Back In Black: Malcolm’s riff and the band around it
Malcolm Young had a riff on a cassette that he was ready to erase. During the Highway to Hell tour he played it for his younger brother Angus, who remembered Malcolm saying the track had been bugging him and asking for his opinion. Malcolm planned to tape over it. Angus told him not to trash it and said that if Malcolm did not want it, he would take it. It was the riff for "Back in Black." Asked later whether the little single-note lick in it was Malcolm's, Angus said, "Oh yeah," and admitted he had never been able to play it quite the way Malcolm had it on that tape.
The riff that became "Back in Black" survived because of how well things were going. Highway to Hell, released in 1979 and produced by Robert John "Mutt" Lange, was AC/DC's first million-seller, a Top 10 album in the UK and a Top 20 album in the United States. In January 1980 Angus and Malcolm began work on the follow-up in London with their singer, Bon Scott, who played drums on the demos of the new songs, as he had in his earliest bands. Scott told his mother in a phone call, "This one is going to be it!" Angus later told Paste that Scott's part was limited to drumming on demos of "Hells Bells" and "Have a Drink on Me": "it was really just to help us with those demos on the drums."
Then, on February 19, 1980, Bon Scott was found dead in London. He was 33. "We were heartbroken," Angus said later. "We had lost a person we bonded with in life." At the funeral in Fremantle, Western Australia, Scott's father, Chick, urged the brothers to carry on. Back in London, Malcolm eventually phoned Angus and suggested they stop moping and do some work, since it would at least keep them together. They shut the doors on record companies and managers and worked on songs.
The band wanted a singer who was his own man rather than a copy of Scott. Brian Johnson, formerly of the glam rock band Geordie, had one advantage: Scott had admired him. In the early 1970s Scott's old band Fraternity had opened for Geordie, and Scott later told Angus it was the best Little Richard impersonation he had ever seen. Johnson auditioned on March 29, 1980, and the band found him downstairs playing pool with their roadies. He sang "Whole Lotta Rosie," a song closely tied to Scott, and Guitar World records that he was announced as the new singer on April 1.
With Johnson broken in at rehearsals, AC/DC flew to Nassau in the Bahamas to record at Compass Point Studios, again with Lange at the controls. A tropical storm was passing over the island when they arrived. Malcolm said the quiet suited them: they worked through the night over rum and coconut milk, and many lyric ideas came from those sessions. Johnson struggled with the words for the album opener, "Hells Bells," until Lange pointed at the storm and said, "Rolling thunder." Johnson turned it into "I'm a rollin' thunder, pourin' rain, I'm comin' on like a hurricane." The title track was the first song recorded. The last, "Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution," was written by the brothers in about fifteen minutes. Angus said a lot of the ideas were in place before Johnson arrived, and he denied the rumor that the lyrics came from a notebook Scott left behind. The whole album took roughly five to six weeks, a fast pace for a producer known for slow, painstaking work.
The sound came from familiar gear. Angus played a Gibson SG, and Malcolm played a Gretsch. Asked about amplifiers, Angus said he was still using 100-watt Marshall Super Leads, "the old-style ones, without those preamp things." Marshall was pushing its newer preamp models at the time, and he was not interested. Malcolm remembered using his Marshall bass head and thought Angus went to a smaller 50-watt Marshall for his solos, "just for some extra warmth." On the solos themselves, Angus said some were "totally off the top," while others took longer, and that he sometimes spent a whole day on one.
One detail came late. In May, while the album was being mixed at Electric Lady Studios in New York, Malcolm decided it needed a tolling bell at the start of "Hells Bells." Engineer Tony Platt was sent to Loughborough, England, to record a church bell, but pigeons roosting in the tower flew off noisily at every strike. Platt had a custom bell made at a foundry in Leicestershire instead. The cover was solid black as a tribute to Scott. Executives at Atlantic Records worried that an all-black sleeve would hurt sales, but the band refused to change it. As Angus put it, the black cover and the tolling bell were the whole idea.
Back in Black came out in July 1980, about five months after Scott's death. It reached number one in the UK within two weeks. In the US it peaked at number 4, spent 131 weeks on the chart, and was certified platinum by early October, at one point selling 10,000 copies a day. The first single, "You Shook Me All Night Long," made the top 40 in both countries. Sales are now estimated at about 50 million copies. Malcolm's summary of the record was short: "We meant it."
- Guitar World interview with Angus and Malcolm Young, reproduced by SoloDallas — solodallas.com
- Guitar World, AC/DC's Back In Black: the inside story — www.guitarworld.com
- Louder, AC/DC: the story behind Back In Black — www.loudersound.com
- Ultimate Classic Rock, Angus Young Shoots Down Bon Scott Back in Black Rumors — ultimateclassicrock.com