AC/DC just completed the North American leg of their tour, and the legendary rockers will next tackle Europe later this month. By just about all accounts, 70-year-old guitarist Angus Young and 77-year-old singer Brian Johnson are holding up and delivering a quality show, which is a welcome site coming off of their previous tour that saw Johnson have to step aside to deal with hearing issues.
Two years ago, Web Is Jericho published the complete backstory of how Johnson was able to rejoin the band thanks to noted audiologist, Stephen Ambrose. In honor of AC/DC’s successful North American run, we’re sharing that story again.
How Brian Johnson rejoined AC/DC
Amsterdam. February 2020. The whole world is about to fall into a collective coma, but a month prior, rock legends AC/DC have reconvened at a top secret location. The objective? Full-on, full volume rehearsals to ready for shows on the heels of their forthcoming album, “Power Up.” The last time we heard about Brian Johnson, he was reportedly on his front door step retrieving road gear shipped back to him by the band during the “Rock or Bust” tour.
Most of the world world doesn’t know it yet, but for “Power Up” and in Amsterdam, not only is Johnson back, so are bassist Cliff Williams and drummer Phil Rudd. Williams retired, and Rudd nearly forced a retirement of his own with drug and legal problems four years prior. None of that matters, however, if a tiny invention by a world renowned audio engineer doesn’t work.
Steven Ambrose, inventor of the Ambrose Diaphonic Ear Lens (ADEL), is in the rarest of positions. Not only is he a first-hand witness to the highly-secretive rehearsal proceedings, he’s the wild card to getting the AC/DC show back on the road. “Obviously there’s quite a lot of stress and importance on the line,” Ambrose said. “I put them in Brian’s ears, and he walks out on stage …”
Going “Bust”
Rewind to February 28, 2016. AC/DC’s “Rock or Bust” tour has rolled into Kansas City as part of the fifth leg of a journey that started April 10 of the year prior. For the audience, it seems like business as usual, as the band rips through its 20-song set. For AC/DC and their singer, however, it’s anything but. Johnson sounds in fine form, but he’s getting by on muscle memory. The 68-year-old singer is struggling to hear the massive band he’s fronting.
“I was having difficulty hearing the guitars on stage,” Johnson went on to say in a later statement. “Because I was not able to hear the other musicians clearly, I feared the quality of my performance could be compromised. In all honesty, this was something I could not in good conscience allow.” Doctors told him he had to stop performing or risk going deaf. And just like that, 36 years after joining the band, hundreds of millions of albums sold and having performed all over the globe to countless fans, Johnson was out of AC/DC. “That was the darkest day of my professional life,” he said.
Guns ’N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose stepped in, and AC/DC finished the “Rock or Bust” tour, but if their latest album title was posed as a question regarding their future, the answer would be the latter. Ticket sales and revenue were fine. It was the band itself that had gone bust.
Rhythm guitarist and band co-founder Malcolm Young was out of the picture as he suffered with dementia. Rudd managed to get his personal issues together enough to play on “Rock or Bust,” but then allegedly got into hard drugs, a legal mess and was sentenced to eight months of home detention in New Zealand after pleading guilty to charges of threatening to kill and possession of marijuana and methamphetamine. AC/DC recruited “Razors Edge” drummer Chris Slade and ex-touring guitarist Stevie Young, a nephew of Angus and Malcolm. The band was starting to fracture prior to Johnson’s exit, and later with Rose in tow to salvage the rest of the tour, Williams announced he wanted out. “Losing Malcolm, the thing with Phil and now with Brian, it’s a changed animal,” Williams said in an emotional video message to fans. “I feel in my gut it’s the right thing.”
Ambrose to the rescue
While the Axl-fronted AC/DC began a European leg of the “Rock or Bust” tour, Ambrose, most well-known as the creator of the wireless in-ear monitor, shared an open message to Brian Johnson via video. “Please don’t stop performing,” Ambrose said. “Help is on the way. Nobody should have to go deaf performing on stage, driving race cars, or simply listening to their phone. My life’s work has been dedicated to solving this.”
Ambrose explained the technology of the ADEL with a story straight out of Amsterdam. “Angus had all of his Marshalls cranked up on stage,” he said. “I don’t need any more hearing loss. Especially as an engineer and a designer in audio. So I’ve got the ADELs in my ears, and the band is totally cranked.”
Even with Angus turned up to 11, Ambrose’s hearing was totally isolated. “I can hear a little bit or a medium amount or as much as I want just by inflating and deflating the device,” Ambrose said. “I had inflated them and put my head inches from the grill on one of his Marshalls, and the thing is just blasting. I’m right there, and I had to put my hand on the grill to tell if that particular speaker was on. THAT is isolation.”
The ADEL uses an inflation method that gently conforms to the ear canal, but unlike in-ear monitors or even ear plugs, it absorbs harmful in-ear pressures and allows people to more safely hear sound the way it is meant to be heard. “It’s air suspension like you have on trucks,” Ambrose said. “It keeps the bubble and re-inflates it and allows it to softly stay sealed in your ear. If you put it in the deflation position, it deflates. So you put it in your ear, and it will pump up and ride with your ear. If you want to hear more, you start to deflate it. And all the sudden you don’t have nearly as much isolation, and you can feather in ambient sound that you want.”
Ambrose explained the problem with his first invention — the wireless in-ear monitor. “It’s a tremendous but very simple oversight that nobody ever realized — you’ve got acoustics, which is sound waves, and you’ve not pneumatics, which is like what inflates your tires,” he said.
And Ambrose said, when you seal a speaker in the ear, you have both. “And if hearing aids and ear buds were made by people who made bicycle pumps or shock absorbers or compressions, they would know immediately that if you have a reciprocating piston or diaphragm moving in a tube like the ear canal, that it’s pneumatic. Yeah it also makes sound, but it’s really pneumatic.”
Audio experts previously claimed that with in-ear monitors, ear buds and headphones, people are simply sealing sound in the ear. “No, you’re not just sealing sound in the ear, you’re sealing the sound source, and it’s making pneumatic pressure,” Ambrose said. “And it just got totally overlooked.”
Years prior, when Ambrose announced his discovery, major scientists in the audio industry claimed that it couldn’t be true. “They said, ‘There’s no extra turbulence in there. There’s no extra pressure. It’s just what we can measure with sound.’”
“Nothing could be further from the truth,” Ambrose said. “Now, it’s self-evident and it’s widely accepted. Just applying that as a science restores hearing function in people who have lost it like Brian.”
A trip to Florida
Brian Johnson got wind of audiologist Stephen Ambrose’s video plea which went viral shortly after it was posted. The two met not long after at Johnson’s Sarasota home. “When I first flew down there, I showed up at the door, and I said, ‘Look. Three minutes and I’m out of your hair. You will know whether or not this works for you in three minutes. If it can’t help you, I really don’t want to take any of your time.’ They were very gracious letting me into their home.”
“He said, ‘Well, come in me son. Let’s go out to lunch.’ We have a very nice lunch. Then he goes, ‘You wanna hear some new tracks?’ I’m like, “Do you want me to set this stuff up? Do you want to try it?’ ‘Ahh, let’s go to dinner.’ ‘Let’s stay up all night drinking.’ (laughs)”
Johnson showed Ambrose his home stereo system, a tube setup that Ambrose called “gorgeous,” but would send Johnson’s wife, Brenda, searching for solitude somewhere else in the house. “Brenda has to leave every time he cranks it up, because he has hearing impairment,” Ambrose said. “By the time it’s loud enough for him to enjoy, she’s gotta leave. There’s no place in the house for refuge.”
It’s not until late the following afternoon that Johnson finally sits down and tries out Ambrose’s invention. “The first time he came down he brought this thing that looked like a car battery,” Johnson later told Rolling Stone while promoting “Power Up.” “I went, ‘What in the hell is that?’ He said, ‘We’re going to miniaturize it.’ It took two-and-a-half years. He came down once a month. We’d sit there, and it was boring as shit with all these wires and computer screens and noises. But it was well worth it.”
Ambrose explained their initial testing. “The car battery he was referring to, I brought a lot of electronics with me, and I used this prototype that you see in the videos on our website,” Ambrose said. “It still exists after a decade. It’s just kind of a historic tool that has restored hope to so many different people. It was hooked up to a lot of different electronics.”
Ambrose laid out his gear on the table in the Johnsons’ breakfast room. “He and Brenda just sat there listening,” Ambrose said. “They don’t know me. Who knows if this is a scam or smoking mirrors? We’re sitting at the table, and Brian’s got these things in his head.”
Johnson started to tremble. “I swear Brenda shot me a glance, I thought she was gonna jump over the table and rip my head off if it didn’t work,” Ambrose said.
That wasn’t the case. “He just went, ‘It f*cking works!’ He knew at that point. Hearing is believing. We’re just doing it right.”
Back in Amsterdam
“I put them in Brian’s ears, and he walks out on stage, and he nails the hardest song there is, ‘Back in Black,’ ” Ambrose continued about the band’s rehearsals in Amsterdam. “You can see the rest of the band. They’re like, ‘Pinch me.’ I forgot who it was, but somebody in the crew came over and said, ‘Don’t do anything. Don’t say anything. Don’t change anything.’ I didn’t say this out loud, but I’m thinking, ‘Who the f*ck are you?’ Ambrose continued with a laugh. “But I kept it together.”
Johnson gets through “Back in Black.” Then another song, and another. The mood starts to lighten a bit. “But, I didn’t realize it, at the time, they didn’t have enough experience with this to know what was working,” Ambrose said. “But they knew it was working, because a normal rehearsal, they would’ve been halfway through a song, then rip out the in-ears. Come over to the board. Try to fix it. Go back. They hadn’t been able to get through a rehearsal. You can understand this, if you were under the conditions that Brian was. I mean, it’s amazing he was able to proceed as long as he did at all.”
Things are working, and AC/DC is back. But the band and crew are about as tight-knit and closed off to outsiders as they come, so it’s not all high fives and backslaps just yet. “So all of the sudden, things are just working, and it might be this technology, But we’re not sure,” Ambrose said of the crew’s reaction. “Whatever it is, we’re gonna look at this real close, so don’t do anything yet. Don’t move while we check this out.”
Rehearsals only got better — and longer. “The next day, they do 17 songs,” Ambrose said. “The day after they do even more. Pretty soon it’s like, ‘We got this.’ After two weeks, they said, ‘We’re gonna do another week here, and we want you guys to leave, so we can find out if it happens without you. Are you hypnotizing the whole place? Let’s see if we can pull this off.’ ”
Johnson was confident in Ambrose, and his bringing him to Amsterdam was proof. “I have to tell you, that Brian was under that kind of scrutiny, and he had brought me in,” Ambrose said. “And you don’t come onto a set like that with a band a crew that has toured together for decades. He brought me in and backed me up and he made this work. The science is sound. But it’s never gonna get out there unless somebody gets out there and gives it a chance and understands it and applies it. And he did. He’s part of this dream and success.”
Ambrose further explained the challenges Johnson faced prior to the ADEL. “If you listened to his mix in Amsterdam with normal hearing, before this, because his one ear was so totally dead on him, the mix had to be balanced for someone who had no hearing on one side. So if you listened to the mix with normal hearing, it wouldn’t sound right to you. Now, anybody can listen to his mix, because it’s a normal, two ear, no hearing loss mix. The ADEL hasn’t regrown what’s wrong with his ears, but they operate so differently, it functions as though he’s got two good ears.”
Word on the ADEL is spreading fast among music circles, and at the time of this interview, Ambrose said Asius Technologies is in negotiations to bring the product to a mass audience. With a past clientele that includes everyone from Stevie Wonder, Simon & Garfunkel, Steve Miller, Diana Ross, Rush and Kiss, it won’t be long before the ADEL is helping a lot more big name musicians and the audiences who love them.
“Our aim is to not only have musicians on stage using these, but to make them for the audience so you can have hearing protection that doesn’t ruin the way the concert sounds,” he said. “It’s one thing to be able to do something that is scientifically sound. It’s another thing to be able to do it for somebody like Brian. He’s just been such a beacon of encouragement and tolerance as well. A lot of the success is largely due to the real humanitarian side to Brian. When it first helped him, he saw how it could help everybody else. He called Joe Walsh, he called Roger Daltrey, he called everybody. Ultimately he wants to see this help children in third world countries, and have it be something that is affordable that everybody could be included in.”
