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GW As part of your new deal with Epic, the label is remastering most of your back catalog. Atlantic Records did the same thing back in the early Nineties. What’s different about these new reissues?

MALCOLM For one thing, the levels are up a hell of a lot louder than they were the last time. I was just comparing them the other day and the volume is twice is loud. Plus, the bottom end sounds great, and they put in a bit more mids as well. Everything sounds tight and ballsy.

ANGUS And with these new ones we involved a lot of the people who worked on the original records, as well as newer guys who have a good grasp of the recent technology. So it’s the best of both worlds. Plus, we’ve included a few little surprises and things, like some rare audio and video.

GW Any chance that some of the material you recorded with your first singer, Dave Evans, will turn up? Like the 1974 single version of “Can I Sit Next to You Girl,” for instance…

ANGUS I certainly hope not! [laughs] Because you could’ve blinked and that’s about how long he was with us. It was sort of like, when you’re just getting together as a band, he was the local guy down the road so we had him join. That lineup certainly wasn’t your dream band or anything.

MALCOLM The guy was a schmuck, to be honest. When we kicked him out he thought we would be finished. Every time we come back to tour here in Australia, Dave seems to get himself into the newspapers by saying he was the star and he made AC/DC. So we certainly don’t want to promote him.

GW You can tell right off the bat when you rerecorded that song with Bon that, even though his voice was very wild and sometimes even off-key, it had such character.

MALCOLM Bon was an original. There was another guy out of England, Alex Harvey [best known for his early Seventies work with the Sensational Alex Harvey Band—Ed.], who was quite clever with his phrasing and his words, and I think Bon picked up a few things from him. Alex never really had a singing voice—he did more of a talking type of thing—but he would tear it up onstage. That certainly woke Bon up to the fact that there’s more to songwriting than just pop tunes.

ANGUS And with Bon, you felt his charisma. You could see him coming from a mile away. He was originally a drummer, and when he first joined up with Mal and I, he said, “Ahh, I just want to play drums.” And we went, “No no no. You’re singing.”

GW Bon also had a real gift for penning lyrics that not only were true to the life he was leading but also managed to be funny, no matter how uncomfortable or embarrassing the situation he was singing about. “Whole Lotta Rosie” from Let There Be Rock comes to mind, or a track from the Australian version of that record, “Crabsody in Blue.”

MALCOLM Yeah, I remember Rosie—what was it, “42-39-56”? She was quite a big girl! As for “Crabsody in Blue,” well, we all got the crabs at one time or another. They would spread in the car! We were touring in Australia at the time, and just about every town we went to somebody had to go into the VD clinic. Crabs and scabies— they were rampant at the time. Because every band was screwing the same women. That’s where “The Jack” [High Voltage] came from as well. Some girl at a gig accused Bon of giving her VD. She was yelling it from the front of the club. And in between songs Bon told her, "I didn’t give you the jack. It was Phil!” So we wrote that song because girls tended to blame us for spreading it around. But it wasn’t our fault—it was already out there. So we figured we’d put it in a song so when these girls came to our shows we could point at ’em and shout, “She’s got the Jack!”

GW The band’s backing vocals on those early records were also great—like a street gang shouting away. Who was doing them?

MALCOLM Mainly Cliff and me, though we used Angus on some of that stuff, like “T.N.T.” [High Voltage] and “Dirty Deeds,” because he’s got that same character in his voice. That’s what we were going for—just a bit of character. Because we’re certainly not singers!

GW As your producers, how big of a role did your older brother George and his partner Harry Vanda [both were former guitarists in the Easybeats, best known for their 1966 hit, “Friday on My Mind”—Ed.] play in shaping the sound of the band?

ANGUS They were huge. Harry always had a great ear for guitar work. He could pick out things in your playing that were different from what anyone else was doing. Which was particularly great for me because I was the youngest, and when I would get in the studio and pick up my guitar I would tend to just go wild right off the bat. Just blast out every note, you know? [laughs] And Harry and George would politely ask, “That’s great, but can you do something that’s a little more in there with the track?”

MALCOLM They would say, “Just come into the studio and do what you do onstage. We want to capture that live excitement.” That’s why you’ll probably notice that most of our early tracks speed up toward the end. After the guitar solo we’d start to take off!

GW And George even pulled double duty on High Voltage, handling all of the bass parts.

ANGUS Sure. He used to fill in a lot in those early days. At that time the band was all about getting the best guys you could find to play the music. It wasn’t always easy to find people who had the right chemistry and who dug playing our type of music.

GW Did you guys have a clear vision right from the beginning of what you wanted AC/DC to sound like?

ANGUS I suppose it was more of Mal’s thing. When I first got together with him I said, “Well, what are we going to play?” And he said, “That’s obvious—what’s missing out there?” And I, of course, replied, “I don’t know. What?” I was as baffled as anyone! And he said, “A good hard rock and roll band.” Because it just seemed to be a dead time, judging from what you’d hear on the local radio here in Australia and also what was coming from your shores and out of Europe. Sure, you had the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, but there was very little good, solid rock that appealed to the youth of that time. And we noticed it straight away when we first started playing about. People were showing up in droves just from word of mouth.

GW Other than Highway to Hell, you recorded all of your Seventies-era albums at Alberts Studio in Sydney. What was that place like?

MALCOLM It was great—the best studio we’ve ever recorded in. But they changed it around the time we were doing Powerage. They built a second, bigger room that was geared up with all the latest equipment of the day, like the solid-state SSL desks. But we preferred the old Neve boards, the analog ones that had that warm, valve-y sound. So we ended up going back into the little room. In fact, all the records we did at Alberts were recorded in that small room.

GW Would you record together as a band?

ANGUS Sure. We’d all get in there and start off with the rhythm tracks. Sometimes, we’d do it all. George would say, “Go ahead and just play the guitar solo.”

GW While you were doing the basic rhythms?

ANGUS Yup. And also any little fills that were in the song. Because it would add to the atmosphere. “High Voltage” was one of those tracks. It was the first take we’d done, and every take after that just seemed shallow in comparison. So that was a first-timer, guitar solo and everything. And it was great for me, because then George would go, “All right, you’re done!” [laughs]

GW Would you ever go back and overdub rhythm tracks?

MALCOLM Only if it was really necessary. Occasionally we might go out of tune because were recording some pretty fiery stuff and we’d be hitting the guitars pretty hard. So sometimes we’d have to drop in and fix it up. But we’d do as little as possible.

GW What amps were you using on those early records?

MALCOLM The same stuff we were playing onstage. We would just send the gear over to the studio after a show, set up and crank it out until six or seven in the morning. Then the next day we’d go off and do another gig. So the equipment was going in and out all the time. In the very early days I was using one of those Marshalls with the small logo on the front. Starting with Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap in ’76 I began using a modified Marshall bass head. That gave me a much bigger and cleaner sound. And I’ve used it on every album since.

ANGUS For me it was always Marshall 100-watt Super Leads. I had bought one secondhand somewhere in Australia when I was younger, and it had a great sound. Very bright. And that was it. Back in those days there wasn’t a lot of money for us to go looking around for gear. We didn’t start off as millionaires, though I wish we did!

GW Malcolm, were you always using your ’63 Gretsch Jet Firebird? [Severely modified, Malcolm’s original Gretsch has two holes in the body; one in the center, a result of first installing and then removing a humbucker from between the Firebird’s two Gretsch FilterTron pickups, and one below the neck from when he subsequently removed the original neck pickup, leaving just one FilterTron in the bridge position. In addition, all of the controls have been disabled except for the volume knob on the horn of the guitar—Ed.]

MALCOLM Yes. I think the only time I didn’t was when we recorded “High Voltage.” My guitar had been broken, and we had to get the song down that night, so I just grabbed whatever was lying around the studio. I believe it was a Gibson L-5. To this day I still hear that track and go, “Ugh.” [laughs] But other than that it’s the Gretsch on everything.

GW And for Angus, of course, it was always the Gibson SG.

ANGUS Right from the very beginning.

GW Is there any AC/DC song where you’re playing something else?

ANGUS Actually, come to think of it there is one track—“Live Wire” [High Voltage]—that I did with another guitar because I had broken mine as well. I did an overdub with a Les Paul, I think.

GW So on “Live Wire” we can hear Angus Young playing a Les Paul?

ANGUS Sorry, but that would be no. Once my SG was fixed I just went out and recut it!

GW What year is that first SG from?

ANGUS I think it was a ’69 or a ’70, although I had someone else tell me it might even be a ’71 or ’72. So I don’t really know for sure. But I still have it. I use it in the studio.

GW How about onstage?

ANGUS Occasionally, but I get a bit queasy sometimes because I know how I play. In the early days that guitar would get broken in two, or I’d bang the headstock off. Nowadays I do my best to look after it. And Gibson did a good copy recently for me. They have all these new tools—3D scanners and whatnot—that they use to help them replicate guitars. So they took mine in, X-rayed it, put it on a drip, whatever they do! [laughs]

GW How many SGs are currently in your collection?

ANGUS It must be in the hundreds. I lost count years ago. I remember when I first went to America I bought some on that street in New York…

GW 48th Street?

ANGUS Yeah. There used to be a little shop on the corner there where I bought a couple of SGs. And one of them was great. The guy who sold it to me told me there was a “2” on the back of it, and apparently that’s what they put on the rejects. So I said, “Yup, that’s me!” I used that guitar on Highway to Hell.

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