Rock Chronicles. 1980s: Angus Young

When: Early 1983
Where: West Hollywood, California (Sunset Marquis Hotel)
What: This conversation with the feverish and
manic performer took place at the beginning of 1983. Flick of the
Switch had been released and the band had found themselves with another
big record. Angus talked about the record, his beloved SGs, his
Marshall amplifiers, and the unique sound AC/DC has been refining for
so many years.
What really struck me was how small he was. I’m about 5’7” if the
wind is blowing in the right direction and I towered over him. But he
had a hell of a lot more energy than I ever did.
In
an industry gone mad with detail, where every guitarist knows to the
nth degree not only the gauges of his strings but the alloys which made
them up, where every player has a rack of pedals, gadgets and gizmos
which would befuddle most any NASA representative, Angus Young stands
apart as a guitar player who’s unin­terested and unamused. When
referring to his variously dated Gibson SG’s, Young calls them “This guitar” or “This thing.” Rarely “This SG.”
He admits to not know­ing the names of chords; and only upon joining
AC/DC did he develop any sense whatsoever of chord names and
descrip­tions. But for all his lack of technical knowledge, Angus Young
is one of the rare players who has been able to propel the normally
monolithic properties of hard rock out the window and replace them with
intriguing overlays of rhythmic instruments.

Maybe
more than any other guitarist ever, you’re inextricably linked to the
Gibson SG? What was the evolution that brought you to this particular
instrument?

I started playing on banjos and re-strung
them up with six strings. [But] an acoustic guitar, an old bang up
little ten-dollar job, that was probably the first thing I started
playing on. Me brother Malcolm got a Hofner off of one of me other
brothers and he got a Gretsch and passed the Hofner on to me after much
squabbling. It was semi-acoustic and had all been packed with cotton.
But I never used to really take it as a serious thing; I just used to
fool around with it. When I was about 14 was when I really started
playing it seriously. I got an amplifier for about sixty bucks that
used to distort all the time. It was a Phi-Sonic.
After
that I got out and got a Gibson SG that I played until it good wood rot
because so much sweat and water got into it. The whole neck warped. I
bought it second-hand, it was about a ’67. It had a real thin neck,
really slim, like a Custom neck. It was dark brown. After about a year,
you lose about half the power in the pickups so you either get them
re-wired or put new ones in. Just ordinary Gibsons.

How do you explain what you and your brother Malcolm create as guitar players?
He’ll get something and I’ll play along. It’s a natural thing. I
suppose it’s just something we do well together. He seems to have a
great command of rhythm and he likes doing that. That to me is more
impor­tant because if we’re playing live and something goes wrong with
my gear and my guitar drops out, you can still hear him and it’s not
empty. He’s proba­bly got the best right hand in the world. I’ve never
heard anyone do it like that. Even Keith Richards or any of those
people. As soon as the other guitar drops out, it’s empty. But with
Malcolm it’s so full. Beside Malcolm always said that playing lead
interfered with his drinkin’ and so he said I should do it.
Soloing was pretty easy for me be­cause it was probably the first thing
I’ve ever done. I just used to make up leads. I never even knew any
names of chords until Malcolm told me and then I picked it up from
there. I don’t regard myself as a soloist. It’s a color; I put it in
for excitement. It’s not great loss if a solo has to go. We’ve made
songs without solos.

Live you use four Marshall stacks. How do you control so much volume?
All the sound comes directly from the amps. That way it’s your sound
coming out. A lot of times you’ll hear bands and it’s a different sound
coming out than what’s on stage. Because you can clean it up [through a
PAl and make it sound completely different than what they really sound
like. We’ve always been wary of that and that’s why we always tended to
have a lot of amps on stage. And also it has a lot better feel to it
especially when you’re playing hard rock music.

Did these early instruments still have that tremolo arm attached?
They did but I took it off. I used to fool around with them but you begin sounding like Hank Marvin.

Talking about instruments from back in the day, you didn’t start with Marshalls obviously?
I got a $60 amplifier and the tubes would turn blue when you used the
push/pull treble pot. I remember one of the first gigs I played with
that amp was at a local church. They wanted someone to fill in with the
guitar and my friend say, Ah, he can play.’ And so I dragged the
amplifier down and started playing and everybody started yelling turn it down!”


And why did you remain loyal to the SG for the remainder of your career?
It was light [weight-wise]. I’d tried the other ones, Fenders, but
you’ve really got to do a number on ‘em. They’re great for feel but the
wiring just doesn’t got the balls. And I don’t like putting those
DiMarzios and everything because everyone sounds the same. It’s like
you’re listening to the guy down the street. And I liked the hard sound
of the Gibson. All the other sort of Gibsons I tried like the Les Paul
was too heavy. Hip displacement. When I first started playing with the
SG there was nothing to think about.
I don’t know how
this came about but I think I had a lot thinner neck. Someone once said
to me they [Gibson] make two sized necks, one was 1 ½ and one was 1 ¼
and this was like 1 ¼, thin all the way up. Even now I still look all
over and I still haven’t found one; I’ve been to a hundred guitar shops
and I found the same guitar [model] but with different necks. It had a
really thin neck almost like a custom neck.
And you can do a lot of tricks on it, too!
Did
you ever experiment with the SGs when they were called Les Pauls [Eric
Clapton’s graphically appointed Cream-era guitar is probably the most
famous representative of this model]?
Yeah, I had a
really old one I bought, a 1962. But it had a very fat neck; it was
good to play but it felt heavier than all the other ones. That’s why I
stopped using it. And when you’re running around a lot, it weighs you
down.
So from High Voltage on it’s always been the SG. Have you ever tried using more modern types of instruments?
Yeah, I tried a Hamer but I wouldn’t buy an expensive guitar -
especially in my case. It’s always getting beaten around. With the SG,
you can do plenty of tricks with them.
You’ve always
used the same guitar and all the AC/DC albums are always built around
those pretty simple rock formula - how do you keep coming up with new
songs that find an audience?
We try to do everything
with a fresh approach. We try and get an idea of what we basically want
from the album. We don’t like to leave people dry or have them say, ‘These guys have left us and gone off to something else.’
That self-indulgent thing. So we try and keep it basic. A lot of people
say we work a formula but we don’t. We try a fresh approach all the
time.
I saw Deep Purple live once and I paid money for it
and I thought, ‘Geez, this is ridiculous.’ You just see through all
that sort of stuff. I never liked those Deep Pur­ples or those sort of
things. I always hated it. I always thought it was a poor man’s Led
Zeppelin.
And you’ve been faithful to Marshall amplifiers as well?
Ever since I’ve been in this band I’ve been using Marshalls. I’ve tried
Ampeg and they weren’t too good for the sound I wanted. On stage I have
four stacks going, all hooked up with splitter boxes. 100-watt stacks …
it’s good for your eardrums. I use a real lot of volume, I turn that
up; I turn the treble and bass on about half and middle, the same. I
don’t use any presence. If I don’t think it’s putting out enough top, I
will kick up the presence. Just over the years and fooling around with
them you find something that sounds right. With Marshalls, if you’re
using a fair bit of volume, if you whack the treble and bass at half,
that’s where they’re working. We get them from the factory, that’s what
we do. We go down there and try them out and fool around with amps and
tell them what we want and they doctor them up. At the moment, they’re
all back to the old style of Marshalls, they’re very clean. They don’t
have these master or preamp settings.


You have entered the modern age of electronics in your use of a wireless system.
Yeah, I use the Schaffer-Vega. I’ve been using that since ’77. On the
receiver you’ve got like a monitor switch you can boost the signal and
in the transmitter you’ve got the same sort of thing. You can really
give a guitar hell with ‘em. I have used the remote in the studio and
it worked really good.
I don’t believe I’ve ever had a
wah-wah or a fuzz box. It’s just the guitar and the amp and if I need
anything, if someone says they want a different approach to the sound,
then I’ll get it with the guitar.
I did fumble around
with a fuzzwah a long time ago but my foot kept going right through it.
I found that pedals were too much to fool around with. You’d be halfway
through a solo and the batteries would go dead and conk out. And if you
tread on the lead going to the pedal, something would always go wrong.
Or some crazy kid would pull the lead out just at the moment when
you’re about to do your big number on it.
Your sound on Flick of the Switch is a combination of a clean tone but very big sounding. How do you describe your sound?
We wanted this one as raw as possible. We wanted a natural, but big,
sound for the guitars. We didn’t want echoes and reverb going
everywhere and noise elimi­nators and noise extractors. Getting the
sound has always been the easiest part of the guitar. Also, if you’re
playing it right, it’s going to sound right somehow. I mean you gladly
turn down if it’s going to sound good. I mean it’s not like, ‘I have to
have a wall of amps and a candelabra on top.’ If you hit a chord and
it’s distorted, you clean it up. It’s all what you hear. You fiddle
around until you get a good sound. For me, I prefer the sound to be
clean if I can get it clean. If you can get that natural distortion,
fine, because I don’t believe in boxes that sustain. And I don’t
believe in pushing the hell out of the amps because they become muddy
and whooshy.
The way you talk about the guitar, it’s almost as if what you do is an afterthought.
I tend to look at the music as a song; it sounds a bit funny talking
about it as some­place to play a solo. My brother would beat me up.
People tend to see me as a soloist. Poor people. You’d think they’d
have something better to do. I mean there’s a lot of comedy on TV worth
watching. Yeah, people see that but I don’t. I look at it as a band. I
think Pete Townshend is rotten without Roger Daltrey and The Who. He’s
quite boring actually. Or the same with Zeppelin without John Bonham.
To me it’s not the same. I mean there are solo people who just do that
sort of thing. I like it as a band, as a unit. You should hear me on my
own. It’s horrendous.

2008 © Steven Rosen
Thanks for the info UG