Picture yourself, if you will, at an AC/DC show at some unruly venue in Albany or Toledo in the fall of 1978. Perhaps a friend has brought you, or maybe hearing one of the band’s songs on FM radio has drawn you there. Regardless, you’re in luck. You’re catching AC/DC at the perfect moment, as it’s on the cusp of transforming itself into a musical juggernaut. The group, hailing from Australia, has just released “Powerage,” a forty-minute distillation of swinging, aggressive rock and roll that Keith Richards will later say is his favorite AC/DC album. In a matter of months, the band will record “Highway to Hell” and, soon after that, “Back in Black,” which will become the sixth-best-selling album of all time.
So, what do you notice? Up front and hard to miss is Angus Young, the diminutive dynamo of a lead guitarist, wearing the sweat-soaked remains of a velvet schoolboy uniform, duck-walking and thrashing his head like the lightning-strike victim on the cover of “Powerage.” Nearby, prancing bare-chested, is the lewd and mischievous lead singer, Bon Scott. (He’ll be dead by the end of the decade.) But, if you can take your eyes off these two showmen for a moment, you might find your gaze drifting to the left of the drum riser, where a pugnacious long-haired kid (he looks like he’s still in high school), wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, is strumming his Gretsch guitar and shaking his leg in time to the driving beat. His name is Malcolm Young, and you could be forgiven for seeing him as just another part of the backing band, but he is in fact the mastermind of the whole operation, at once its visionary and its taskmaster. He is the soul of the band, its leader on and off the stage.
Malcolm, who founded AC/DC with his younger brother Angus, in 1973, died on Saturday, at the age of sixty-four, succumbing to the dementia that had first manifested nearly a decade ago. He had not performed with the band since 2014, when the condition became so disabling that he was no longer able to play the immaculate hard-rock songs he had helped to write. (His nephew Stevie Young replaced him on the road.) Malcolm’s passing comes a month after the death of his older brother George, a member of the nineteen-sixties Australian hitmaker the Easybeats. In addition to mentoring Malcolm and Angus in the art of songwriting, George helped foster in them a distrust of the business side of the music industry. AC/DC was a notoriously insular family enterprise, one whose inner workings often seemed veiled and capricious.
But there is no questioning the brilliance of the formula that George and his longtime songwriting partner, Harry Vanda, helped nurture in Malcolm and Angus: a rigorous fidelity to the musical tradition established by Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, coupled with the volume and propulsive force of hard rock. The hybrid resulted in sales of more than two hundred million albums and a decades-long career as a top-grossing live act. Many bands tried to emulate AC/DC; few came close to equalling them, in part because few could match the sheer musicianship that the Youngs brought to the task. “It’s harder than it looks,” sang Bon Scott in “It’s A Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll),” and the Youngs always made it look easy. For his part, Malcolm saw the members of the Rolling Stones as his only true peers.
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.” There was a dogged consistency to AC/DC’s songwriting, which stemmed directly from Malcolm’s stated unwillingness to change. This spared the band’s fans from having to put up with the experiments that other groups engaged in—collaborations with classical musicians, or investigations of music from other cultures. You knew what to expect, and AC/DC always delivered. But, as the members of the group aged (with Brian Johnson replacing Scott as vocalist), the roguish, rebellious songs that formed the core of their legacy—songs with titles such as “Problem Child,” “Hell Ain’t a Bad Place to Be,” “Riff Raff,” and “You Shook Me All Night Long”—came to seem more and more removed from the graying men who sang them.
My AC/DC obsession began in the late nineteen-seventies, right around the time I was reading the works of S. E. Hinton in middle school. Though Angus always dressed like a delinquent English schoolboy onstage, Malcolm struck me as having walked straight out of the pages of “The Outsiders.” He was a Greaser itching for a chance to rumble with the privileged Socs. It’s that scrappy, committed presence that stays with me. A special kind of self-confidence and self-awareness is required to embrace the undersung role of rhythm guitarist and backing vocalist, ceding the limelight to your brother, but he correctly saw that this was the best distribution of their talents.
The interplay of Malcolm’s and Angus’s guitars is the essence of AC/DC’s sound. You can hear it if you listen closely to almost any of their songs. A favorite of mine is “Overdose,” from “Let There Be Rock,” released in 1977. The song opens with a series of arpeggios played on a single guitar, almost like a warm-up exercise. (It’s uncharacteristic of the band to have left such a rough intro in the final edit.) Drums soon arrive, adding some structure, followed by a thrumming bass line, and then the second guitar, with a striking, unforgettable riff. The other guitar shifts to playing open chords before finally locking in on the riff with the first. Lars Ulrich, of Metallica, singled the song out earlier this year, noting that AC/DC almost never performs “Overdose” live. Thus, it’s hard to know which brother plays which part of that intro. One thing’s for sure, though: the song, like the band, wouldn’t work with only one of them.
