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

“theirs is a wild-eyed cry of unruly youths from a country founded by convicts,” that “ AC/DC came from the trenches” and that the band “have not reinvented the wheel—they’ve spun it like a motherfucker.”
    You get the drift. Even a slimline 160 pages is hard going with that amount of fanboy guff. The well-intentioned Bozza later admitted he’d done the book in the hope he’d be anointed as AC/DC ’s official biographer. It reads as such: verging on hagiographical. All the same, the title of the book deserved answering. Bozza can be commended for having a crack.
    The thing is, and it’s a point that needs to be strongly made, not everything AC/DC has done has been good. In fact, some of it has been downright crummy (from individual songs such as “Hail Caesar,” “Danger,” “The Furor,” “Mistress for Christmas,” “Caught With Your Pants Down” and “Safe in New York City” to forgettable albums such as Fly on the Wall , Blow Up Your Video and Ballbreaker ). Some of it has been crass (“Let Me Put My Love Into You,” “Cover You in Oil,” “Sink the Pink”). But even when the lyrics are bad or in dubious taste the music always manages to sound good—the riffs never let you down.
    For a group that Bon Scott once described as an “album band” it’s ironic that of AC/DC ’s 15 originally released, non-compilation studio albums at time of writing, only four ( Let There Be Rock , Powerage , Highway to Hell and Back in Black ) are truly essential. Their last great album was recorded in 1980.
    As the Australian music critic Robert Forster writes in his book The 10 Rules of Rock and Roll : “The reduction that goes into an AC/DC song, and the tight palette of influences the band has always worked with, gave the early work precision and power, but three decades later it acts less as a liberator and more as a noose.”
    Tony Platt agrees they’ve got themselves stuck in a musical corner of sorts from which there can be no escape: “Their biggest strength, the simplicity and directness of their music, is also their biggest weakness because there’s only so much you can do with that. Where do you go? If you’re David Bowie you can reinvent yourself on a regular basis and nobody bats an eyelid. But if AC/DC reinvented themselves, they would lose their fans overnight. You’d be hearing the outrage from millions of miles away.”
    That said, the Youngs might not be reinventing themselves with each new AC/DC record, but that has never been the point of what they do. It’s sticking to a basic palette.
    Phil Carson, who signed them to Atlantic Records in 1975, says: “I guess that the Youngs had a realization that rock music should be a driving force that shouldn’t be overburdened with complexity. AC/DC has a unique sound, and the space within it was created by the Young brothers as musicians and producers.”
    Says Mike Fraser: “Everybody kinda says, ‘Well, they never change.’ Yeah, but that’s hard to do. [They’ll do] B, G, C; three, four chords in a song. They play it in such a way that it’s simple but it grabs you and really sounds powerful. I find with a lot of other bands—Van Halen, Metallica, for instance—they’re different types of bands in that they create a soundscape . A very nice, complex picture. Great songs. But with AC/DC , it’s red, white, black and that’s it. I think your brain absorbs it better.”
    Sure, it’s possible. But then there is the view that trying to divine the secret of what they do is simply pointless.
    â€œI’ve never heard a band so tight in my whole life,” says David Mallet. “Never anywhere . They play and they are tight and the subtleties of rhythm in those riffs and the way they are put together, you could analyze them from now for the rest