How Angus Young confused America’s drug dealers

(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)

Underneath every pillar that rock music has built, every guitar solo, screaming fan, life-changed, and sold-out show lie the three core components that set the foundation for the most important genre in the world would be built upon sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. AC/DC are champions of the sound, but the band’s attention has always been more geared towards the latter over anything else. 

This was cemented when the band released their album Let There Be Rock. In the face of a constantly changing musical landscape, they cemented themselves as musicians who wouldn’t budge from the style that they had made so blatantly their own. Decades later, they are still considered one of the tour de forces in rock, and their unwaveringness to budge from the genre cemented this.

“Let There Be Rock, for me, is the album,” Said Angus Young when talking about what he believes is the definitive AC/DC record. “My brother, George, [asked] me and Malcolm… ‘What sort of album do you wanna do this time?’ And Malcolm just looked at me, and he said, ‘We just want an album that’s just gonna be pure hard rock guitar’.”

If the band’s lyrics are to be believed, sex was never too far away from the AC/DC camp either, as tracks like ‘Hard As A Rock’, ‘Cover You In Oil’ and ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’ hardly need much explaining. But interestingly, they have never been one with much of a drug affiliation attached to them. While this might seem harmless enough, it almost crashed the US drug market, as Angus Young confused Americans into thinking they were missing out on the next big new thing.

“There was a lot of stuff floating around,” recalled Young, talking about the drug scene after shows, “Every time I went to America, I had every dope dealer in the world waiting backstage for me. But me, really, I drink tea, and at that time, I used to drink milk and chocolate.”

This innocence meant that when drug dealers came up to Young and asked him what he wanted, he was honest with them. “I used to get the dope squad people coming up to me and saying, ‘What’s the little guy on?’ And I would say, ‘You know, I eat chocolate bars’.”

Rather than going to the nearest shop and buying Young a gift bag full of sweets, the dealers took the term to be a code for something, refusing to believe that the duck-walking adrenaline-inducing guitarist wasn’t on drugs. “So, they’re all running around,” Angus laughs, “With these little chemical kits trying to find out what this new drug was.”

It’s a fair enough assumption. Anyone who has seen clips of AC/DC performing live will lock on to Young and assume he has taken something. It’s simply not human to be able to play so effortlessly and with that much energy for so long, but Young pulls it off. It’s not the result of drugs, as is the case for a lot of other rockstars; rather, a modest meal of milk and chocolate.

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