Brian Johnson's memoir, The Lives of Brian, is out now.
He tells Billboard, "I had to be careful (while writing), because sometimes it can get a little emotional, and it all comes out. It goes from your brain into your heart, through the soul and then the hand and you’re writing and you gotta stop and, ‘Woo, this might be a bit much now, come on.’ And there were tears. There were times I actually started crying.”
One tear-jerking moment was recounting his hearing issues, which forced him to leave AC/DC in 2016, and being in the same hospital at that time as the band's founder Malcolm Young, who was being treated for dementia, but not being able to see him.
And, if having to leave the band weren't difficult enough, he writes that he couldn't watch them carry on with Axl Rose. “I’m told that he did a great job, but I just couldn’t watch -- especially when you’ve been doing it for 35 years. It’s like finding a stranger in your house, sitting in your favorite chair. But I bear no grudges. It was a tough situation. Angus and the lads did what they felt they had to do. That said, after the band released a statement confirming that I was leaving the tour and wishing me all the best for the future, I couldn’t relax or concentrate on anything. It was just always there."
So he drowned his sorrows in his love for auto racing, but admits he was okay with dying in a crash. "I found myself winning more than usual. People would come up to me afterwards and say, ‘Brian, you’re fearless!’, but I wasn’t fearless. I just didn’t care anymore. I’d always thought that the best way to go out would be at 180 miles per hour, flat-out around a corner. You’d hit the wall and boom, it would be over, just like that. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t want to die… I just wouldn’t have minded all that much.”
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Be advised, this is not the story of AC/DC. “I didn’t want to write an AC/DC book, ’cause that’s not my book. It never will be. It’s not my story to tell. That book is for the boys, or whoever was there from the start. That’s what I want to read. I want to read what it was like when Malcolm and Angus just had a meeting and said, ‘Right, let’s do this’ and got the drummer and the singer. I think it would be fantastic if it came out, if somebody wanted to do it. But that’s not my book. And I think a book about the present day or, say, when I joined to the present day would be nothing more than a catalog, a diary of what happened.”
But in the book, he wrote, “I will save all those stories for another time, another book.” Realizing the error of his ways, he tells Billboard, “I should have said that’s another book, but it’s not mine. I wouldn’t write another book about the band, absolutely not. If there’s something else to write about I would, but there isn’t. It’s somebody else’s story. If I can think of something like the great [screw]-ups on stage, maybe, that would be a book!”
Johnson also recorded an audiobook version, but don't hold your breath for a movie, even though he's already been pitched. "If they do [make one], I’ll shoot the balls off anybody. I hate movies about bands.”
The Lives of Brian is his second book. Rockers and Rollers: A Full-Throttle Memoir came out in 2011.
Source: MusicTImes and Premiere