“There were thousands of pirate tapes, shit-poor quality and expensive,” Johnson told Creem magazine. To their fury, the band didn’t have the power to stop the release, though they did their best to cover their record company’s tracks, claiming it was essentially to counter US bootlegs of the album. Not for the first time in history, short-term record company greed had stymied long-term artist career growth. The upshot, says Carson, was that the sales plateau for all subsequent AC/DC album releases in America would be similarly downsized. This was one of the worst money-driven decisions ever made by a label executive.”ĭirty Deeds… reached No.3 in the US, one place higher than Back In Black’s peak, but it sold only two million copies there at a time when Back In Black was now topping 10 million. “There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind, if they’d waited for the next Johnson album it would have been an even bigger album. “I said to Morris: ‘How are you ever going to consider releasing a Bon Scott album after we’ve just broken our balls introducing the public to Brian Johnson? I think you’re crazy!’” states Carson today. Phil Carson was the head of Atlantic everywhere outside America, and the man who had signed AC/DC to the label. Rather than wait for a proper follow-up, he decided to make hay while the sun shone by releasing Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap – an album that had been released everywhere but the US five years before.
In Morris’s eyes, the success of Back In Black was a flash-in-the-pan. “The only other time was when Atlantic told them to go home to Australia and write a hit, and they came back with Rock And Roll Damnation, all hand-claps and maracas – and still not a hit.”īy the end of 1980, Atlantic had installed a new president, the hard-nosed Doug Morris. “It was one of the only times they ever played the game,” says Jeffery. None of these decisions had been popular with the band, but they had gone along with them because they had no choice.
Hence also the decision to oust George Young – elder brother of Malcolm and Angus – and his partner Harry Vanda from the production hot-seats they had occupied from the very beginning and bring in producer-of-the-moment Mutt Lange, with the specific brief to produce an album that US radio would actually play (a feat he achieved in with 1979’s Bon Scott swansong Highway To Hell). Hence the nudge they gave them towards ditching their original manager, Michael Browning, and switching in 1978 to more experienced handlers, in the shape of Leber-Krebs and the day-to-day attentions of an up-and-coming young firebrand from New York named Peter Mensch. The label had picked up AC/DC in 1976, though the feeling in the US office was that the band had little chance of making headway there. Founded in 1947 by Turkish-born mogul Ahmet Ertegun, it made its name with R&B, jazz and soul before branching out into rock in the 70s, most notably with Led Zeppelin. “Everything was going great until Atlantic stepped in and fucked it up.”Ītlantic Records was one of music’s great powerhouses. “We didn’t know it yet, but the really hard part had only just begun,” he says of the post- Back In Black period. He had been with them since they’d arrived in the UK in 1976 and was an integral part of the set-up. Ian Jeffery was the band’s tour manager at the time. That’s not how everyone in the AC/DC camp remembers it, however. We were very confident after the success of Back In Black. We never felt any outside pressure, because we didn’t let it in. “You can’t write songs with the intention to sell a million singles or albums. “Of course, the label wanted it to sell just like Back In Black did, but we knew damn well that’s not going to happen cos you can’t do that,” Brian Johnson says today. They even had a title for the new album that rang out as both a call to arms and a tribute to the fans who had elevated them to their current position: For Those About To Rock We Salute You. Not only had they managed the seemingly impossible in replacing Scott with Johnson, a 33-year-old journeyman whose only previous brush with success was a sole Top 10 hit with his former band Geordie seven years earlier, but also they had the ultimate team in their corner: top management in the shape of Leber-Krebs, who also handled Aerosmith and Ted Nugent Atlantic Records, the world’s biggest label and, most importantly, producer Mutt Lange, the man who had played such an important part in their rise.
#Camp rock 1 song list plus
When the five members of AC/DC – Angus Young and his elder brother, rhythm guitarist and de facto leader Malcolm, plus bassist Cliff Williams, drummer Phil Rudd and new-kid vocalist Brian Johnson – arrived in Paris in the early summer of 1981 to start recording the follow-up to Back In Black, the building blocks for yet more success were solidly in place.