Whoa... what? The blokes who busted out some of the most well-known and overplayed anthemic badboy balls-to-the-wall rockers started out as a glam rock band?! Well, sorta. It's okay, most people only know of the Bon Scott and Brian Johnson/Back in Black/increasingly over-produced ball-sagging instead of ball-busting sound periods anyway, unless you're a self-professed accadacca nerd like I turned into as a kid. (That's what I get for crushing on a guy who wore AC/DC shirts when we were in junior high.) And yeah, I can hate just as much as I can appreciate. The Dave Evans years ('73-'74) proved to be the band's most flamboyant and jovial era. Note the polyester garbs adorning each member, if you will.
Alright, enough with the passive aggressive jabs at the correlation between the decline in aging rockers' sex appeal and the diminishig effectiveness of their once lusty male libido-ridden songs.* Let's get down to business -- my attention span is fading.
Here's a handful of videos from bands with connections to AC/DC that someone out there might find mildly entertaining:
The Easybeats "Gonna Have A Good Time Tonight" (1968, Sydney) with George Young (older brother of AC/DC's Angus and Malcolm) on rhythm guitar.
George and Easybeats' lead singer Harry Vanda would continue to team up as a songwriting and production duo for AC/DC while spearheading projects of their own under names like The Marcus Hook Roll Band, Haffey's Whiskey Sour, and new wavy studio project Flash and the Pan (Grace Jones' cover of "Walkin' In The Rain" is actually a Flash and the Pan original, yep.) If you can dig the quirky synthpop and drum machine vibe of the next video then I can assure you that there are plenty more like it.
Rewinding a bit... here's a track from one of my personal favorite AC/DC family connections called "Elevator" by London-based pop band Grapefruit -- Ang & Mal's older brother Alex was the bass player. The band was signed to The Beatles' Apple label after John Lennon bequeathed them with their name as a tribute to Yoko Ono's book Grapefruit.
As for Angus and Malcolm, I have yet to find any available recordings of their early bands, though it might be worth mentioning that Angus's teenage band was called Kantuckee and that Malcolm was part of an Aussie band called The Velvet Underground (no connection to that Lewis Allan Reed-fronted VU.)
As for Bon Scott, he had a pop group in the 60s called The Valentines who recorded this nifty Coca-Cola jingle in '69.
Scott co-fronted The Valentines with teenage Aussie heartthrob Vince Lovegrove. See the leopard-vested, tight-jeaned ladies man back in the day in a live television performance HERE.
In '64, Scott's first band - The Spektors - recorded a version of Van Morrison's "Gloria."
Scott's unmistakeable vocals are perhaps the only distinguishing characteristic to a song that could've easily been lost in the dozens of generic sounding garage rock covers of the time.
Then there were the bearded, flute-playing days he spent in Fraternity. Brace yourself... this one's a bit startling.
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