THE FIRST BAD SIGN CAME even before AC/DC started recording their new album, Rock or Bust, in Vancouver last May: The group’s longtime drummer, Phil Rudd, was 10 days late for the sessions. “One minute he was coming, then he wasn’t, then he was,” lead guitarist Angus Young recalls. “We’re not a band that likes to wait around.” At one point, Young says, producer Brendan O’Brien decided Rudd had one last chance to show up. “Brendan said, ‘If he’s not here by Friday, there will be another drummer there.’ ”
Rudd arrived and, Young says, “did his job.” But, the guitarist notes, “I’ve seen him in better shape. It was not the Phil we had known, after we had finished the last tour. He’d let himself go.” In October, Rudd…
