We Salute You
rememberinG malcolm younG
With Malcolm Young’s passing, we lose the most exciting, propulsive rhythm player in rock guitar history. We look back on his TNT style
1953-2017
With the death of ac/Dc’s mastermind and rhythm man, the best right hand in rock has fallen silent. We look back on a life in which flash and fanfare came second to fabulous riffs
Malcolm Young was never the face of AC/DC. Amidst the razzmatazz of a typical stadium show, with its attendant cannons, pyro, inflatables and locomotives, the Australian band’s founder and rhythm man could easily be overlooked. For a full 37 years, while his younger brother Angus frolicked and spasmed in a school uniform, Malcolm was an impassive sentry on the backline, face obscured by lank curtains of hair, a five-foot-nothing figure dwarfed by his Marshall stack. Even offstage, he moved like a shadow, usually delegating press duties to the convivial pairing of Angus and latter-day frontman Brian Johnson.
But for fans who had followed the band since their 1973 formation, Malcolm was the walking embodiment of AC/DC: he represented the heart, the guts, the bluecollar work ethic, the business brain, and perhaps most of all, the right hand, widely fancied as the best in the business. In recent years, this most elusive of guitar heroes had receded still further from public view, his 2014 exit from AC/DC cruelly forced by early-onset dementia. But when news broke of Malcolm’s death on 18 November – aged just 64 – his influence and legacy were underlined by a starburst of tributes from players representing the gamut of genre. “The entire rock ‘n’ roll community,” noted Slash, “is heartbroken by his passing.”
Although Australia claimed ownership of AC/DC – and both Young brothers spoke with an Antipodean twang – Malcolm was born in Glasgow in 1953, his childhood on the tough Cranhill housing estate lightened by vinyl brought home by six older siblings. “We were always into blues and rock ‘n’ roll stuff,” he recalled. “We had older brothers who were into Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, so we grew up hearing all that.”
It’s A Long Way To The Top
By 1963, the Youngs’ father – a former RAF mechanic, fallen on hard times – had heard of the Australian government’s Assisted Passage Scheme, and relocated the family to the Sydney suburb of Burwood. The music began. Malcolm had already learnt the rudiments on an acoustic guitar in Glasgow, but watching elder brother George form The Easybeats in 1964 – and score a global hit two years later with Friday On My Mind – gave him impetus. “I guess I started seriously picking it up when I got to Australia,” he told Guitarist in the early-90s, “but I knew how to get hold of the strings, and a few chords, and a few riffs, at the time. The ones with three or four notes in – same as what we do today, really!”
Malcolm’s own career was less meteoric (“He worked in a bra factory,” Angus once chuckled. “That was with, like, a thousand women. They’d say ‘Mal, my machine’s down’. And while he’s on the floor fixing it, they’d be patting his head and rubbing his butt”) but already his drive was palpable. By 1972, he’d drafted a proto-lineup of what became AC/DC through a classified ad in the newspaper, adding Angus on lead when he decided that solos “interfered” with his drinking, but also because of his affinity for the groove. “Rhythm has always been my thing,” he told Guitarist. “When I used to listen to records, I used to listen to the drummer. Ringo’s fills with The Beatles: they were always simple, but they stuck out in my mind. Lennon was conjuring up the feel within the track, y’know, and I sort of got into it that way, being a fan of John Lennon. So I ended up playing guitar a bit like a drummer, with that sort of influence.”
As AC/DC debuted at Sydney’s Chequers club on New Year’s Eve, 1973, the Youngs adopted the roles they would occupy for the next four decades: Angus as manic livewire and Malcolm as stoic backbone. When the shirtless, leering, habitually drunk Bon Scott arrived on vocals in October 1974, Malcolm became even less of a focal point. Yet any notion of him as a silent partner was misguided. Holding his bandmembers to the highest standards, Malcolm wasn’t shy of ejecting a weak link, and his axe fell on various hapless rhythm sections and managers in those formative days. As sometime
bassist Mark Evans said in a backhanded compliment: “Malcolm was the driven one, the planner, the schemer, the behindthe-scenes guy, ruthless and astute.”
When AC/DC moved to Melbourne in 1975 – the lineup taking up residence in a shared house of notorious excess – it was Malcolm’s steely vision that ensured the mayhem never derailed the music. The guitarist’s recollection that “back then, we never went into the studio with anything more than a riff” sounds casual, but on the following year’s debut international album release, High Voltage, those riffs were astonishing:
from T.N.T to It’s A Long Way To The Top
(If You Wanna Rock ‘N’ Roll), each was a masterclass in pugnacious economy. “The ideal situation for us,” he told Guitarist, “is to come up with a riff that you really get off on. If you’re lucky enough to come up with one that really stands out, then that’s a great way to start writing a song.”
By 1977’s Let There Be Rock, Malcolm had hit his stride as a writer. “Now that was a steamer,” he agreed. “Whole Lotta Rosie, we knew, was a winner, and Bad
Boy Boogie and Let There Be Rock were the other two that we felt would really go the distance.”
Even better riffs would roll off Malcolm’s fingers – and just in time. In 1979, with Atlantic Records threatening to drop AC/DC in the absence of a bona fide hit, the guitarist raised the band’s game with the breakthrough Highway To
Hell album, and he already had another world-beater ready to go. “During the
Highway To Hell tour,” remembered Angus, “Malcolm came in and played me a couple of ideas he had on cassette, and one of them was the riff for Back In Black. In fact, I was never able to do it exactly the way he had it on that tape. To my ears, I still don’t play the thing right.”
Whole Lotta Rhythm
Deceptively simple, Malcolm’s rhythm work was by now setting the standard for hard rock; his right hand hitting with the power and precision of a locomotive piston; his sense of space and groove making other bands sound leaden and club-footed (indeed, the guitarist made an important distinction between ‘rock’ and ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ bands, noting that the former “don’t really swing”). In his hands, even the most rudimentary open chords were vital and alive. “They’re big chords and they can ring for ages,” he told
Guitarist. “You can take any one of our songs and move them up and play them as barre chords and they’re just not the same songs any more. They’ve lost width or depth, somehow.”
In the wake of Back In Black – recorded with Brian Johnson following the death of Scott – Angus was just one of many global guitar heroes in awe of this minimalist genius. “Malcolm has got the best right hand in the world,” gushed the younger brother. “I’ve never heard anyone handle the instrument like that. Not even Keith Richards.”
Back In Black would shift over 50 million copies – making it the secondhighest-selling album in history – but even as AC/DC straddled the planet, success didn’t go to Malcolm’s gear. Just as on the Australian toilet circuit, he stuck with the same patched-up ’62-ish Gretsch Jet Firebird he dubbed “my Stradivarius”, with thick 0.12-0.56 strings that let him “really whack the guitar”, the original bridge pickup re-wound with “the thickest gauge wire that I can get in there” and the neck pickup removed entirely because “it always sounded shit, anyway – it was just a waffly, bassy, middly type of sound that never did anything, y’know?”
As for the Gretsch’s distinctive tailpiece plate, that too came with a story, gleefully told to Guitarist in 1994: “That was some kid in Sydney that put the bridge on for me – it’s supposed to be some guy’s dick. I never knew it until about two years later when he told me, it was just his little joke. He was having a good old laugh at my expense for a couple of years. I never knew. But I just kept it on, y’know?”
As the polar opposite to the prima donnas of the 80s music scene, AC/DC fans loved Malcolm for his everyman demeanour (“I’ve never felt like a pop
star,” he told Rolling Stone, “this is a nineto-five sort of gig”). But stardom didn’t leave him entirely unscathed. While Angus was famously teetotal, Malcolm’s alcoholism was spiralling, and in 1988, he left his nephew Stevie Young to deputise on the Blow Up Your Video tour. “It caught right up to me and I lost the plot,” he recalled. “Angus was going: ‘I’m your brother, I don’t want to see you dead here. Remember Bon?’ So I took that break and cleaned myself up.”
Malcolm returned – he never drank again – and if the classic material was getting thinner on late-period AC/DC albums like 1990’s The Razors Edge and 1995’s Ballbreaker, then his prowess as a rhythm guitarist was undimmed. By the post-millennium, however, those who knew him best had concerns. “When we made Black Ice [2008], when we were writing songs together, me and him, it was noticeable,” Angus told Australia’s ABC News. “Just strange things, y’know? Memory things. Malcolm was always very organised, and this was the first time I’d seen him disorganised, confused about a lot of things. That’s when it hit me that something was not right. When we were actually doing that album, it became even more prominent. Then he’d be confused just travelling somewhere. He got diagnosed then: it said he had shrinkage of the brain. He had some medicines and stuff – he had the best treatment – but as I said to him at the time, ‘You don’t have to be doing this if you don’t feel you’re capable’. And he said, ‘No, I’ll keep doing it ‘til I can’t.”
Malcolm played his final show with AC/DC at Spain’s Campo De San Mamés stadium in 2010, and in September 2014, he officially left the lineup, his family confirming his diagnosis with dementia. Not for the first time, many questioned whether the band could – or should – continue, but they played on, using some of the bandleader’s stockpiled material to fuel 2014’s Rock Or Bust and touring once again with Stevie. “Malcolm was the inspirational leader and he said, ‘Keep making music’, without any of that sympathy stuff,” explained Johnson. “There was none of that stuff around. He just said, ‘Keep doing it’.”
Famously private, Malcolm’s deteriorating condition was always going to be played out behind closed doors. Although the rock scene hadn’t seen or heard anything of him for over three years, the guitarist’s death last month brought with it a fresh sense of loss. And if it seemed odd that a player who had recycled the same low-register chords for four decades could be regarded as an alltime great, then the response around the world begged to differ.
Rock In Peace
Tweets of condolence came from players as disparate as Tom Morello (“#1 greatest rhythm guitarist in the entire history of rock ‘n’ roll”), Nancy Wilson of Heart (“His rhythm guitar style needed no embellishment. He laid down the simple solid guitar truth that taught us all about the ‘less is more’ ethic”) and Ryan Adams (“He was the engine that roared behind the most powerful band in the world”). Even Eddie Van Halen – a virtuoso seemingly diametrically opposed to Malcolm’s steady grooves – was bereft: “It is a sad day. Malcolm Young was my friend and the heart and soul of AC/DC.”
But perhaps most affecting of all was the tribute from Angus himself: “As his brother it is hard to express in words what he has meant to me during my life, the bond we had was unique and very special. He leaves behind an enormous legacy that will live on forever. Malcolm, job well done…”
“He leaves behind an enormous legacy that will live on forever. Malcolm, job well done” Angus Young