Malcolm Young

1953-2017

This was not completely unexpected. Malcolm’s health deteriorated sharply about three years ago. His premature battles with dementia forced him to leave AC/DC back in 2014, leaving his nephew to fill in for him. But I don’t think anybody suspected the end to come so soon.

He was not a flamboyant guy on stage, but he wrote half the music with his brother Angus and was said to be the “brains” behind the band. I took a cue from him when I played in bands 1986-96, echoing that similar to Malcolm Young, my job as rhythm guitarist was to write half the songs and make all the other guys on stage sound good. It was a good lesson, well learned.

Along with Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath and, later, Rush, AC/DC was a main influence on me in my early teenage years, especially when I plugged in my electric guitar the first couple hundred times. To this day I can probably play from memory 40 or 50 AC/DC songs, all riffs from the fingertips of Malcolm. The most phenomenal thing about them is that, though they’re not exotic chords in obscure time signatures, they all stand the test of time. It’s not embarrassing to listen to an AC/DC song from forty years ago. In fact, give me any random hard rock CD released in 2017, and I can guarantee you can find a riff or two that could’ve been found on one of Malcolm’s home demo tapes.

Difficult to pick a song to tribute the man with. He was a shadowy figure, ceding the spotlight almost entirely to his younger brother. But this song, “Gone Shootin’” has been in my mind all day today. I like the rhythmic interplay between Malcolm and Angus, particularly in the outro around the 4 minute mark:

Rest in peace, Mr. Young. You may not have led the squeakiest, cleanest of lives, but the music you created made millions of us feel awesome and will live on for, well, as long as people strum electric guitars. And that has to count for something.