Listen to the Angus Young interview

Oh, to be 40 years old yet still be a teen-ager. That’s Angus Young, lead guitarist, schoolboy-uniform-clad wild man and focal point of AC/DC.

He’s maintained his perpetual youth by finding his niche, boldly sticking to it and never taking rock and roll too seriously. AC/ DC’s what-you-see-is-what-you-get hard, loud, blues-edged rock and roll sound has changed little in 22 years. And with disc titles like the new Ballbreaker and songs with names such as Cover You in Oil, this band continues to take the silly and sophomoric and turn it into art.

“We know what we do best, which is rock and roll music,” Young says by phone from San Francisco. “We drew our line, even in the beginning. You’d get a lot of pressure of people saying, `People are listening to this now. You should be recording that type of music.’

“One year it’s punk music, the next year it’s metal music, the next year it’s pop music. We were always a band that said, `This is what we do.’ “

They’ve been tagged heavy metal, hard rock – even punk. Whatever they’re called, Young says, “We stand our ground.”

Their ground-standing is even more astounding because so many of their contemporaries have dropped off the map (anyone remember Deep Purple?) or fallen from fan favor, like Blue Oyster Cult.

AC/DC’s current tour, which brings the band to Market Square Arena on Thursday, is its first in five years. Yet the band’s absence has only made its fans hungrier for more.

“The main reason we had the break is, it’s probably the first time we had the time to really take a break,” Young says. “We had been on the road since we started, virtually. Up ’til that point we had been touring all the time. It was a constant cycle of touring,

recording, touring, recording.

“There was never a lot of time to sit back and look at where you were going, what you were doing. All the guys went home to say hello to their teen-age children, who are now working.”

The time away wasn’t all vacation – AC/DC released a live album in 1992 and also contributed the song Big Gun to the soundtrack for The Last Action Hero. During his leisure time, Young dabbled in painting, his hobby.

Unlike fellow rock and rollers such as Jerry Garcia and The Who’s John Entwistle, who have made art a lucrative sideline, Young has no plans to show his work.

“I wouldn’t force it on the public,” he says with a laugh. “I do it. That doesn’t mean to say I do it well.”

AC/DC spent another chunk of the half-decade between albums (“I think the next one will be a lot quicker,” Young says) trying to find a recording studio that could accommodate their needs. They finally found Ocean Way in Los Angeles.

“When we went to record it, we came up with the idea of trying to get free of the modern technology,” he says. “When we first started recording (in the mid-1970s), it was a lot more basic. You didn’t have the computer world.

“There’s a tendency these days, where instead of spreading a few microphones around and taking the time to put them in the right positions, they’ll pull out the latest gadget, flick it on and plug it in. Even a very hard thing to find, believe it or not, was recording studios that still kept their basic room. A lot of them had gone on to catering to dance music. So they had followed that trend. And a lot of them went out of business.”

With producer Rick Rubin (Tom Petty’s Wildflowers; Mick Jagger’s Wandering Spirit; Johnny Cash’s American Recordings) sliding the controls, they came up with a raw, dry sound for a new collection of instant anthems.

The best new tracks include Hard As a Rock, where it’s a competition to see whether Young‘s fingers or Brian Johnson’s throat will blister first, and the assaultive Caught with Your Pants Down.

They’re good enough to make Young want to spend his nights careening around arena stages for two hours (“My brother says it’s from nicotine withdrawals,” laughs the chain-smoking Young) while wearing his schoolboy outfit.

It’s the same apparel he’s worn onstage since AC/DC’s beginnings. His sister thought up the gimmick.

“When I would come home from school and I would run in the door – before my mother would grab me and say you’ve got to go run errands – I’d grab the guitar and run off to where my friends were,” Young says.

“She used to think it’s so funny that I was running around with a big guitar under my arms and my little school uniform on. When (rhythm guitarist) Malcolm, my brother, put the band together, she said, `It’d be really good if you got your school uniform on and played. It’d give people something to look at.’ “

While the outfit has served Young well, he wouldn’t wish it on others. He disagreed with President Clinton’s suggestion, made in the State of the Union speech, that students wear uniforms to school.

“I remember when I went to school, it was a case of them saying it would keep everyone the same,” Young says. “And I always thought, `Who wants to be the same?’ “

No, he’d probably rather see kids dressed like Butt-head from MTV’s Beavis and Butt-head. Butt-head is the one in the AC/DC T-shirt. His dim sidekick, Beavis, wears the Metallica shirt. Young says he’s glad the smarter of the two likes AC/DC.

“Damn, damn glad,” he says, laughing. “We got the one with the C grades. I don’t think the other one quite gets a grade.”