What You Might Not Know About AC/DC's Angus Young

07/26/2011
. (Gibson) It's been nearly four decades since Malcolm Young invited his kid brother, Angus, to join a new band he was putting together. Who could have imagined, at that time, that all these years later AC/DC would still be churning out some of the world's greatest riff-rock?

Through the years, legions of guitar players and fans have delved deeply into Angus' background, perhaps looking for the secrets behind his artful riff-making. Still, we managed to uncover some biographical facts that might have escaped all but the most diehard followers.

He still owns the very first Gibson SG he bought � 41 years ago. Young purchased a late '60s Gibson SG from a music shop located within walking distance of his family's home in Sydney, Australia, when he was just 16 years old. To this day, it remains one of his main go-to guitars. "I think it was the little devil horns [that sold me]," he told the New Zealand Herald, in 2010. "I've still got it and it's still my favorite guitar of them all."

His main pre-AC/DC job prepared him well for the band's bawdy lyrical content. Young left school before his 15th birthday. Not long afterwards, he took a job working as a typesetter at a "men's" magazine that sported the title, Ribald. Malcolm, incidentally, had by then put in a couple of years doing sewing machine maintenance for a company that manufactured bras.

His older sister, Margaret, suggested something even more important than Angus' trademark schoolboy uniform. Most AC/DC fans know that it was the Young brothers' sister, Margaret, who encouraged Angus to wear his schoolboy get-up on-stage. But fewer fans realize that it was also Margaret who christened her siblings' band "AC/DC" after noticing the letters on a vacuum cleaner. According to biographer Susan Masino, Angus and Malcolm liked the fact that the letters denoted power and electricity. A lot more here

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