The future of the chart-topping Australian hard-rock act AC/DC seemed in doubt earlier this year, when news broke that the rhythm guitarist and songwriter Malcolm Young was, in the words of the group’s Web site, “taking a break” from the band because of illness. (Young is reported to be suffering from dementia.) There was further reason to worry later in the fall, when the group’s drummer, Phil Rudd, was arrested by police in New Zealand and charged with drug possession and hiring a hit man. Though the latter charge was dropped, Rudd is still accused of threatening to kill, and of possession of cannabis and methamphetamine. He plead not guilty today, which, it happens, is also the official U.S. release date for AC/DC’s sixteenth studio album, “Rock or Bust.”
Despite the headlines for Rudd, the real concern for fans was Malcolm Young. While his younger brother Angus, the group’s school-uniform-wearing lead guitarist, may be the iconic public face of AC/DC, it’s the older brother who has been the band’s guiding force. Mark Evans, who played bass for AC/DC in the nineteen-seventies, once wrote that Malcolm was “the driven one . . . the planner, the schemer, the ‘behind the scenes guy,’ ruthless and astute.” He was also their onstage leader, the person the rest of the band watched for changes and cutoffs. Though the other members of AC/DC gamely announced that they would gather to record a new album, it was hard to imagine how it could be anything but a diminished version of the powerhouse act that had dominated the rock world for nearly four decades. A longtime fan, I was among those who thought it was time for them to call it a day.
AC/DC is almost unique among bands of its vintage and stature in eschewing the break-up-reunion-tour-breakup cycle of false endings and restarts. The only previous occasion on which the band faced a crisis of comparable magnitude was in 1980, when the lead singer Bon Scott died, at the age of thirty-three. Through the group’s first five studio albums and two earlier Australian releases, Scott had embodied AC/DC’s ribald and rebellious personality. At the time of his death, AC/DC was on the cusp of a major breakthrough. The band’s most recent album, 1979’s “Highway to Hell,” had made it into the Top Ten in the U.K. and the Top Twenty-Five on the Billboard album charts in the U.S. Rather than being derailed by the loss of their singer, AC/DC hired the shrapnel-voiced ex-Geordie vocalist Brian Johnson and released “Back in Black,” which went on to sell more than twenty-two million copies. Though the band has never quite equalled the success of that record, it has certainly shown itself to be resilient.
Fans got a first taste of the new record in October, when the single “Play Ball” was released and used to promote the Major League Baseball playoffs. AC/DC has been shrewd, if at times capricious, about the way it licenses its music. For example, it is hard to imagine a better fit for an “Iron Man” soundtrack than the group’s gear-crunching rock anthems. At the same time, AC/DC’s longstanding refusal to allow other recording artists to sample its songs casts the band as retrograde and out of touch. Allowing M.L.B. to use “Play Ball” felt a little desperate to me, even though the song itself was a solid foot-stomper with a crisp Angus riff at its heart.
I am relieved to report that those early omens turned out to be misleading and my own fears were misguided. Compact, charged, and focussed, “Rock or Bust” is as good as anything AC/DC has produced since “Back in Black.” The title track, which opens the album, is one of the group’s periodic mission statements and features the same familiar riff-heavy attack as “Play Ball.” Elsewhere though, there is a notable and welcome return of the blues and R. & B. influences that were more prevalent during the band’s first decade. The standout is “Rock the Blues Away,” a driving sing-along song that is as close as the album comes to saluting the group’s missing leader.
How is it possible, then, that AC/DC produced such a good recording without Malcolm? One answer is that he is there in part, at least as a songwriter. Jesse Fink, the author of “The Youngs: The Brothers Who Built AC/DC,” told me that the songs on “Rock or Bust” “came about through piecing together new ideas with riffs and choruses from years ago that Angus and Malcolm hadn’t yet fully developed.” Credit also needs to be given to Brendan O’Brien and Mike Fraser, who helmed the production of the album, and to Stevie Young, Angus and Malcolm’s nephew, who played rhythm guitar on the record.
Fink’s book, which was published just after the news about Malcolm’s health broke, is an essential read for fans of the band. Most important, “The Youngs” gives a full portrait of just how significant a role George Young, Malcolm and Angus’s older brother, played in AC/DC’s development. Still active to this day in guiding and counselling the band, George first rose to stardom as the rhythm guitarist of the popular nineteen-sixties Australian rock group the Easybeats, which is best known in the U.S. for the single “Friday on My Mind.” Contemporaries of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the Easybeats never achieved comparable success in the Northern Hemisphere. Formed in 1964, the band lasted only five years before financial disputes and the rise of Young’s independent songwriting partnership with the lead guitarist Harry Vanda caused it to disband.
George’s early, disappointing experience with the business side of the music business is one reason, according to Fink, that AC/DC remains so insular, private, and self-reliant. Beyond that us-verses-the-world mindset, George’s biggest legacy in the band is its sound. He and Vanda mentored Angus and Malcolm and served as producers on AC/DC’s early albums. One only has to listen to the opening bars of “St. Louis” or “Good Times” by the Easybeats to hear many of the elements that make AC/DC’s sound so distinctive: precise, cutting, guitar riffs; propulsive rhythms; and infectious choruses. AC/DC hardened the guitar sounds and simplified the arrangements—no horns or strings, though sometimes bagpipes—to foreground Angus’s playing and Scott’s vocals. That’s the formula they used to sell more than two hundred million records in the past forty years.
