadventure” - that Bon had “drunk him ­self to death.”

The loss of a frontman, let alone one as uniquely talented as Bon, would have meant the end of most bands. But Highway to Hell had been AC/DC’s most successful album yet, and thanVg to John “M utt” Lange’s radio-friendly production, it broke the group in the all-important American market. Additionally, the

At left: Angus Young setting a bad example for schoolboys everywhere. Above: For Those Still Rockin’, We Salute You: AC/DC going strong thirty years on.

m usic for the band’s crucial followup, the album that was to becom e Back in Black, was nearly w ritten w hen Bon m et his end. Undaunted, AC/DC soldiered on. Recalls Angus, “M al­colm called me and said, ‘Me and you w ill keep working on the

vfj|ngs that we had been w riting. It’ll take our minds off all this.’ ”

Three m onths later, AC/DC announced they had hired Brian Johnson, the former lead singer of the British hard-rock hand Geordie.Brian, it turned out, was the perfect replace­ment for Bon. W ith the brim of his hounds- tooth Kangol cap yanked firmly over his eyes, and his boxer’s nose, the new singer appeared every inch the menacing ne’er-do-well that Bon had celebrated in songs like “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.” But while he looked like a small-time Cock­ney thug, Brian’s affable personality and down-to-earth style per­fectly prepared him for the hard work and endless tours the band would endure in the years ahead.

“Brian got the gig because w hen he came to audition he didn’t have any airs about him ,” says Angus. “He sat around and played pool w ith a couple of friends - we didn’t even know he w as there to sing. Finally, M alcolm said, ‘W h at are you doing here?’ And he said, T came down to audition for a gig.’ He came, sang a couple o f our songs and had a dam n good crack at them.”

W ith Brian’s pile-driving, gravel-throated shriek in the fore­front, Back in Black, nojw a tribute to Bon, was successfully com­pleted. The album that would become a true rock classic yielded at least a half-dozen songs that quickly entered the hard-rock, canon, including “You Shook Me All Night Long,” “Have a Drink On Me,” “Hells Bells” and the thunderous title track. Thie album has sold forty-one million copies worldwide.

For the next two decades, AC/DC would embark on numerous international arena tours and record explosive multiplatinum albums like For Those About to Rock We Salute You (1981)/ The Razors Edge (1990) and Ballbreaker (1995), w hich was produced by rebel visionary Rick Rubin. Still a major force, the band recently signed a multialbum deal w ith Epic, the first fruits of w hich w ill be refurbished reissues o f classic albums like Back in Black, Highway to Hell and Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap. A new stu­dio album is expected later this year.

For all their success, AC/DC have never taken themselves seri­ously. Brian Johnson likens the band to the Three Stooges, “except there are five o f us.” Stooges they m ay be, but these Aussies have delighted and entertained at least three generations

of music fans, who have made them the fifth- highest-ranking group in terms of album sales. Not too shabby for a band of ruffians from Down Under that, remarkably enough, has never had a Top Tw enty single in the

kfnited States or Great Britain.For his part, Angus Young sees AC/DC as

part of the great rock continuum. “This music has been around since the days when Chuck Berry put it all together,” he says. “He com­bined the blues and country and rockabilly

and put his own poetry on top, and that became rock & roll. Our whole career has been playing rock & roll, and some o f the peo­ple tuning in to us w ill be musicians who w ill take it into the next realm. It w ill just keep goin g.. . and so w ill we.”

Angus Young throttles his axe while riding piggyback through the crowd.

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