The Lives of Brian: a Memoir, page 1
Endpapers
Photo © Paul Natkin/Getty Images
Dedication
To my Great, Great, Great Grandchildren, who
I’ll never meet. It’s nice to know we’ll connect
through these words. I wish you the very best in
life whoever you are.
With Love your Great, Great, Great Grandfather
Brian Johnson
Contents
Cover
Endpapers
Title Page
Dedication
Author’s Note
Prologue
Part One
1. Alan and Esther
2. Out in the Cold
3. A-Wop Bop A-Loo Bop
4. Showstopper
5. A Ruff Business
6. The Apprentice
7. Eine Kleine Rockmusik
8. Crashing and Burning
Part Two
9. Oops
10. A Horrible Shower of Shit
11. Geordie Boy
12. Wardour Street
13. Highway to . . . Nowhere
14. Stowaway
15. Bailiff Blues
16. A Sign from Above
Part Three
17. Lobley Hill
18. Beautiful Mover
19. Grand National Day
20. Breaking Up
21. Welcome to Paradise
22. Rolling Thunder
23. Back from Black
24. The Last Bit before the End
Epilogue
A Rock’n’Roll Family Tree
Acknowledgements
Index
Photo Section
About the Author
Also by Brian Johnson
Copyright
About the Publisher
Author’s Note
Courtesy of the author
Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.
This is a book about what happened when I didn’t get what I wanted, but never stopped believing, and never gave up. Luck also played its part, of course – but I truly believe that you can achieve just about anything if your dreams are urgent enough, and if you don’t just sit around, waiting for something to happen.
Others will have different memories of the events that I describe in these pages. It’s been more than forty years since the making of Back in Black, after all – and half a century since the glory days of my first band, Geordie. This is just my version of how it all went down.
Finally, I’d like to say a big thank you to Angus, Malcolm, Cliff and Phil for rolling the dice and giving me a second chance at a professional music career under some of the most difficult and tragic circumstances that any band could face. Malcolm, if there is another side, mate, when I get there I’ll be buying you and Bon a beer.
B. J. – London, 2022
Prologue
Dana Zuk Photography
I’d taken some hard blows before. But this time felt different.
This time, barring a miracle, there’d be no getting back up.
The first hint that something was about to go very badly wrong had come in Edmonton, Canada.
It was the end of September 2015, halfway through AC/DC’s Rock or Bust World Tour, and we were playing Commonwealth Stadium, the biggest outdoor venue in the country – packed to capacity with more than 60,000 people. It was extremely cold and extremely wet, with buckets of rain coming down in front of the stage.
Angus already had a bad fever, and I could feel myself starting to come down with the same thing.
Being Canadian, the crowd didn’t seem to have even noticed the weather. But of course, they were bundled up in the kinds of clothes that you can only buy north of the U.S. border, which protect you from everything from raging blizzards to pissed-off polar bears.
As for us, we were just in our usual gear. Me in a black T-shirt and jeans. Angus in his thin white school shirt and shorts. The stage was at least dry, with some warmth from the lights, but Angus and I always like to go out onto the walkway to be with the audience. So, that’s where we spent a lot of the show – and after a few songs, we’d worked up such a sweat from all the moving around, we didn’t care that we were getting soaked to the bone in near-freezing conditions.
Two hours, nineteen songs and a couple of encores later, we came off stage, feeling great about the gig. The sound on stage had been perfect. The fans had been screaming and cheering and singing along. Angus had played like a man possessed. But there was no time to hang around – we had to get to our next show. So, we said our goodbyes and climbed into our minibuses, which sped us straight to the airport.
As we boarded the jet that would take us to Vancouver, the adrenaline of the show was starting to wear off – and the physical toll that it had taken was starting to become clear.
I couldn’t stop shaking.
The thought crossed my mind that for someone just a week away from celebrating his sixty-eighth birthday, maybe all that time in the freezing rain hadn’t been such a great idea.
Then again, Angus wasn’t faring much better – and he was just a wee nipper of sixty.
Touring is always hard on the body, I reminded myself, no matter what your age. Coming down with the occasional bout of flu between shows is just part of the deal.
I ordered a big shot of whisky, which helped, while Angus had his usual mug of steaming hot tea – and before we knew it, we were wheels-down in Vancouver and heading to our hotel.
But something wasn’t right.
It was my ears.
They hadn’t popped.
I tried all the old tricks – yawning, swallowing, holding my nose and blowing – but nothing worked. I gave up, thinking that they’d clear themselves during the night.
But when I woke up the next morning . . . oh, shit. I felt like I was wearing a bearskin balaclava.
If anything, my hearing had gotten even worse.
I couldn’t bring myself to mention it to anyone at breakfast. When you’re the lead singer of a band, your bandmates, the crew, the management, the support staff, the record label and, most important of all, the hundreds of thousands of fans, are all depending on you to get up on stage and do your job, no matter what.
My ears would pop eventually, I told myself.
They always had before.
By the time we got on stage that night at BC Place – another stadium, but this time with a roof – Angus seemed to have shaken off the worst of the fever. But I was still struggling.
Then disaster struck.
About two-thirds of the way through the set, the guitars lost all their tone in my ears, and I found myself searching for the key of the song. It was like driving in fog – all reference points suddenly gone. It was the absolute worst experience that I’d ever had as a singer, made all the more terrifying by the fact that it was happening with several more songs to go . . . in front of tens of thousands of paying fans. But somehow, I made it through – and if anyone noticed, they were too kind to say.
With only two more shows to go on this leg of the tour – AT&T Park in San Francisco and Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles – I convinced myself that I could keep going, that my ears would eventually pop. It seemed impossible to me that they wouldn’t.
But the exact same thing happened at both shows. Two-thirds of the way through, I lost the key of the song and couldn’t get it back. Worse still, I couldn’t hear the conversation in the dressing room afterwards – or later, when we went out to a restaurant for dinner. I just smiled and nodded along, pretending that everything was fine.
But inside, panic was setting in.
Since Angus formed AC/DC with his brother Malcolm in 1973 – first with Dave Evans on vocals, then the great Bon Scott, then yours truly – it’s always been an all-or-nothing kind of band.
Just take the giant stack of speakers that we use on stage.
A lot of bands, they use fakes or real cabinets with empty compartments to get the same aggressive, awe-inspiring look. Not AC/DC. With AC/DC, what you see is what you hear – and what you hear as a result is the loudest band on the face of the earth.
Then there’s Angus.
The intensity that lad brings to the stage, the whirlwind of energy he can keep up for more than two hours . . . it’s frightening. He can’t turn it off. When he comes back to the dressing room after a show, he’s spent, dead on his feet, gulping down oxygen.
The normal, off-stage Angus is just this nice, softly spoken, five-foot-something guy. But on stage, something happens to him. He transforms. When he goes for a piss before the show, he’s still Angus. But when he comes back and he’s at the side of the stage, you’ve lost him. You can’t look into his eyes and tell him, ‘Have a good one.’
He’s gone. Dr. Jekyll has become Mr. Hyde.
And then off he goes, walking out in his schoolboy outfit, Gibson around his neck, lifts his fist to the crowd and 50, 60, maybe 100,000 people lose their fucking minds. He hasn’t even played a note. It’s just the poise. The growl in his eyes. Who else can do that? Maybe Elvis Presley or Freddie Mercury could do it back in the day. But now it’s Angus alone. And the guy can move like the best dancer. The hips. The legs. The whole thing. He out Chuck Berrys Chuck Berry. When you’re up close on stage with him, it’s the most incredible thing to see.
For most of AC/DC’s history, of course, Angus also had his opposite on stage in the form of Malcolm. All of the Young kids – who were born in Glasgow, but emigrated with their parents to
Malcolm was never any less intense than his younger brother. He just didn’t care about being the centre of attention. He’d run up to the mic and sing whatever lines that he had to sing, then he’d walk back to his amp stack and stay out of the way. But make no mistake – Malcolm was the beating heart of the band.
Over the many, many years that I spent with Malcolm on the road, I saw just about every great guitarist you could think of take him aside and ask him how he got those thick-wound strings on his battered Gretsch with a missing pickup to sound that way.
‘I just hit ’em hard,’ he’d reply with a shrug.
Malcolm also had this uncanny ability to simultaneously watch every single move of every single person in the band, listen to their performance, study the audience’s reaction, and at the end of the night, give the kind of feedback that might not have been easy to hear, but made the show better the next night. I’ve never known any musician to command so much respect from their bandmates and crew.
But even an all-or-nothing band like AC/DC sometimes has to compromise when faced with the setbacks and tragedies that can’t be avoided when you spend a lifetime on the road.
A year before the Rock or Bust World Tour began, Malcolm had to leave the band to get treatment for early-onset dementia. He’d been suffering from lapses of memory and concentration since the Black Ice tour of 2010. So, he stepped back – with his nephew Stevie filling in.
It was the biggest shock to the band since Bon’s death, thirty-five years earlier.
And it wasn’t the only shock. The master of bass, Cliff Williams – AC/DC’s Essex Boy to my Geordie, with the band since 1978 – made it known that Rock or Bust would be his last tour. Meanwhile, Phil Rudd had to bow out due to legal problems in New Zealand, with Chris Slade – who’d played on Razors Edge – taking over on drums.
And then . . . well, there was me.
It’s strange to talk about my own part in AC/DC . . . never mind my own voice. You have to be a pent-up, woundup animal to hit those notes in ‘Back in Black’, ‘Thunderstruck’ and ‘For Those about to Rock’. Before a show, I feel like my feet are in the blocks at the start of a gold-medal sprint at the Olympics – because I know that it’s going to take every last piece of me to produce that roar of power, rage and attack, and keep it up, for song after song after song. It’s like singing with a fixed bayonet.
But without my hearing?
I couldn’t escape the feeling that, after thirty-five years with the band, maybe I was nearing the end too.
After the three shows in a row where I couldn’t hear the guitars, we had October off, which I hoped would be enough time to rest my body and ears and make everything fine again.
But back home in Sarasota, Florida, it was more obvious than ever that there was something very wrong. It had been six weeks now since my ears hadn’t popped.
I needed to get help.
The next leg of the tour was due to start in Sydney, Australia. As it happened, I knew that one of the world’s best ear, nose and throat doctors was also there – Dr. Chang. So, after talking to the band’s tour manager, Tim Brockman, I decided to fly out ten days early to get my ears properly checked out. I also knew that Malcolm was being treated for his dementia nearby. I hoped that I could pay him a visit.
It was a relief to see Dr. Chang and finally confide in someone about what had been going on. But the relief didn’t last very long. After an examination and some tests, he turned deadly serious and said that he would have to put me under and operate.
‘After the tour?’ I asked.
‘No, right now,’ he replied.
When I’d contracted the fever in Edmonton, Dr. Chang explained, fluid had built up in my ears. The flight to Vancouver had then caused swelling that had trapped it there. That’s why my ears hadn’t popped. And because I’d kept touring instead of getting treatment, the fluid had crystallized – and for every minute longer that it stayed in there, the more damage it was doing. So, it had to be removed, immediately.
‘Will the operation fix it?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Dr. Chang replied. ‘But we can certainly try and stop it from getting worse.’
‘But I’ve got a gig in ten days . . .’
‘We’ll do everything we can to get you better by then.’
‘One more thing, Dr. Chang,’ I said, now feeling very nervous. ‘How will you get the crystals out?’
‘Are you sure you want to know?’
‘I mean . . . yeah . . . ?’
‘With a chisel.’
He didn’t look like he was joking.
Part One
1
Alan and Esther
Courtesy of the author
The soundtrack of my early childhood was the clatter of my mother’s sewing machine, followed by the muffled sobs of her crying herself to sleep every night downstairs.
She was Italian, my ma – Esther Maria Victoria Octavia De Luca was her maiden name – and she’d moved to the North East of England with my dad after the war, not realizing that it would be absolutely nothing like her home town of Frascati, just outside Rome.
I can only imagine how much the poor lass’s heart sank when she first set eyes on Dunston, the part of Gateshead – just south of the river from Newcastle upon Tyne – where my dad was from. The factories and coal staithes. The back-to-back terraced houses on the steep slope of the Scotswood Road. The soot-faced men trudging home from work. Bombed houses everywhere. The constant wind and rain.
On top of that, of course, there was the rationing, which went on for another nine years after we ‘won’ the war – the food made worse by the British custom of boiling it until every last atom disintegrated, turning every meal into a plate of grey sludge.
I mean, I’ve got to hand it to my dad – who served with the Durham Light Infantry in North Africa and then Italy, where he met my ma – that he ever managed to persuade such a beautiful, well-to-do young woman to come home with him.
What made it even more impressive was that my mother was engaged at the time to a tall, handsome Italian dentist who probably had a fabulous name like Alessandro or Giovani or something, while my dad was a five-foot-two Geordie sergeant called Alan. But my old man’s secret weapon was his voice. It was so massive and commanding, he could make you simultaneously stand to attention and shit yourself from a thousand yards. Even when he growled – which he did a lot – he could somehow make the words come out at the same terrifying volume. His secret was he learned to speak Italian and promised my mother he would speak Italian in England. For the rest of his life, he never broke his promise and we kids listened and wondered why no one else spoke like that. It was a little confusing going to school and hearing English.
My dad had joined the army in 1939, just before conscription, to try and get out of working down the pits. But then Hitler invaded Poland, Britain declared war and, all of a sudden, then-Private Johnson found himself shipped off to North Africa, where he fought with the Desert Rats. Now, as any history buff knows, Germany’s Afrika Korps were a far superior fighting force to the British in those early days of the war, so the fact my old man survived two blood-soaked years in the Tunisian desert is nothing short of a miracle. But he didn’t just survive. He rose all the way to sergeant – not that there was much competition for promotions, given that most candidates were dead before they could be considered for the job.
My dad almost didn’t make it back in one piece himself.
His most terrifying near-miss came when he was in the back of a truck that ran straight into the path of a German half-track with a 20mm anti-aircraft cannon on it. After a pause of about two seconds, the truck and anyone still in it were turned to ashes and dust. My dad managed to jump out in time with a few others, and they all piled into a nearby cave for cover. But the Germans just trained their cannon on the cave and let loose until they got bored. When the shelling finally stopped, my dad was the only one left in there alive. He was convinced that the Germans saw him crawl out, but they let him go anyway, probably not wanting the bother of dealing with a shell-shocked prisoner of war who could barely walk.
