In a tastefully luxurious suite at the Peninsula Hotel in New York, Brian Johnson, the lead singer of AC/DC, is crooning the opening lines of It’s a Wonderful World while he waits to have his picture taken. Although he’s known for belting out AC/DC’s hard-rock songs, he can also sing delicately about trees of green and red roses.
Suddenly he clears his nasal passages with a giant snort and cracks up laughing. “What’s green and goes backward at 100 miles an hour?” he asks in a northeastern English accent. Across the room the brothers Angus and Malcolm Young, the band’s guitarists, start laughing along with him. Even at their age — Angus is 53, Malcolm is 55 and Johnson is 61 — the members of AC/DC can’t resist a gross-out joke.
The band’s music hasn’t matured much either, to the delight of its fans. AC/DC has always delivered an aggressive take on rock’s raw essentials: slicing guitars, driving rhythms and lyrics about sex, drink and rock ’n’ roll. Its new album, Black Ice, which will be sold in the US only at Wal-Mart starting today, is its most focused release in almost two decades, full of the fist-pumping riffs and shout-along choruses the band is known for. And it is expected to be one of fall’s biggest rock releases.
Gradually, and without getting much media attention, AC/DC has become the most popular currently active rock band in the US, to judge by albums sold. Since 1991, when Nielsen SoundScan started tracking music sales, this Australian band has sold 26.4 million albums, second only to the Beatles, and more than the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin. Over the past five years, as CD sales have cratered, AC/DC albums have sold just as well as or better than ever; the band sold more than 1.3 million CDs in the US last year, even though it hasn’t put out any new music since 2000. And with Black Ice, increased visibility for the band’s catalog at Wal-Mart and a tour that starts on Tuesdayof next week, it’s possible that AC/DC could sell more CDs overall this year than any other act in pop music.
AC/DC’s commercial success flies in the face of conventional music industry wisdom. The band does not sell its music online and has never put out a greatest hits collection or allowed other musicians to sample its songs. At a time when most pop acts give fans the opportunity to have it their way by offering downloadable tracks and remixes, AC/DC gives listeners a different choice: its way or the highway.
“You get very close to the albums,” said Angus, relaxing on a couch while sipping a cup of tea. Without the schoolboy uniform he’s famous for wearing onstage, he comes off calm and soft-spoken in a black T-shirt, blue jeans and Converse Chuck Taylors. Like his brother he’s short and slight, about 160cm and 50kg.
“It’s like an artist who does a painting,” he added. “If he thinks it’s a great piece of work, he protects it. It’s the same thing: This is our work.” The band has said it does not want to break up its albums to sell individual songs as iTunes usually requires.
AC/DC’s decision to focus on selling CDs has put it at the center of an industry debate about whether even superstar acts can continue to dictate the way their music is sold. Although Kid Rock and Buckcherry had recent hits without iTunes, that online store is now the largest music retailer.
The band’s reluctance to break up its albums may stem from a stubborn belief in their power. But AC/DC also has a reputation of being business savvy and a tendency of skipping an easy paycheck to preserve its long-term interests. The band has also been reluctant to license its music for advertising.
“They have a purist approach,” said Steve Barnett, the chairman of Columbia Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment. (He also managed the band from 1982 to 1994.) “Their instinct was always to do the right thing for fans, think long term and not be influenced by financial rewards.”
AC/DC’s insistence on selling albums has almost certainly helped keep its sales from declining. And although many music executives believe that not selling tracks online leads fans to download music illegally, AC/DC’s music is downloaded from file-sharing sites less than that of Led Zeppelin, which does sell music digitally, according to BigChampagne, a company that monitors peer-to-peer services.
AC/DC gets less attention than many bands it outsells. Its songs receive less airplay than those of Aerosmith, according to Nielsen Broadcast Data Systems. Its members get less attention in gossip columns than the children of the Beatles. And it has never been a critical favorite. The band makes no pretense to art, and its lyrics often contain what might be called single entendres.
For this, and much else, Angus is unapologetic. “People say it’s juvenile music, but pardon me” — he speaks these last two words with exaggerated politeness — “I thought rock ’n’ roll was supposed to be juvenile. You sing what you know. What am I going to write about — Rembrandt?”
Much of AC/DC’s appeal lies in the group’s consistency, its unwavering focus on cranking up the rhythms of early rock into stadium-sized anthems. Although AC/DC has fans of all ages, it is almost unique among 1970s bands in that it never tried to grow up with its audience. The band never experimented with different genres, made an “unplugged” album or even recorded a ballad, and none of its songs sound rooted in a particular time.
The group’s raw aggression is as relevant to teenagers who listen to its albums on iPods as they were to those who heard them on record players. Back in Black, which has sold 49 million copies worldwide since 1980, according to Columbia, could serve as a catchy soundtrack to teenage frustration for as long as it exists.
Like a blues song come to life, Angus Young is a seventh son. His parents emigrated from Glasgow, Scotland, to Sydney, Australia, where his older brother George joined the Easybeats, the pioneering rock band known for Friday on My Mind. Obsessed with rockers like Little Richard and Chuck Berry, Angus and Malcolm formed AC/DC in 1973 when they were teenagers, and won a reputation for giving raucous concerts after their sister suggested that Angus perform in his school uniform.
“Most of the time I’m quiet, but when I put on that suit it gives me that kind of confidence,” Angus said. “I suppose the music sounds aggressive but I was never that guy, really.”
AC/DC had its first big hit in the US when the producer Robert John (Mutt) Lange gave its guitar riffs a pop shine on the 1979 album Highway to Hell. The next year, after the singer Bon Scott died in a misadventure with alcohol, the band recruited Johnson. The group’s next album, Back in Black, has sold about 22 million copies in the US, making it the fourth best-selling album in American history.
Since then AC/DC has lost its way (Fly on the Wall, 1985) and recaptured its old energy (Razors Edge, 1990). But its catalog kept selling. “High school kids were discovering this band while they weren’t even doing anything,” Barnett said.
In 2003, after the rights to AC/DC’s previous albums reverted to the band, Barnett acquired those rights for Sony. In 2006 he renewed that deal and acquired the rights to the album left on the group’s recording contract with Warner Music. Under his direction Sony reissued the old albums in nicer packaging, negotiated to put the band’s music in movies like School of Rock and Iron Man and released several DVDs and DVD box sets. The most popular of these, AC/DC Live at Donnington, has sold more than 800,000 copies, making it the label’s best-selling DVD; it will provide the basis for an AC/DC edition of the video game Rock Band.
These days the band’s members don’t spend much time together between albums. The Young brothers split their time between London and Australia; the drummer Phil Rudd lives in New Zealand; and the bassist Cliff Williams and Johnson live about a half-hour apart in southwestern Florida. Johnson enjoys driving sports cars and recently came in third in an event at the Sebring International Raceway in central Florida.
Over the last several years Angus and Malcolm would come up with riffs and ideas on their own, then meet to work them into songs. When they had enough material for an album, they called Barnett, who recommended that they work with the producer Brendan O’Brien, who has also made albums with Pearl Jam and Rage Against the Machine.
“The AC/DC music that I remember most is Highway to Hell and Back in Black, which I view as pop songs done in a very heavy ferocious way,” O’Brien said. “Angus and Malcolm were writing songs that had a lot of hooks and my only job was to make a record that made people say, ‘I’ve missed AC/DC, and I’m glad they’re back.’”
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