September 11, 2008 10:16 AM

AC/DC coming to Denver

Last time AC/DC came to town in 2001 they simply blew the roof off the Pepsi Center. Now they're ready to do it again, with their first U.S. tour since before Sept. 11 (yes, it was that long ago). A Nov. 25 date is set for Denver; ticket details are on the way, with a tentative on-sale of Sept. 20. In the meantime, here's my Angus Young interview from the 2001 tour, where he was relaxed, funny and down-to-earth:

HIGH VOLTAGE
AC/DC STILL JUICED ON HARD-ROCKING REPERTOIRE

Date: Wednesday, April 11, 2001

Let's face it: AC/DC was never a critics' darling.

In a legendary exchange, a reviewer asked the band members how they felt about making 10 albums that were exactly the same. Guitarist Angus Young snapped back ``Actually, we've released 12 albums that are exactly the same.''

Wednesday's concert at the Pepsi Center is all but sold out. They don't need anyone's help. So why even talk to the media?

``That doesn't mean they're all bad, does it?'' Young says. ``It's good to let people know that you've got a voice, anyhow. Plus, I learn something new from people.''

It's that surprising self-awareness that allows the band - fronted by brothers Angus and Malcolm Young along with singer Brian Johnson - to maintain a huge crew of loyal fans year after year. While maintaining a relatively low mainstream profile, AC / DC has gone on to be the fifth-biggest-selling band in the United States.

That's partly because the band has stubbornly stuck to what it does best and makes no apologies for it, Young acknowledges.

``(Too many bands) think, `This is the hip thing at the moment,' and they all dive into it and they kill the thing they love,'' Young says. ``They shoot themselves in the foot. The ones that have staying power are the bands that have always made good albums and survive all the changes.''

While other '70s rockers have gone to great lengths to modernize their sound, work with outside songwriters or associate themselves with hip new bands, AC / DC has had none of it. After bursting out of Australia with hard-rock albums in the '70s, they hit the big time with Back in Black in the early '80s.

``We're lucky enough, we've made money over the years, and we're comfortable enough,'' Young says. ``We make records. Everybody knows that AC / DC is a band that makes hard-rocking music. That's the way we've always viewed ourselves, as a rock 'n' roll band. We've never wanted to stray into things for the sake of a Top 40 hit. We've never looked to sweeten ourselves up or change anything. We've always stuck to what we do best.''

Even You Shook Me All Night Long never cracked the top 50, Young says, yet it helped push the Back in Black album to 17 million in sales in the United States alone.

AC / DC just rocks on, which is why some fans were surprised at the five-year lull between Ballbreaker and last year's Stiff Upper Lip - roughly twice as long as the band usually takes. But as Young tells it, it was actually business as usual for AC / DC.

``We got into the writing right away,'' Young says. But their label had been trying for years to get them to do a boxed set, and they dived into that, digging through their extensive archives and finding material recorded with their original singer, the late Bon Scott, that they'd forgotten existed. They also got fan input from around the world, which led to the discovery of stray live tracks buried in radio-station and record-company vaults.

``We tried to think of something a bit different, rather than a greatest-hits type of thing,'' Young says. ``We decided we'd make something for the hard-core fans and dedicate it to Bon. A lot of fans have always been asking if there was anything in the archives from Bon that we hadn't released.

``It's probably something we should have done earlier, but when you're that close to the tragedy, it could have been viewed as grave-robbing. We didn't want to appear to be doing that.''

Fans actually helped compile the boxed set.

``We had a lot of input from them. There were a lot of people that, when they heard that we were looking for stuff, stepped up,'' he says. ``They're all Web people now. They'll send us e-mails via our offices. They'd say stuff like, `Some radio station here in Europe has some great live stuff you'd done in '77.' ''

Even when they tracked these things down, ``we had to find stuff that lived up to today's technology,'' he says. ``In some cases, we were really lucky. There was a lot of recording that had been done that we didn't know was out there.''

The recording of Stiff Upper Lip also was delayed by the search for a studio. AC / DC does everything old school, ``and these days it's hard finding rock studios that haven't gone into the modern era and replaced everything,'' Young says. ``The main ingredient was good sound in a live acoustic room. A lot of studios nowadays have done away with the good live room and went out and bought a whole heap of technology. We've always been the other way. We always felt that what made a good studio is the sound you can get in a good room.

``Nowadays there's a tendency toward `Let's get out that big Grand Canyon echo box that sounded great on someone else's record.' ''

They ended up using Bryan Adams' studio in a run-down part of Vancouver, British Columbia.

``Great atmosphere, good vibe,'' Young says. ``It was pretty quick once we got in. We said we'd do it in three months, and we were out of there a week early.''

They'd also gone back to using the third Young brother, George, who'd produced their earlier albums. The legendary Rick Rubin hd produced Ballbreaker. While it wasn't a big sonic departure for the band, it was a learning experience for all.

``He tends to search. He's on a quest,'' Young says. ``He came to us and said he'd been wanting to work with us for a lot of years.'' The band jumped at the opportunity after spending years working with legends such as Mutt Lange and Bruce Fairburn. ``It's the different styles and how people apply themselves that you learn. When we work, we look, listen and learn. We've always kept that approach.''

Posted by Mark Brown at 10:16 AM | Comments (2)