Despair was the only word that rocker Brian Johnson from AC/DC felt after an issue with his hearing forced him to drop out of his band’s tour in 2016, only to be replaced by Guns and Roses frontman Axl Rose.
Johnson, 75, reveals in his new memoir The Lives of Brian that he dealt with suicidal thoughts after he had to leave AC/DC’s Rock or Bust Tour or risk going completely deaf.
“I just didn’t f—ing care anymore. I’d always thought that the best way to go out would be at 180 mph, flat-out around a corner,” Johnson writes. “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.”
Johnson previously spoke to Rolling Stone and discussed his hearing issues. It addressed them as pretty serious and that he was completely unable to hear the tone of the guitars on stage.
In his memoir, he recalls the pain of telling his tour manager that he’d have to sideline himself for the remainder of the tour.
“I called Tim, the tour manager, on my mobile right there in the room to tell him that I just couldn’t continue,” Johnson reportedly writes. “It was one of the most difficult conversations of my life. The pain of it made worse over the weeks that followed when the tour simply went on without me. It was a sheer cliff. I didn’t tumble down, I was in free fall.”
Due to these issues, Johnson was replaced by Axl Rose and while he says Rose did a nag-up job, it was still really jarring and devastating to sit back and watch.
“It’s like finding a stranger in your house, sitting in your favorite chair,” he writes in The Lives of Brian. “But I bear no grudges.”
Johnson claims before getting help for his hearing issues, he was literally getting by on muscle memory and mouth shapes on stage, and found it crippling to be standing there and not being sure while performing. He was eventually equipped with a small device that uses the bone structure in the skull as a receiver, and was able to return to the stage.
Though AC/DC has not toured since Rock or Bust, Johnson rejoined the band to record the 2020 album Power Up, which reunited the four surviving members of the band. Those members include; Johnson, lead guitarist Angus Young, bassist Cliff Williams and drummer Phil Rudd.
Malcolm Young died in 2017, and his nephew Stevie Young has been playing in his place since 2014.
