AC/DC: The Story of the Original Monsters of Rock, Jerry Ewing (Carlton Books 2015)
Angus Young. Jim Morrison. Marilyn Monroe. What’s the connection? Believe it or not, they all had the same lover. And that lover was called the camera. Even casual photos of them can look good and at their best they seem to blaze off the page with show-biz magic. Jim and Marilyn died before being deserted by that lover, but Angus has been deserted before he’s died. As you’ll see in this book, he got old and bald and the camera stopped loving him. His clowning began to look contrived, not spontaneous, and the schoolboy’s uniform began to look sad, not scampish.
But the camera definitely loved him when he was young, as you’ll see again and again. That must have been an important part of what took AC/DC to the top: when would-be fans looked at Angus in magazines and on posters, they saw the youth, energy and fun of AC/DC. But the camera never loved Malcolm Young, his late brother and the rhythm-guitarist in the band. Malcolm looks positively half-witted in some of the photos, caught dull-eyed or slack-jawed on stage or strumming his guitar backstage. That too must have helped AC/DC to the top: Angus supplied the charisma and Malcolm the cretin-cred. I don’t think the camera liked Bon Scott much either. He was the original lead-singer and his charisma was in his voice and lyrics, not his looks. Well, when I say “original lead singer”: there were lead singers before Scott, but they don’t count. AC/DC wasn’t truly AC/DC before Scott. He added the charm and cleverness to the crunch of the music.
And AC/DC stopped being AC/DC after Scott. Brian Johnson, the new lead singer, doesn’t count either. He wrecked AC/DC, in my opinion. They became a zombie-band, an animated corpse that still performed and released records, but had lost its soul. I can’t imagine Bon Scott appearing on stage with a cannon the way Johnson does, because Scott was a rock’n’roller, not part of a circus-act. And where Scott took his lyrics from the street, Johnson took his from the lavatory-wall. But I was interested to read here that Johnson is half-Italian. And yes, once you know you can see it in his face. You can’t hear it in the music he’s collaborated on, though. Johnson doesn’t have the talent and inventiveness of the fully Italian Tony Iommi, lead guitarist in those other greats Black Sabbath.
He doesn’t have the vocal ability of Scott either. And certainly not the wit or the melancholy. Angus was loved by the camera for years after Scott died, but the soul of the band was gone. Jerry Ewing, the author of this book, won’t agree with that, of course. Nor will most of the readers. Most of AC/DC’s fans – maybe the vast majority – must date from the Johnson era and must like what Johnson turned the band into. After all, most of AC/DC’s fans are of average intelligence or below. AC/DC have never played cerebral music and they don’t attract deep thinkers. But at least the lyrics were intelligent when Scott was writing and performing them.
This book is intelligent too, offering a good mix of photos and text. First I leafed through it, then I read it. There are sections devoted to the various eras and albums of AC/DC and to the main people in the band, from the Young brothers to Phil Rudd and Cliff Williams by way of Scott and Johnson. You’ll get an overview, not deep insights, but there are no depths in AC/DC anyway, are there? Well, I think Scott sometimes supplied them. As Michael Hann pointed out in the Guardian: “What’s Next to the Moon?” is one of those rare AC/DC songs that sound mysterious. But there’s only one mystery in this book: that of how the camera can react so differently to two brothers. Again and again, Angus looks good, Malcolm looks gormless. Malcolm is dead now, but the cannonball corpse lumbers on.
Previously Pre-Posted on Papyrocentric Performativity
• Bon and Off – Two Sides to Every Glory: AC/DC: The Complete Biography, Paul Stenning (2005)
• Glasguitargang – Dog Eat Dog: A Story of Survival, Struggle and Triumph by the Man Who Put AC/DC on the World Stage, Michael Browning (2014)
• Whole Lotta Scott – Highway to Hell: The Life and Times of AC/DC Legend Bon Scott, Clinton Walker (2006)
• Auto-Biommi – Iron Man: My Journey through Heaven and Hell with Black Sabbath, Tony Iommi with T.J. Lammers (2011)
Papyrocentric Performativity 
Leave a Reply