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Brian Johnson: The Lives of Brian (Dey Street Books, 2022, audiobook)
My journal tells me I struggle with insomnia every spring, and this year is no different. I’m not sure if the cause is the change to daylight savings time, the pollen, the changing weather, the excitement of winter being over, or something else entirely, but when my head hits my pillow this time of year, it’s like my brain gets a signal to wake up and start racing. Honestly, it sucks. I empathize with people who struggle with insomnia long term, because not feeling rested is a drag, physically, mentally, and emotionally. Often, rather than letting my monkey brain chase its tail until sunrise, I’ll try to quiet my mind with an audiobook. Usually I go for something dry, like a history of some time and place that’s far away from my current concerns. Lately, however, I’ve been listening to rock biographies. I listened to Ronnie James Dio’s autobiography a few months ago, then Bob Spitz’s massive tome on Led Zeppelin, which was one of the better rock books I’ve ever read. And earlier this week I finished The Lives of Brian, the recently released memoir by AC/DC singer Brian Johnson.
Although I’ve listened to and read so many of them, I don’t devour rock books the way I used to. Somewhere along the line, I realized my favorite parts of these books were the human stories they told rather than the musical ones, and then I had the further realization that all kinds of human beings, not just musicians, write their stories. In fact—and this may be hard to believe—some of those humans are even better than musicians at writing their autobiographies! Not being a massive AC/DC fan (though I do like them), I wouldn’t have been interested in Brian Johnson’s memoirs, but a while back on the You Don’t Know Mojack podcast (which I still listen to every week), Brant mentioned the book was fantastic and that it was devoted almost entirely to Johnson’s life before he joined AC/DC. So, late one night I downloaded a sample of the audiobook, which Johnson reads himself, and was sold.
While his bandmates in AC/DC are Aussies, Johnson was born and raised in Newcastle in the northeast of England. Johnson’s mother was Italian, and his parents met while his father served in the British army in World War II. Brian paints a detailed picture of life in postwar Newcastle, where (like all of Britain) the war’s effects continued to be felt well into the 60s, particularly on council estates like the one where Brian grew up. It would be easy to draw this world as a caricature, but Brian’s way with a story is apparent from the jump, as he portrays the people in his life with remarkable empathy and the unpretentious wit that has served him so well as a lyricist. Perhaps it’s Johnson’s Italian heritage, which made him an outsider on the insular, homogenous council estate, that gives him the perspective to see the world around him so clearly. Regardless of the cause, Brian deserves the credit for his vivid and powerful writing. And it’s his, too… from what I’ve read, Johnson wrote The Lives of Brian himself, longhand no less, without help from a ghost writer.
While The Lives of Brian is light on AC/DC content, there’s a lot about music in the book. Johnson didn’t join AC/DC until he was 32 years old, and he was obsessed with music from the time he was a young boy, when he was playing in the street and heard a teenage girl playing a Little Richard record in her living room. He was so entranced that he knocked on the stranger’s door and asked her to play the record again. Eventually, Brian started playing in bands himself. One of the most remarkable stories in the book is when Brian needs to buy a PA system so his band can play bigger gigs, and he covers the expense by joining the army’s reserve force. He heard from a friend that recruits to the Parachute Battalion received a substantial bonus upon completing training, so he signed on and started jumping out of planes in pursuit of his dreams. Talk about commitment!
Before Johnson got the call from AC/DC, he was in a glam rock group called Geordie that had a few minor hits and even appeared on Top of the Pops. Johnson goes into detail about his time in Geordie, and the story comes alive thanks to Johnson’s account of the sub-mainstream music industry they inhabited. It was a world full of shady labels, shifty promoters, future superstars, and talentless hacks, all rubbing elbows and getting into epic drama. Johnson quit his job as an apprentice engineer—which could have been a lifelong career—to pursue Geordie, but after the group failed to build on its initial success, they fell apart, leaving Brian, the father of two young children, to move back in with his parents and start life over from scratch. He starts a successful business fitting cars with then-fashionable vinyl roofs, but he finds himself unable to walk away from music and soon he’s formed Geordie II, which hones Johnson’s live chops as they play (mostly cover tunes) in pubs and working men’s clubs around Newcastle.
Ultimately, though, it’s not what happened that makes The Lives of Brian so great; it’s Johnson himself. Having lived for 32 years and experienced his fair share of adversity before joining AC/DC, who hit their commercial peak just as he entered the band, Johnson has perspective and wisdom. His view of his difficulties early in his life are tempered by the unfathomable success he experienced with AC/DC—he knows those struggles prepared him for the gig—but he’s also aware of how lucky he is… at so many points in his journey, a different choice would have led him into very different circumstances. Johnson doesn’t view himself as a genius, and he isn’t entitled in the least… the only trait he credits for his success is persistence. The sentence “Never give up” appears many times in the book. This sense of hope for the future and gratitude for the past makes The Lives of Brian an utter pleasure.