An investment manager and AC/DC super-fan has revealed that he paid an eye-watering $28,000 to have a face-to-face guitar lesson with Angus Young.
It was 2020, AC/DC had just released Stiff Upper Lip, when Wade Sickler of Bozeman, Montana, entered a charity auction on eBay to bid for a lesson with the band's lead guitarist and co-founder.
Speaking to the AC/DC Beyond The Thunder podcast, Sickler said it was a strange time when eBay was new, and this offered a unique opportunity to support the Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy Foundation and get educated from rock's longest-serving schoolboy.
If you haven’t seen an AC/DC show, you've never seen anything like it, because they weren’t manufactured in a studio
Wade Sickler
But it didn't quite turn out as he imagined. Rather than sitting down with Young to go over some left-hand/right-hand picking drills and taking notes on stripping before thousands of people during a 12-bar blues jam, Young started to play Meltdown and the rest of the band joined in.
“He just smiled at me. His eyes lit up.” said Sickler. “Brian walks over, picks up the mic, leans into me (and) starts singing. ”
With Sickler on rhythm, Malcolm Young sat it out, heckling his brother from the sidelines – “Hey Angus, he’s less nervous than you are!”
Sickler jammed with AC/DC band for hours, with Angus Young giving him a Gibson SG in Cherry Red afterwards.
“If you haven’t seen an AC/DC show, you've never seen anything like it, because they weren’t manufactured in a studio,” said Sickler. “AC/DC in a studio is the real deal, and so when you see the live show it’s pretty much what you heard on the album.”
You can listen to Sickler's and others talk AC/DC on AC/DC Beyond The Thunder.
AC/DC release their seventeenth album, Power Up, on 13 November. Preorder it here.
