The musician Angus Young hailed as a “guitar wonder”
It must be weird to exist as a looming legend in music. You’re just living life, hanging out with friends—but not only are you famous, your best friends are often also well-known. While we look at the god-tier of musicians as if they’re mythological legends, to them, the best players around are, or were, simply their peers and mates. Sure, you might look at your friend who’s in some band and think they’re the best guitarist around. But in Angus Young’s case, the man he considered the best actually was legendary.
Young himself is up there amongst them. Ask plenty of guitarists who they believe the world’s finest player is, and Young’s name will come up time and time again as his contributions to AC/DC, creating some of the world’s most electrifying rock songs, isn’t something to be understated.
Even if their brand of rock isn’t your cup of tea, or if their 1970s decade-defining sound isn’t to your taste, no one can hear songs like ‘Back in Black’, ‘Highway to Hell’ or ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’ and not hear the worth in them, or the power of his playing.
But Young was surrounded by powerful players who undeniably inspired him and spurred him on. It must be pretty easy to stay engaged and excited with rock and roll when you have stories of waking up in the middle of the night to a phone call; “I was tired, went to sleep, so my wife picked up the phone,” he recalled on the Talk Is Jericho podcast. “She passed the phone to me [and] she says, ‘Eddie is on the phone.’ ‘Eddie the fuck who?!’”
It was Eddie [the fuck] Van Halen, leader of Van Halen and Young’s American counterpart. With both bands absolutely dominating the rock world in the late 1970s, the connection between the two players wasn’t just a strong peer bond between leaders but a life-long friendship that both deeply treasured.
The foundation of the friendship, though, was obviously deep mutual respect. Van Halen once watched an AC/DC gig in awe, and it left a huge impression on him. “Just the power. The sheer… it just engulfs you. You just feel it. It makes you vibrate,” he said about the band in 2015, decades from that first encounter. In particular, he loved the song ‘Down Payment Blues’, with Young recalling how the Van Halen player used to basically beg them to play it: “Malcolm used to say, ‘Eddie keeps going to me all the time, ‘You gonna do ‘Down Payment Blues’?’”
But the excitement and admiration was completely mutual. In Young’s eyes, Van Halen was nothing short of “a guitar wonder”. If there were to be seven wonders of the musical world, Van Halen’s playing would have to be one of them as the AC/DC guitarist was baffled by the power of it. To him, it was “pure wizardry” as if making music like that can only be magic.
