When the cannons went off for “For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)” at San Mamés stadium in Bilbao, Spain, on June 28, 2010, AC/DC was closing out a world tour of 168 shows. It was also the last song Malcolm Young would ever play with the band he started with his younger brother Angus in 1973. Almost nobody knew then how hard he had worked just to be standing on that stage.
Relearning songs he knew backwards
Angus Young didn’t talk about it until 2014, after Malcolm had retired. In an interview with The Guardian, he described what the Black Ice tour had really been like for his brother.
“It was hard work for him. He was relearning a lot of those songs that he knew backwards; the ones we were playing that night he’d be relearning.”
These weren’t someone else’s songs. Malcolm had co-written many of them with Angus, and his rhythm guitar had driven AC/DC since the beginning. Speaking to Rolling Stone that same year, Angus said Malcolm got good medical care on the road, but had to relearn parts he had created for the band’s biggest songs, which Angus called “very strange for him.” Then he added, “But he was always a confident guy, and we made it work.”
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
The trouble started before the tour. Angus told The Guardian that Malcolm’s symptoms of dementia were already beginning when the band went in to make Black Ice in 2008. Before they committed to the album, Angus put the question to him directly.
“I had said to him, even before we did the album, ‘Are you sure you want to do this? I have to know that you really want to do it.'”
Malcolm answered that they really had to do it. In the Rolling Stone interview, Angus told the same story with Malcolm’s reply in saltier language, and the answer was just as firm. “He was his own driver,” Angus said of his brother. “He himself had that thing, where you’ve just got to keep going.”
Producer Brendan O’Brien, who worked on Black Ice, later told Rolling Stone he hadn’t known about the illness during the sessions. He remembered Angus and bassist Cliff Williams saying Malcolm seemed a little off and was forgetting things. “But he played great,” O’Brien said.
No pity on the road
On stage, the band saw the struggle up close. Angus Young admitted there were nights when he looked over at his brother and wondered, “Does he know where he is?” His next words were simple: “But he got through.”
Singer Brian Johnson told The Guardian it was tough, but nobody could say or do anything, because it would have felt like pity. So they treated every day like a normal day.
The last night in Bilbao
The Black Ice tour opened in October 2008 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and crossed 29 countries before it reached Bilbao. That final night began with “Rock ‘n’ Roll Train” and ended, as AC/DC shows had for years, with “For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)” and its row of firing cannons. Malcolm had helped write that song for the 1981 album of the same name.
As Rolling Stone later pointed out, no professional footage of that show exists. What survives was filmed by fans near the front of the stage. Rolling Stone also noted that Bilbao was the last time Malcolm Young appeared in public.
What came after
In April 2014, AC/DC said Malcolm was ill and taking a break. That September the band made it official that he would not return, and his nephew Stevie Young took over rhythm guitar. Angus Young built the next two albums, Rock or Bust and Power Up, from riffs the brothers had written together, and every song on both carries Malcolm’s name.
Malcolm Young died on November 18, 2017. He was 64. His last song on stage was the one AC/DC had saved for the end for years, on a tour where even the songs he had written had to be learned all over again.