When I was a kid I use to walk down to the corner market where they had a little record
section. I loved to look at the album covers, except for a couple that scared me: Meat
Loaf's Bat out of Hell and AC/DC's Highway to Hell. Meat Loaf I could put
out of my mind, but not Highway to Hell. Hours, even days later, I would be alone
and find my mind wandering to Angus Young's lurid sneer, goat horns, and leathery tail.
Now when I look at the cover, I am more stricken by the other dude's ice cold stare,
which seems much more frightening. However, at the time, that was all I needed to be
convinced of the fact that AC/DC were unquestionably Anti-Christ/Devil's Children. When I
discovered that the kid up the street's older brother actually owned a copy of this
damnable record, I could not believe it. How could his parents even allow it in the house?
Years later as my parents were throwing out my copy of Slayer's Reign in Blood, among many much cherished and more missed others, AC/DC must have seemed, at first glance, rather tame. However, from the vantage point of adulthood, when one learns not to take devil worship seriously but that nihilistic self-destruction is a very real and potent threat, AC/DC, particularly the Bon Scott era, stands up as one of the hardest rock and roll bands'-like a top forty incarnation of The Birthday Party or Jesus Lizard. Whereas, now, those dorks in Slayer seem like developmentally arrested D&D dorks whose pot-fuelled fantasy has never worn off, Bon Scott's dark and cursed growling still causes me a palpable unease.
AC/DC exists somewhere between the loose and lurid blues-based rock of the Rolling Stones and the Faces and the self-conscious trash and thrash of The Stooges. Raw, stripped down riffs, shot through with a bluesy swagger. Tough and punchy, but with enough boogie woogie to lure the ladies. Between 1974 and 1980, they produced three really good records (Powerage, Highway to Hell, and Back in Black), two great ones (High Voltage and Let There Be Rock), one essential record (Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap), plus a live album (If You Want Blood). They knew that no one really need more than a year to tour, record, release and tour again. However, as their success and excess caught up with them around the time of Highway to Hell in 1979, the band was struck in a way that cost them their literal and figurative voice, a blow from which they were never able to recover.
The earlier records, before Highway to Hell, have a dry, wide open quality. The guitars crunch and there is enough space in the mix that the individual chords really stand out, taking on a heavy, percussive quality. Though, in modern times, records are produced to death, polished to a high sheen, and given bottomless bass, those records lack the "toughness" that is present in AC/DC's early, sparse, stripped down mixes. AC/DC records sound like a band, in a rock, playing rock and roll. Strangely, I often think of Low when I hear these early records, because they operate on the same principle: open the song up, strip it down, and each note, and each space, becomes enhanced. Economy of sound creates power.
Song after song, they crank out simple, but never stupid, riffs. Their U.S. debut, High Voltage, was comprised of songs which were mostly recorded in 1974 and released in their native Australia on an album called T.N.T. (the U.S. version is superior if for no other reason than it sports an absolutely beautiful green and orange art-deco style logo). It is a startling first record. The album opens strong with two tracks which start off kicking and build to loud celebrations of debauchery. Bon Scott's hideous rasp and the band's backing squaks ensures that there is nothing clean and pretty. "The Jack" is more of a slow burn and features a sludgey, bottom-heavy shuffling riff that matches its lecherous double entendres perfectly. They save the best, however, for the side two opener, "T.N.T." This track features the heaviest riffs and a menacing "Oi" chant, oozing violence. These songs were manifestos of drug and drink fuelled, sexually charged youth, who were openly embracing the thug life which promised greater rewards than a dead end life in a forgotten corner of a rotting empire. The mix of profane sass, self-conscious irony, filthiness, and bull-headed rock is curiously similar to that which appeared three years later as Never Mind the Bollocks, Here�s the Sex Pistols (I defy anyone to listen to the riffing on "Let There Be Rock" and call it anything but punk�s country cousin).
AC/DC reached their apex two years later with Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, whose opening riff is one of the greatest in all of rock and roll: heavy, threatening, and just shy of The Stooges "T.V. Eye" in intensity. The whole album is filled with the kind of tightly wound tension that is crammed into this first 30 seconds. Where punk rock energized audiences by letting everything loose, AC/DC creates time bombs by keeping it just barely restrained. Like punk, however, they stood in contrast to most hard rock bands who were becoming increasingly obsessed with complexity and precision. In addition to keeping things as effectively simple as possible, the Young brothers played with a wild and loose abandon.
It was also on this album that the humor which underpinned much of went into the early records becomes most apparent (like the mocking grin looming over Angus' head on the cover of Highway to Hell--it's easy to miss, but it's always been there). While "Big Balls" teeters dangerously close to being over the top, if you didn't realize it earlier, you now figure out that Scott realized just how absurd much of what he sang really sounded. When you get to the next track, where he insistently chants "I'm a rocker, I'm a roller," he sounds as if he is trying to convince himself as much as anyone else. Just as no one naturally wants to be ugly or otherwise repulsive, those who aspire to be degenerates are doing so as a reaction against being pegged as such. If you are labeled as a troublemaker early on and find it difficult to dodge the tag, then you might as well really show them what a troublemaker is. Thus, on "Problem Child," Scott explains, "what I want, I take, what I don't I break, and I don't want you, with a flick of my knife I can change your life. There's nothing you can do." If you go ahead and say it out loud, you realize the genius of these lines. The rhythms and rhymes are satisfying, and although it's tough to say without grinning, you realize that you wish you could cop such an attitude. Scott knows that it's bullshit, but if you can match it to a cold-ass stare, you might be able to pass it off.
"Dirty Deeds also finds the band at their most ambitious. "Ain't No Fun (Waiting 'Round to be a Millionaire)" is a lengthy seven-minute plus romp that is closer to straight blues number than most of their other songs. It rides along on a nifty pair of syncopated, interlocking riffs, and features Scott's tightest lyrics. The entire second half of the song is comprised of a call and response between Scott and the band repeating the title, as the band gets faster, louder, and looser. This is immediately followed by the ballad, "Ride On," a surprisingly candid and effective song which laments the inevitable end of the band's chosen lifestyle. It's unlike any other song they have recorded (fortunately, however, they close the album with the lurid and repulsively misogynistic "Squealer," so you know they are not fully repentant).
1979's Highway to Hell, though considered a classic by many, features a significant and detrimental shift in the bands sound: the arrival of producer Mutt Lange (later married to Shania Twain), who polished up, and therefore weakened, their sound. Gone is the crunch, replaced by smoother guitar tones, which sustain to fill up the spaces. Also, the choruses, instead of being horrible, inhuman noise, become more delicately layered and palatable, prefiguring the sissy glam metal of the Eighties. Though there are some great tracks like "Highway to Hell," "Girls Got Rhythm," and "If You Want Blood (You've Got it)," and no actually bad songs, the punch was gone. Needless to say, this was their most commercially successful album to date.
And then Bon Scott drank himself to death, which gave that album�s title a morbid connotation, and made the cover all that much more creepy. This is, simply stated, the defining moment for AC/DC. It solidifies the band as the hard living thugs they'd always played themselves to be, but it is the inevitable end of the lifestyle they led and championed in their music. It gives everything they had previously released a dark pall and a bitter edge. And it was the event from which they could never recover. Though they released another strong record, Back in Black, the AC/DC of 1974-79 was gone and in their place was something else entirely, as evidenced by the tonal shift Back in Black.
The music for Back in Black had already been written, including Scott's lyrics, which were not ever recorded. Instead, the band hired Brian Johnson to take Scott's place. He wrote new lyrics, and they recorded the album a mere two months after Scott's death. Thus, Back in Black is a Bon Scott album. Though he does not appear on it, his presence, or lack thereof, defines every aspect of it. It was written with him in mind as vocalist, and it was recorded in the cold shadow of his death. It was the last good album AC/DC would record.
Though some songs were as menacing (the astounding epic opener "Hell's Bells") or as furious ("Shake a Leg") or as nasty ("You Shook Me All Night Long") as earlier AC/DC songs, the album feels emotionally heavy and dark. The fun is gone. The jokes fall flat. It's obviously intended as a tribute to Scott, and it is effective enough in that sense. But the wild abandon is now tempered by an ever present sense of doom. AC/DC would never be able to escape the posthumously prophetic Highway to Hell.
