AC/DC Shrugs Off a Death and Rocks On

"We just get out there and rock," says Angus, who loses an average of three-and-a-half pounds a night through his manic stage routine. "If your amp blows up or your guitar packs it in, smash it up and pick up another one. And that's how it always was with us. We can't even stop and tune up. Those kids are all wound up. A second or two seconds is too much for them. They've gotta have it."

Offstage, Angus Young doesn't look like the guy to give it to 'em. In high contrast to AC/DC's reputation as troublemakers, boozers and womanizers — due in no small part to the lyrical content of songs like "Sin City," "Kicked in the Teeth" and "What Do You Do for Money Honey" — Angus is a quiet, reflective sort, with a crooked smile, a Scottish accent only slightly more intelligible than Brian's, an attractive Dutch-born wife, Ellen, and an addiction to hot tea with milk. Similarly, Malcolm does not look half so mean pushing a baby stroller with his four-month-old daughter in it as he does banging out the monster riff to "Hells Bells" on a wide-body Gretsch White Falcon guitar that's almost as big as he is.

But the stories of AC/DC's hair-trigger tempers and fast fists are legend. "That's because we always stick together," says Angus. "Like us Youngs, we're all short. We walk into a show now, and we still get people hassling us. We used to pull up at a show in a car, and the security people wouldn't let us in. We'd tell 'em, 'We're playing here tonight,' but you couldn't get through to half these people. In the end, we'd just crash through. We pulled many a Starsky-and-Hutch through the gates."

For AC/DC, and the Young brothers in particular, life has always been an us-against-them proposition. Malcolm remembers his first few years of school in Glasgow as a series of schoolyard brawls. Angus was only four when his family moved to Sydney, but when he entered high school there, his older brother's reputation preceded him. "I was caned the first day," he says. "The guy said, 'What's your name?' 'Young.' 'Come out here, I'm going to make an example of you.'" By the time he was fifteen, Angus was given what he calls "a very fine option — 'Either you leave or we'll throw you out.'" He left.

Music also ran in the Young family. Malcolm cites his second-oldest brother, John, as a big guitar influence. Another brother, George, was a founding member of Sixties Aussie pop sensations the Easybeats ("Friday on My Mind"). He later formed a production team with fellow Easybeat Harry Vanda, and the two still record as Flash and the Pan. They also produced the first four AC/DC LPs.

Malcolm and Angus followed suit, taking up guitars and forming their own bands with little success until they decided to join forces in 1973. From the very beginning, the band was called AC/DC, and Angus' gonzo stage act was part of the show. George even encouraged Angus to get wild in the studio. During the sessions for the group's second U.S. album, Let There Be Rock, amps started blowing up in the middle of one Angus solo, but George made him keep playing. "There was no way," a deadpan George explains, "we were going to stop a shit-hot performance for a technical reason like amps blowing up." Angus also experimented with several different stage costumes in the early days — a gorilla suit, a Zorro outfit, even a "Super-Ang" get-up — but the school uniform was a natural, since he was only sixteen at the time.