Fact #94109

AC/DC'S FIRST EVER GIG

by Johnny Black

The early 70s Australian music scene was a dying dingo, dominated by slick pop combos adept at three-part harmony vocals. Then, on the last day of 1973, a pair of rock-crazed brothers, Angus and Malcolm Young, debuted their new band at a dilapidated former cabaret bar in Sydney. Named after the small print on a vacuum cleaner label, AC/DC were here to kick up an unholy din and point the way to the highway to hell. Oz rock would never be the same again.

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Malcolm Young : I got together with a few guys interested in having a jam, and thought, 'If I can knock a rock'n'roll tune out of them, we'll get a few gigs and some extra bucks'.

Angus Young : Malcolm had been playing on the club circuit, and he said the one thing that was missing was a good 100% hard rock band.

Colin Burgess (drummer) : I had been in a very successful Australian band in the sixties called The Masters Apprentices, but we broke up in 1972 so I was at a loose end. A chap called Alan Kissack, who was involved in putting bands together, called me up and told me that Malcolm Young wanted to form a band. Malcolm was the younger brother of George Young, who had been in The Easybeats, Australia's most successful band of the sixties, so I said, 'Sure, let's have a go.' Even then, Malcolm was very ambitious. He was a hard business man, wouldn't take no for an answer.

We formed the band with Malcolm, myself and Larry Van Kriedt, just a three-piece. Right from the start, it was quite heavy.

Larry Van Kriedt (bass) : I was part of the circle of friends of both Mal and Angus. Our main interest and point in common was guitar playing and music.
In 1973, I had recently bought a bass and they heard this and wanted me to jam on bass. So I went and kept going each night after that and we rehearsed a bunch of Mal's tunes and a few covers...

Colin Burgess : We rehearsed above an office building on the corner of Erskineville Road and Wilson Street in Newtown in Sydney, mate. We used to do one Beatles' track, Get Back, threw it in just so we could say we did a Beatles track.

Larry Van Kriedt : We had the same room every week on the first floor. Good rehearsals, bad rehearsals, creative moments, sometimes arguments and even fights. It was pretty much Malcolm's vision and he was the driving force behind it.
Colin Burgess : Dave Evans came along a little later, and then Angus.

Dave Evans (vocalist) : I'd been with an Australian band called The Velvet Underground, which I must say was not the New York band of the same name.

So I saw this ad in the Sydney Morning Herald, a band looking for a singer in the style of Free and The Rolling Stones, which I was, and when I rang up I found myself speaking to Malcolm Young. We'd never met but we did know of each other.
He told me he'd got together with Colin Burgess of The Masters Apprentices who had been very famous. That was like 'Wow!', because I'd loved them when I was a kid at school.
Dave Evans : Malcolm invited me over that afternoon for a jam in Newtown, an inner suburb of Sydney, so I went along to this empty office block, it was being renovated. That's where we first met and shook hands.
Angus wasn't in the band yet, so I went in and introduced myself to Malcolm, and Colin, sitting there looking like a rock star. It was hot, getting towards summer, and we just jammed on a bunch of songs we all knew.
We only did about five or six songs, we were all smiling away, and Malcolm just looked at the other guys and said, 'Well, I'm happy if you guys are.' Colin and Larry both went 'Yep', and I said, 'Wow!' We shook hands and that was it. That night we all went out to celebrate that we had a band.
About a week later Malcolm informed us that his younger brother Angus, had a band called Kentuckee, which was breaking up, so could Angus come and audition for us? By this point, we felt like we were a band, so we just said, 'Sure.'
Colin Burgess : Actually Malcolm was a very good lead guitarist, so it seemed strange for him to want to bring in another guitarist, like Angus.

Malcolm Young : It was OK, but I felt it needed another instrument – a keyboard maybe or another guitar.

Angus Young : I was totally shocked when he asked me to play with his band. I hadn't expected it and I was really frightened.

Malcolm Young : Angus was the player, to be honest; he was always the showman of the two of us when we were kids.

Angus Young : I walked through the door, and there was a drummer, and Malcolm goes, "All right, let's start!" And I'm going, "Wait, isn't somebody supposed to count us in?" He says, "What? This is a rock band. Go! And so that was how it started.
Dave Evans : At that point we became five rather than four.
We'd been rehearsing for a couple of months when Malcolm told us Alan Kissack had got us our first gig, at Chequers night club on Goulburn Street. This was the number one club in Sydney. I'd played a lot of gigs but never Chequers, so that was great.
Gene Pierson (entertainments manager, Chequers) : Chequers, traditionally, had been a theatre-restaurant in the 60s where they'd had acts like Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr, Dusty Springfield, Dionne Warwick, and I was brought in at the end of that era.

My job was to get in there and change the format, turn it into a rock'n'roll venue, but the old school was still in charge.

The two guys who really convinced me to put the band on at Chequers were their first manager, Alan Kissack, and their roadie Ray Arnold, both of whom are now dead. Alan was a humble little man with glasses, but he lived and breathed AC/DC.

They would wait outside for me to arrive at the office and beg me to give these guys a go. Eventually I became good friends with Ray, because he could supply some very nice bags of marijuana, which worked like a bit of payola.

Alan Kissack was convinced they were going to be the biggest band in the world. He and Ray were great gentlemen, much too nice to be in the music industry. It was Alan's perseverance that broke me down and convinced me to give them a gig.

Dave Evans : The gig was to be on New Year's Eve, the prime time, and there was a lot of interest in the band because Paul Burgess was in it, and the two younger brothers of the famous George Young from The Easybeats. So there was a lot of anticipation, but we didn't even have a name yet.

Colin Burgess : I'd been around the business for years, so I had lots of friends, a lot of people knew me, so they assumed the band would be good because they knew I wouldn't have played with any old rubbish.

Dave Evans : The only problem was that we were expected to do two sets, but we didn't have enough songs. We had a couple of originals, but it was mostly Rolling Stones, Free, Eric Clapton ..., so to get enough songs, Malcolm said he'd start up a riff, I would announce a name for it, and then we'd make it up as we went along. That suited me fine, because when I was about eleven, me and my sister used to make up songs on the spot. We had a game called Hit Parade where we would just throw imaginary song titles at each other, and then make them up on the spot. So I knew how to do that.
Now, though, we had to come up with a name in a hurry. At the next rehearsal, Malcolm said that his sister had suggested AC/DC, and I really liked it because it was easy to remember and it gave us free advertising on every electrical appliance in the world.
In those days we didn't know it had a sexual connotation. I used to hang out with a few gay guys and I'd never heard them using that term. To us, it was just all about electric current.
Paul Close (audience) : At the time of that gig, I was doing sound and staging for artists around the East Coast. I do recall there was quite a vibe building up before they even came in for a soundcheck on the day. Word had been spreading about them.
Their manager had got them a Greyhound Tour Bus to travel in. The equipment, band, and crew all traveled together in it. It was quite a sight to see this big long bus pull into the rear lane behind Chequers to unload.
Colin Burgess : Chequers was downstairs, below street level, and they had very heavy security, very nasty guys that used to knock people around all the time.

Dave Evans : It had been very glamourous in the 50s and 60s but when we played there it was past its heyday. It was a small venue with a little stage, no dressing room. You got dressed either in the kitchen, or in a little alcove just off the side of the stage.

The decor was still very 50s. It had the tables with the white tablecloths, stuff like that, and a dance-floor, and half-moon booths sunk into the walls where you could sit. You could tell that it must once have been really cool, and it was still the place to be.
Larry Van Kriedt : It was a late starting gig, you know, bands wouldn't start to play till, like 11pm or so.
They would usually have three bands on one night. We were the first band to play when we played there. I didn't have a bass amp and we would ask one of the other bands if we could use theirs. Mal usually organized this for me.
Paul Close : The buzz in the air that night was palpable, a full house and the bar was doing a good trade as the industry people all came in to see this new band.
Gene Pierson : I'll never forget, the first song they did was Baby Please Don't Go, which had been a hit for Van Morrison's first band, Them.

When I stood out the front, it was the first time I'd ever felt the bass and the drums vibrating my chest. They were deeper and louder than anything else I had ever heard.

Colin Burgess : No-one was dancing at the start. Then my brother Paul Burgess, who used to drive us around, he was the first one that got up and started to dance. After that everyone else started and from there I knew the band was going to be a success, no doubt about it.

Angus Young : We had to get up and blast away. From the moment 'Go!' it went great. Everyone thought we were a pack of loonies. You know ... 'Who's been feeding them kids bananas?'

Dave Evans : Angus didn't have his schoolboy uniform at that stage. We were just in jeans and shirts and stuff. What we did have was absolute energy and a belief in ourselves. Even though we were very young, we were all already professionals. Our attitude was that we were going to be the best band in the world.
Paul Close : They grabbed people by the throat with the high level energy that has since become their trademark. They were a very tight band that rocked hard, and certainly shook the bubblegum pop people out of their placid little existence.

Dave Evans : Our two sets that night were pretty much a mixture of songs we knew plus a couple of originals, including The Old Bay Road written by Malcolm Young and Midnight Rockin', and the songs we were just making up. No-one knew the difference.

Gene Pierson : Peter Casey, the club manager, was an old Greek gentleman who had been running the club in the days of its cabaret-style acts. He pulled the plugs out halfway through a track because he just thought they were too loud. They would get the power back on and twenty minutes later Casey would pull it out again.

Dave Evans : I personally counted down the New Year for the crowd. Everyone was in a great mood because it was New Year's Eve and the crowd just went off their brains. It was an amazing, fantastic first show, which I will never forget. How could I? It was incredible.
Angus Young : That gig was really wild. It’s wild on New Year’s Eve anyway but putting what we were doing on top of all the seasonal stuff just made it wilder.

Gene Pierson : After that show, I was able to get them gigs at another important venue, Bondi Lifesavers, and more gigs at Chequers and elsewhere. They developed a big following very quickly. Once Angus got his little school uniform, he was like a man in a trance, and he would climb up on the bars, on the tables, and keep playing the whole time. He was unbelievable. They were like nothing anybody had ever seen before.
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WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?

AC/DC went stratospheric after they were joined in 1974 by hard-drinking vocalist Bon Scott but even after his tragic death in 1980, Angus and Malcolm Young, plus an ever-changing cast of hard-rockin' reprobates, hurtled onwards and upwards, eventually selling over 200m albums. Their 1980 high water mark, Back in Black, is the best-selling hard rock album of all time.

Although ejected from the band in 1974 after disagreements with the Brothers Young, Dave Evans has continued to rock. He recently toured the UK and has lately released a new album, Revenge, a collaboration with Texan blues stringmeister John Nitzinger.

Colin Burgess also fell out with the Youngs in 1974, but he too continues to perform regularly and record sporadically.

After his 1974 dismissal, Larry Van Kriedt became a prolific performer, songwriter and producer. After moving to the UK in the new millennium, he has established Jazzbacks, the first downloadable jazz backing tracks business.

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This feature, researched, compiled and written by Johnny Black, first appeared in Classic Rock magazine