Report: Meet AC/DC's "Go-To Guy"
November 28, 2008, 15 years ago
GlobeAndMail.com has issued the following report from Fiona Morrow:
Mike Fraser takes credit for the latest AC/DC album, Black Ice, making it to disc - and not just because he's responsible for the sound mix.
He had been keeping a booking window available in his Vancouver studio since the rock band released Stiff Upper Lip in 2000 - just in case.
"I just moved it along in three-month blocks," he says. For eight years? "Yes," he shrugs. "I wanted to be ready."It may sound a little overeager, but 48-year-old Fraser is practically AC/DC family, having worked with them since 1990's The Razor's Edge. Impatient to get things moving, he called the band last year, suggesting that if they had any mind to start putting an album together, they should buy up a pile of a particular brand of recording tape he'd heard was about to be discontinued. Then, a couple of months later, he dropped in on them in London.
"They'd been writing," he explains. "They were having a good time doing their own thing, and hadn't got around to pulling it all together. I think my contacting them twice in a short space of time just made them realize it was time to get on with it."Like so many of the best partnerships, this one started out by accident. The Razor's Edge was originally to be recorded in Ireland by George Young (brother of band members Angus and Malcolm Young), until a family emergency meant he had to leave the album half done.
The band turned to Vancouver-based producer Bruce Fairburn and headed to Little Mountain Sound Studio, where Fraser had been working since he was a teenager (he started out as the janitor - the only job going at the time).
"We were recording the vocals," recalls Fraser. "And on one track, the song was the wrong key for Brian [Johnson - the lead singer], so we had to rerecord all the instruments from scratch."Read the full report at GlobeAndMail.com.
