Highway to Hell

AC A C / D C ’ S H I G H WAY T O H E L L

Praise for the series:

It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or or Electric Ladyland are are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch . . . The series . . . is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration—The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t aren’t enough— Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet—Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds—Vice A brilliant series . . . each one a work of real love— NME (UK) (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart— Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ‘n’ roll faithful—Boldtype [A] consistently excellent series—Uncut (UK) (UK)

AC A C / D C ’ S H I G H WAY T O H E L L

Praise for the series:

It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or or Electric Ladyland are are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch . . . The series . . . is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration—The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t aren’t enough— Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet—Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds—Vice A brilliant series . . . each one a work of real love— NME (UK) (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart— Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ‘n’ roll faithful—Boldtype [A] consistently excellent series—Uncut (UK) (UK)

We . . . aren’t We aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way . . . watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Continuum’s “33 1/3” series of books—Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our website at www.continuumbooks. www.continuumbooks. com and and 33third.blogspot.com 33third.blogspot.com

AC/DC’s Highway to Hell

Joe Bonomo

2010 The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc 80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038 The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX www.continuumbooks.com Copyright © 2010 by Joe Bonomo All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bonomo, Joe, 1966– Highway to hell / Joe Bonomo. p. cm. — (33 1/3) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-13: 978-1-4411-9028-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-4411-9028-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. AC/DC (Musical group) 2. Rock musicians—Australia—Biography. I. Title. II. Series. ML421.A28B66 2010 782.42166092’2—dc22 2009053555 ISBN: 978-1-4411-9028-4 Typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Photo credits

ix

First chord

1

Second chord

61

Third chord

87

Sources

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For Amy

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Richard E. Aaron, Betsy Alexander, Julie Bateman at Sarm Studios, Paul Bonomo (AC/DC on the jukebox at the Sly Fox!), Howard Bowler, Steve Connell at Verse Chorus Press, Caroline Coon, Mark Dearnley, Malcolm Dome, Arnaud Durieux, Dave Faulkner, Sarah Field and Bill May at Bob Gruen Photo, Heidi Ellen Robinson Fitzgerald, Robert Francos, Manuela Furci and Kerry Oldfield Ellis at Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive, Christina Gilleran, John Holmstrom, Patterson Hood, Eddie Kramer, Jeff Krulik, Laura Levine, Saul Levitz, Richard Manitoba, Ian McPherson at Time Is On Our Side, Laura Micciche, Mark Opitz, Tony Platt, Ron Pownall, Suzi Quatro, Marty Rogers, Andy Schwartz, Kim Shattuck, Andy Shernoff, Ed Stasium, Christine Stauder at Red Light Management, Earl Steinbicker, Phil Sutcliffe, Ruyter Suys, Nadia Syed at Roundhouse Studios, Jason Thome at Converse, Clinton Walker, Rose Whipperr, and my fellow graduates of St. Andrew Apostle School. I’m especially grateful to the knowledgeable archi vists and forum members at ac-dc.net, acdcrocks.com, and acdc-bootlegs.com. At Northern Illinois University, vii

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I’m grateful to the hardworking staff at the Music Library and at the Interlibrary Loan Information Delivery Services at Founders Library. At Continuum, special thanks to David Barker, who oversaw this project with his characteristic assistance and generosity, and to John Mark Boling and Claire Heitlinger. Thanks to Sara-May Mallett, Kim Pillay, and the hardworking folks at Pindar and Co. At home, Amy dealt with Bon, Angus and mates on a daily, loud basis. Thanks and love to her, as always.

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Photo credits

Photo by Robert Francos ©Robert Barry Francos/ Ffanzeen. All rights reserved. Photos by Rennie Ellis ©Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive. All rights reserved. Photo by Ron Pownall ©RonPownall/RockRoll Photo.com. All rights reserved.

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Rock & roll is music for the neck downwards.

—Keith Richards

People say it’s juvenile music, but pardon me, I thought rock & roll was supposed to be juvenile. You sing what you know. What am I going to write about — Rembrandt?

—Angus Young

A5

A gray October late-morning. Wheaton, Maryland. On the playground at St. Andrew Apostle School, Billy’s holding forth before a rapt audience of thirteen year olds. I’m one of them. “Hey guys, my brother and I saw AC/DC,” he tells us. “I met Bon Scott.” We know that the band will come to town again soon to rock Capital Centre, out in Largo. And we wonder: since Billy’s already shaving once a week and has an older brother who brings him along to rock concerts, will a backstage pass to one of the great party bands come next in the inevitable, lucky scheme of things? In our freshly minted teenage naiveté we can virtually inhale the sweat and the reefer as Billy talks to us. It feels as if we’re in the presence of divine fortune here, on the blacktop next to the dodge ball court and the basketball hoops and the swing sets, just feet away from the rectory where the priests live and write the sermons to which we’ll mentally undress the girls. Will Billy get to hang out in a smoky backstage, feel up the groupies, drink beer with Bon Scott? •

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As the Seventies came to a close, AC/DC was not yet a sonic institution firing oversized cannons from vast stages into seas of millions. The band’s seams were showing. They’d formed in Sydney, Australia, in late 1973, when twenty-year-old, Scottish-born guitarist Malcolm Young aborted an earlier band and roped in his kid brother Angus on lead guitar to round out a new lineup featuring Colin Burgess on drums, Larry Van Kriedt on bass, and singer Dave Evans. They debuted on New Year’s Eve at the Chequers Club in Sydney. Maneuvering among band defections, they ducked into EMI Studios and recorded their debut single “Can I Sit Next To You, Girl?,” and spent the remainder of the year raising their profile, gigging tirelessly, and enduring various rhythm section lineups with feet firmly planted on a bedrock of Chuck Berry, the Rolling Stones, and loud, electric blues. At older sister Margaret’s cheeky suggestion, Angus donned a schoolboy uniform onstage in April of 1974, and in between tours and one-off shows taking them from divey gay bars and provincial dance halls to the Sydney Opera House (where they opened for Australian legend Stevie Wright), the band signed with Albert Productions, benefiting happily from record distribution through the mammoth institution of EMI. Their first single charted in Perth, in Western Australia. AC/DC were hungry. In August, a wiry, affable hood tattooed with a risky past caught an AC/DC show in Adelaide in southern Australia, and he dug what he saw. Ronald “Bon” Belford Scott was like the Young brothers, a transplanted Scotsman, but a bit older and a little wilder, and already a veteran singer in several bands (the Valentines, •

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Fraternity). In the midst of a brief stint as a driver, handyman, and general gofer for an old bandmate, Scott was asked to audition to replace Evans, with whom Malcolm and Angus had grown unhappy; he joined in September. In November, after relocating southwest to Melbourne, AC/DC swiftly cut their debut album, High Voltage; their second, T.N.T., was recorded eight months later. Melbourne local Phil Rudd stepped in as drummer, and over the next several years the band committed themselves to a Herculean diet of gigs, drinking, and writing and recording: Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap was released in 1976; Let There Be Rock in 1977. By 1978, with English-born bassist Cliff Williams in the band and the classic lineup intact, they were reaping the benefits of their driven work ethic. Though essentially ignored in America, AC/DC was hugely popular in Australia, where their concerts had grown in size and intensity as their albums went gold. They’d made exploratory inroads throughout Europe and in England, and were boozily, noisily heading west. When they assembled in London in March of 1979 to commence recording what would be their sixth album, AC/DC’s collective body bore signs of the long road. They’d already jettisoned a producer and a batch of hasty demos. For a band driven by unyielding selfassurance and a clear sense of purpose, they were feeling unusual anxiety. Disco, and soft, AOR pop dominated the radio airwaves, angular New Wave songs threw elbows in the mix, and in America pressure was on from Atlantic Records to produce a radio hit and an album that would move quickly and decisively from the stores. The new AC/DC record had to be big. So Malcolm and Angus did what they do best: they •

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shut the door, pulled up a couple of chairs, and went simple. Angus! Angus! Angus! . . .

I remember hearing a frenzied version of “Whole Lotta Rosie,” borne aloft by this raucous chant, on DC101-FM, in Washington D.C., where I grew up in the suburbs. It must’ve been a personal favorite of the staff because the single had stiffed on the charts, unable even in its substantial wattage to overwhelm Nick Gilder’s “Hot Child In The City” or Boston’s “Don’t Look Back.” The song appeared on If You Want Blood You’ve Got It , a live album recorded largely at the Apollo Theater in Glasgow, Scotland, and that album, too, had performed poorly in the United States, peaking at 113 on Billboard . Powerage, a studio album released in the Spring of 1978, had fared even worse in the U.S., topping out at 133 on the charts, barely touching the shores before the wake imposed by Wings’ London Town, Chuck Mangione’s Feels So Good , and the unflagging Saturday Night Fever soundtrack washed it unceremoniously back to the world of wonder. In England, AC/DC was doing a bit better: Powerage had nearly cracked the Top 25 albums chart, and If You Want Blood made it as high as 13. But the band wanted to succeed in the U.S., the vast hometown of blues and rock & roll, the mythic source of their noisy, stomping sound. Though their records weren’t doing much to pry open Yankee wallets, AC/DC knew American geography pretty well by 1979, having worked their way through big cities and small burgs following several years of punishing Eastern European and U.K. tours. Supporting Let There Be Rock , they •

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made their first appearance in the U.S. on July 27, 1977, opening for Moxy in Austin, Texas. Over the next two months, they wound their way through the steamy and alien South, hitting Florida and a solid if small base of fans, and up into the expansive Midwest, playing Illinois and Ohio for the first time. Angus remembers nonstop highways in a cramped station wagon, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder and sock-to-sock with his mates, pulling up to venues as the opening band, their gear dwarfed by REO Speedwagon’s or KISS’ mammoth equipment and their outsized, radio-delivered mythologies. “And here we were — five migrants, little micropeople,” Angus remembers. “It was tough to even get into the show with that little station wagon.” A t W TAC At TAC - A M i n F l i n t , M i c h i g a n , D J P e t e r C . Cavanaugh heard advance presses of AC/DC’s albums sent to him by a friendly A&R man at Atlantic Records. He loved the band’ band’ss raw, raw, direct, basic sound — an an ethos that much of the Midwest historically found hospitable, particularly grimy Detroit with its Mitch Ryder/Stooges heritage. In December of 1977, as AC/DC were winding their way through the second leg of their initial U.S. tour, Cavanaugh invited them to play the Capitol Thea Th eatr tree in Flin Fl int.t. WTAC had ha d been be en the th e firs fi rstt stat st atio ionn in the country to play AC/DC, and as a consequence the band sold better in Michigan than in any other region. Thinking shrewdly along the lines of a “best of the old with the best of the new” promotional angle, Cavanaugh contacted members of the locally infamous and recently reunited MC5, who agreed to open up the show. •

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Cavanaugh met AC/DC at the airport on December 5. “No sooner had they all piled in my car, than someone fired-up something in the back seat,” Cavanaugh recalls. Wrinkling W rinkling his nose, expecting expecting a heady waft of rock rock star marijuana, Cavanaugh discovered that pot is not the band’s vice of choice. Weed only slows things down for the fellas: they were smoking harmless cigarettes, voraciously. “These were boys from Australia,” Cavanaugh says. “To “To them, an American cigarette cigarette was something something to be shared. I took a hit and passed it back.” Cavanaugh drove the car through the increasingly snow-clogged streets, the th e bitter weather and the group’s group’s low-light stast atus ensuring a less-than-packed Capitol Theatre. “Who cared? I knew the night would be historic,” Cavanaugh says now. They arrived safely at the theater, and soon after, the MC5 tore through a charged fifty-minute set, vibing on their legacy and the native goodwill. AC A C / D C w a t c h ed f r o m t h e w i n g s w i t h n o t a l i t t l e admiration, sensing kinship in the sonic mayhem of Detroit’s Detroit’s sons. After a break between sets, AC/DC walked onstage and plugged in. The venue was thrown into darkness, and Cliff Williams wrapped the rope tightly with the ominous opening riff of “Live Wire,” the band’s longstanding starter. Cavanaugh remembers: “Four spotlights instantly inst antly flooded the stage, all focused on and following a remarkably strange, rapidly moving, seemingly possessed apparition. He wore knickers. He was dressed as a proper English schoolboy with necktie and knapsack. His head bounced as though though about to become disengaged. He ran back and forth in circles around the other players, the intensity building and volume rising with every every stroke of the guitar. guitar. He was barely barely out out of his •

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teens.” Though some in the small crowd had rocked to AC/DC on the radio, no one had seen the band in person yet. And the sight of Angus Young, and of Bon Scott — chest bared, jeans painted on, tattoos glaring, his finger-pointing pseudo-menace both fun and scary — was eye-popping. Aff t e r t h e d e a f e n i n g s h o w, C a v a n a u g h p a i d t h e A exhausted band a thousand bucks cash for the night. They thanked him, shrugged their collective shoulder, shoulder, glanced around for girls: they’d gone to work, that’s all, and it was another triumphant night. “The group was, wa s, and an d is, is , simp si mply ly incr in cred edib ible le,” ,” Cava Ca vana naug ughh marv ma rvel elss more than three decades later. “Absolutely perfect, tight, hard, fast, furious rock & roll with unmatched, unrestrained, pulsating purity purity.” .” He recalls an endearing moment near the end of the long day. day. “They wanted to try some Arby’s Roast Beef,” Cavanaugh smiles, “so we stopped at the nearest location, still open despite horrible weather. They bought packs of cigarettes by the dozen and emptied-out several brands from a machine. They loved the Arby’s Arby’s sandwiches, sandwi ches, both for food and as projectiles. Since we were the only patrons and had tipped heavily, heavily, there was no hassle. I dropped them off at their hotel and extended sincere thanks.” He adds, “They had enough American cigarettes for weeks to come, no matter what.” The pairing of the MC5 and AC/DC might have been little more than a regional twining of coincidence and opportunity, but the tandem makes sense. Although Angus Angus and company company were always always hesitant hesitant to sing directly directly about counter-cultural politics, celebrating hedonism rather than revolution, both AC/DC and the MC5 met •

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at a ground floor: raw-throated singing, humongous guitar riffs, and rowdy noise. AC/DC was a difficult band to categorize. Over the decades, they’ve consistently bristled at the Heavy Metal tag, Angus in particular assuring anyone who’ll listen that the band is simply rechanneling Chuck Berry circa 1955, only a lot louder. Among the labels they’d come to wear in the late Seventies was Punk. In the heady spring and summer of 1976, AC/DC played London venues Red Cow, the Nashville, and the Marquee several times, rocking out at Ground Zero of the Sex Pistols/ Clash U.K. transformation. And they were a good draw, packing massive crowds into the Marquee, the heat so overwhelming that sweat condensed on the ceiling and dripped down on the roiled-up crowd in anointment. Over the coming years, while generally disparaging the violence and abrasive politics of the movement, they’d remind critics that AC/DC was there, right at the start of punk, dodging spitballs and sanctifying minimalism with the best of them. They certainly had the snot, attitude-wise, and literally, in the case of an overexcited Angus whose runny nose onstage often required drycleaning bills that the band could ill-afford. AC/DC made it to New York City in 1977, opening for the Dictators and the Michael Stanley Band on August 24, at the Palladium, the original “Academy of Music,” a converted movie house that provided touring and local bands with a venue-size between a small club and a large arena. Located on East Fourteenth Street in a neighborhood bordering scruffy, downtown mania, the Palladium was an exciting place to play, and a baptism by urban fire for AC/DC. Two days after the show, John Rockwell in The New York Times described •

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the night as “a deliberate attempt to bring punk rock to a major concert hall” before admitting that the bill “wasn’t actually quite a punk night, after all.” AC/DC, he noted, “was the closest thing to the punk norm” even as they exhibited “showbiz pretension” — i.e. “Mr. Young” prancing about the stage like a manic, drooling child. Lamented Rockwell: “the band is tight but the singer is undistinguished and the songs rarely ride above the puerile-provocative.” One man’s infantilism is another’s statement-of-purpose. AC/DC would commemorate this dynamic for their entire career. Andy Shernoff, founder of the Dictators, remembers the show and the Aussies well. “They were great, very friendly,” Shernoff says. “They were not superstars yet, they were easy to hang out with, no pretension, no attitude.” He adds, laughing, “Angus is a midget! Bon Scott was small, too. It’s amazing. How can short guys make a sound like that? It’s almost technically impossible.” Angus is five-foot three, his band members only a couple inches taller; watching from the wings, aware that his own group wasn’t delivering onstage as they could, or should, Shernoff was knocked out. “They had killer live songs, better than on the studio albums. People loved them. They were fantastic, no bullshit.” Shernoff watched Angus fearlessly head out into the sold-out crowd of 3,400, a tiny, guitar-shredding kid riding the shoulders of a burly roadie, possessed and obviously getting off on the air-punching excitement. Following the show, AC/DC decided on their version of an after-hours party: they toweled off, climbed into the tour van, and headed downtown. Their destination was a mile away, but felt mythically distanced from the cultural boundary of Fourteenth Street. In the sticky •

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and steamy summer of 1977, New York City was a simmering stew of social unease. David Berkowitz — aka “Son of Sam” — had been arrested two weeks before AC/DC arrived in Manhattan, the killer’s year-long span of murders mercifully ended. The city was reckless, loud, anxious, and brimming with a downtown-bred music revolution, and on a dilapidated avenue a derelict bar became the epicenter of no-frills, streetwise rock & roll. CBGB had opened to little fanfare several years earlier, but by the time AC/DC brashly pulled up to the tattered awning in August, the club was national news. Punk Rock had a name, and fervent disciples. John Holmstrom and Legs McNeil co-founded PUNK magazine in 1975; the magazine’s cartoons, maverick writing, and sensibility was shaped during many late hours on the Lower East Side, and became in large part the movement’s standard bearer. Fresh from the co-bill with the Dictators, a major-label band associated with the punk movement, and curious about CBGB and its risky vibe, AC/DC were eager to play for as many folks as possible, whether they were raising fists in arenas or threatening fists in dive bars. An hour after the Palladium show, the guys surprised CBGB management by showing up uninvited. (The lead band on the bill that evening was Marbles.) AC/DC plugged in and hastily played a handful of songs, including “Live Wire” and “She’s Got Balls,” each clocking in at over seven minutes with long guitar solos pushing the limits of the edgy punk ethos. Bon Scott was wearing his standard stage attire (he’d probably just wrung it out after the Palladium show): crotch-choking jeans and a sleeveless denim vest, soon removed to give his chest hair and medallion more exposure. His hair was shaggy •

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and shoulder-length. He was covered in ink. And the band was loud . “AC/DC were marketed as a punk band around that time,” Holmstrom remembers. “CBS bought ads for them in PUNK , we interviewed them for PUNK .” Holmstrom’s riotous dialogue with Angus and Bon Scott ranged in subjects from herpes, the band’s “favorite disease,” to taste in literature. Bon’s most recently devoured book was a collection of eighteenth-century erotica, what Angus happily called “about the filthiest book I ever read.” Characteristically, AC/DC shrugged their collective shoulder at the punk tag. “We just call ourselves a rock band,” Angus said at the time. “We don’t like being classified as a ‘punk rock’ band. Not everyone can be punk rock. It’s great that there are new bands, fresh faces and all that, but there are good bands and bad bands within that punk rock.” He considered for a moment, adding, “Actually the punk thing is pretty cool in America. It’s not like England where it’s a very political thing — a dole queue type thing. There’s too much money over here to classify all the punk bands as dole queues and dropouts. It’s just a young thing — a new breed type thing.” What Holmstrom remembers of AC/DC is the band’s bone-simple, timeless approach. “They certainly weren’t your traditional heavy metal band,” he notes. “The heavy metal of the mid-70s was a ponderous, bombastic, slow music. They were a high-energy rock & roll band and, before the Sex Pistols changed the image of punk rock from faster and louder to a more political and anthemic music, AC/DC could be classified as punk.” Holmstrom continues, “Then again, so were the Bay City Rollers, Alice Cooper, the Stooges, the •

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New York Dolls, Eddie and the Hot Rods, and hundreds more bands. AC/DC were a great rock & roll band, and that’s basically what punk rock was before things went nuts in 1977.” A few months after the Palladium show, New York Rocker writer Howie Klein put it this way: “AC/DC doesn’t use safety pins, never went to art school, and they sure don’t limit themselves to 2 or 3 chords, but if new wave is a reaffirmation of rock & roll’s traditional values, this band is an important part of it.” The detonation at CBGB, witnessed by a small crowd on a muggy Wednesday night, has been widely bootlegged, archivists digging the idea of AC/DC playing an infamous club during an epochal year. (My favorite moment: some unknown fan, between beers, idly curious about this little band, is caught on-mike asking, “Isn’t Angus the name of the monster in Lost in Space?”) In the crowd at CBGB that night was Robert Francos, who at the time was editing and publishing the New York rock & roll zine Ffanzeen as he explored the street-rock scene. Francos remembers the band’s impromptu appearance: “As Marbles’ set was ending, suddenly there was a commotion at the back of the club and I figured, Oh, I bet some drunk was getting tossed. Then I noticed part of the crowd moving toward the stage, surrounding a cluster of people. That’s when they announced the next band to play over the speaker, and it was not one who was scheduled. One of the group of people had long-hair, muscles and a grainy face; the one behind him was diminutive, wearing short pants that looked like part of a school uniform, and was carrying a guitar case. “At one point, Angus switched guitars that either had a remote or a really long cord (I can’t remember •

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which). He then made his way through the crowd, while playing wild solo licks, and went outside. So, there was little Angus, while still playing, talking to the transient gents from the Palace Hotel milling outside CBGB.” America, welcome to AC/DC. Elvis Presley died one week and a day before AC/DC arrived on the Bowery. The darkness left behind was liberating to the scruffy, avant-garde artists toiling within it, gloomy for those celebrating Presley as the originator. Longtime music observer and critic Phil Sutcliffe remembers the transitional pains that England was suffering during the punk movement of ’76, which had coincided with AC/DC’s arrival. Sutcliffe witnessed a telling scene at Sounds magazine after his editors there had thought to place a photo of the Moody Blues on the cover. “We had the paper in the office, and we looked at the cover, and the editor said, ‘Fuckin’ hell, they’re a bunch of hairdressers, aren’t they!’ And that was the end of it, as far as we were concerned. ‘Sorry, wrong era.’ But some bands still passed the cool test that goes on with any era. And AC/DC did.” As Sutcliffe sees it, many of the U.K. punks were too young to discredit and demolish the sources fueling AC/DC. “They didn’t look back that far,” he observes. “They didn’t have Chuck Berry or Little Richard in their lives to detest them. Bands like Pink Floyd, Yes, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer were massive symbols of what you should loathe.” U.K. journalist and DJ Steve Taylor has considered AC/DC’s beginnings with three decades’ worth of hindsight. “Malcolm Young had effectively trained his band to play rock-punk; straight and loose,” he observes in The A to X of Alternative Music , •

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adding, “The band themselves have never claimed to be anything other than a rock band but then how many punkers said that. That was always the problem with punk. It was against categorization; real punks didn’t want to be called punks. They identified such pigeonholing as the first step to corporate mediocrity and they were proved right in the long run. Listening back now it’s clear that most ‘punk’ bands were pretty much straight rock anyway.” “It’s “It’s funny, funny, when we first first came to England England in ’76, the record company wanted to market us as a punk band,” said Malcolm, who’d roll his eyes at the label, even as they did act out a like image on- and offstage. “We told them to fuck off! You’d get these punks having a go at us, and Bon would go, ‘You shut up or I’ll rip that fucking safety pin out of your fucking nose!’” Sutcliffe concurs: “Nobody could knock the guys in AC/DC, obviously not to their faces, for one thing, because they were as ferocious and far more tough than any punks, because the punks, on the whole, were all mouth and no trousers, as we like like to say. say. And AC/DC — as short as they were! — you just knew fine well that if anyone insulted insulted them from the audience they’d just jump down from the crowd and punch them. And they’re Australians, they’re just known as tough guys. The punks couldn’t really knock that. And AC/DC were playing the raw, souped-up rock & roll which was much closer to punk than it was to heavy metal.” Dave Faulkner of Australia’s Hoodoo Gurus relates a story of Angus duck-walking on top of the bar during a 1977 gig at Bondi Lifesavers, “kicking and knocking everyone’s drinks over. And that’s what endeared AC/DC to the English, they were a bar band with no •

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pretensions, pretensions, just primitive primitive and raw, raw, we don’t give a fuck! ” AC/DC stood with one foot in the Southern South ern sources source s of rock & roll, the other in a new current of stacked amps, shredding guitars, and aggression, part of the continuum and uniquely their own. 1978 was spent in typical fashion for the band: on the road or in the studio. AC/DC played over a hundred and thirty shows in the U.K., Europe, and the U.S. that year, refining refini ng their thei r primal sound during durin g long, sweaty sweat y shows that were even louder and fiercer than before, thanks to a new PA system. The Young brothers and Scott were writing strong, confident, tight songs that drew on adolescent smut, blues-chord changes, and swaggering riffology, riffology, reveling in their growing if limited success measured with equal parts lager, female adulation, and antibiotic shots. America Ameri ca was increasi incr easingl nglyy receptiv rece ptivee to the band in larger clubs and on certain FM stations spinning album tracks, but it wasn’t wasn’t sending AC/DC records to the top of Billboard just just yet. Let There Be Rock, released in the summer of 1977, had done fairly well abroad, peaking at 17 in the U.K. and 29 in Sweden. Loaded with songs that would woul d become the group’ group ’s standard stan dard bearers beare rs (“Whole (“Wh ole Lotta Rosie,” Rosie,” “Hell “Hell Ain’t A Bad Place To To Be,” “Bad “Bad Boy Boogie,” “Problem Child”), the album was bone-raw and sounded immortal, the Youngs’ snarling guitars so sharply recorded that they all but drew blood, the the band’s band’s energy tightly wrapped but played swinging and loose. The production production — by longtime Australian duo George George Young Y oung (Angus and Malcolm’s Malcolm’s older brother) and Harry Vanda Vanda — amplified the finger-on-fret immediacy and strutting recklessness of the songs. •

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Atla At lant ntic ic Reco Re cord rdss had ha d hope ho pefu fullllyy dist di stri ribu bute tedd “The “T he U.S.A. Needs AC/DC: Let There Be Rock” buttons to fans, radio stations, and record stores. But the promoThe re Be Rock Roc k stalled on tion had anemic results: Let There the charts at 154. Both the band and Atlantic were becoming uneasy uneasy, worried privately privately that AC/DC might simply remain Australia’ Austral ia’ss darlings. Releases in their own country were performing very well — “Baby Please Don’t Go,” the b-side of their second single in 1975, Le t had reached number 10 on the national charts; Let There Be Rock had hit 17 on the album charts; High Hi gh Voltage reached 7; Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap reached 4; T.N.T. had peaked at number 2. The band was now regularly selling out large venues across Europe and in England. But the U.S. was proving stubbornly resistant. In February of 1978, the guys headed with Young and Vanda into familiar Albert Studios in Sydney, and emerged with Powerage. “Rock ‘n’ Roll Damnation,” “Riff Raff,” “Sin City,” and “Up To My Neck In You” fairly bounded from vinyl to stage, more ammunition in the band’s band’s arsenal of grinning, grinning, grooving grooving sound. Keith Richards is often cited as having said that Powerage is one of his favorite rock & roll albums, that he listens to it regularly and has even mixed Rolling Stones records to it, cocking an ear to its simple, enduring magic. He’s gone on record more than once expressing his admiration for AC/DC, a crowing achievement for any band steeped in the amplified retelling of white blues. “I’ve always liked AC/DC and the fact that they’re not pompous,” Richards said in 1988. “I like people that know what direction they want to go in as opposed to •

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what people might like. I can’t stand people trying to second guess the public.” Powerage was released on April 28 in the U.K.; May 25 in the States. There was no second-guessing this album’s statement-of-purpose. The boys hit the road the next month cocky and sure that the new batch of songs would translate well in smoke-filled arenas and teenagers’ basements. The sixty-two-date U.S. tour, beginning in June and running through October, was a grueling, booze-fueled panorama of small and large venues and alternating headlining and supporting slots, common to excess, tinnitus, and enthusiastic groupies. Among the bands that AC/DC ran with on this lengthy tour: Molly Hatchet, Aerosmith, Foreigner, Van Halen, Ted Nugent, Blue Oyster Cult, UFO, Thin Lizzy — an indelible slice of late-Seventies, long-haired, high-amp, open-air stadium-festival hard rock culture. In and out of tour buses, hotel rooms, and backstages, holding their noses around the cannabis while guzzling down lagers and bourbon — with the notable exception, of course, of the sober school kid, Angus — AC/DC pounded their songs into the marrow of concertgoers, blending humongous riffs with grins and humor. The culture of AC/DC was beginning to take shape and grow in America in 1978: Scott’s legendary partying and self-mocking lechery, Angus’ boyish costume and lengthy, insane soloing, and Malcolm’s clock-punching, no-bullshit attitude. Critics were mostly bored. And AC/DC mostly shrugged off the critics. Katherine Gilday, reviewing If You Want Blood You’ve Got It in The Globe and Mail , writes that the album “forcefully conveys the emotional complicity audiences have with AC/DC’s Neanderthal •

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rock,” adding “the subject matter celebrates the hoary rockers’ concerns of sex, booze, and drugs and the music is a crude, repetitive blend of loud guitar and pummeling beat.” She concludes, somewhat charitably: “Sincere simple-mindedness apparently has a huge market.” There’s more bemusement in The Washington Post , where Mike Joyce complains about a “dull and deafening” night spent with AC/DC, a band that “appear to be lyrically bereft of ideas, depending rather on sheer volume and overwrought guitar solos.” The band’s fans appear to simply love the lack of subtlety, indeed to court it, Joyce observes, and why the band is popular will stay a mystery to him. He sniffs: “that they have come this far is a credit to their management rather than their musicianship.” The power of Marshall stacks vaporizes most critical derision. AC/DC were happy to hit the stages to thunderous, fist-aloft cheers even if — especially if? — those cheers induced exaggerated sighs from patronizing pop music critics. What mattered was the onstage translation of beat, groove, and dirty jokes. By the close of the 1978 tour, AC/DC, loud and in control, was an absurdly tight rock & roll unit. On September 6, the band flew into Hollywood for an appearance on NBC’s Midnight Special , Burt Sugarman’s ninety-minute late-night concert show. Over a popular eight-year run, hirsute host Wolfman Jack introduced many diverse bands to America. AC/DC’s one-song performance on the show is a classic, and goes a long way toward describing why conventional critical sniping of the band has always been irrelevant. They set up on the middle of three soundstages, as Steven •

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Tyler and Ted Nugent Tyler Nugen t introduced intr oduced them (both (bot h barely barel y able to keep grins off of their faces, likely flashing onroad revelry from the summer tour). The mini drama of “Sin City” captures everything fun, dangerous, and potent about AC/DC. From the opening, crushing three-chords heralded by Scott’s sleeveless sleaze, the song is loud and on-point. Angus’ cap flies off within seconds. His hair is shoulder-length, and the sweaty mop’s manic in head-banging glory from beginning to end, the guitarist prowling the stage with his favorite Gibson SG guitar in a freak show: part Chuck Berry, part hyperactive tweener, with a bit of Lon Chaney, Jr. thrown in. in . He’s He’s grimacing, grimacing, and his skinny ski nny,, wiry legs are are sticking out of his lad shorts, a book bag bouncing up and down on his skinny butt. When he’s not prowling during the verses, he’s relatively still, bopping back and forth on his semi-planted feet in his soon-to-beidentifiable groove. Bon? He’s He’s sporting an ugly ugly mullet and uglier ugli er denim, but his baseness and tight-jean arrogance is redeemed entirely by his gum-chewing, half-grin, all-amused countenance. This is pretty hilarious, innit ? He’s likely drunk, he certainly can’t dance — he looks like the trashy bachelor uncle rocking out at your family picnic — and his stage moves are limited to snaking the mic cord suggestively and striking poses and pointing at the crowd. But those grinning grinnin g eyes make it all fun, and even half-innocent. The crotch-level girls seem amused and maybe interested behind feathered hair and stoner cool. Malcol Mal colm, m, the th e forema for eman, n, is head-d hea d-down own,, hard ha rd at work. wo rk. Rudd and Williams are stand-ins for the guys down in the furnace, their hands wrapped tightly and sturdily around their tools, game-faces on, making the whole •

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thing hum and groove and stay in one quaking piece. During the breakdown, breakdown, Angus is on his ass, then t hen he’s he’s twirling on the floor like a crazed fourth Stooge, now he’s up and (kind of) dancing as Williams and Rudd quiet things down with a hypnotic, funky bass-andhi-hat line. Angus drapes his uniform tie around Bon’s head, garlanding him, and, after Bon philosophizes a final time on the nature of sinning and gambling, and takes a deep breath, the band comes crashing back in, the song leaping in energy and power. By the end, it feels like the inevitable runaway train barreling half way wa y down dow n the th e hill hi ll.. God, God , it must mu st’v ’vee been be en deaf de afen enin ing. g. The crowd crow d digs dig s it, though tho ugh they the y look stunned stun ned during duri ng the whole thing, and that’s part of what Bon seems to acknowledge: acknowledge: he’s he’s part understanding, understanding, mostly gleeful at what the band has just detonated. He’s He’s sung about Las Vegas Vegas and all of the promises and heartaches, booze and powder, luck and destiny, ill-fortune and thrills made manifest in that desert town. Impossibly large noise coming out of these five micro-people. Watch it with the sound down and your ears still ring. T h e n e x t d a y, A C/D Th C/ D C f l e w a c r o s s t h e c o u n t r y t o West W est Virginia irgini a to begin the last leg of the tour, tour, which wound down three weeks later at Fort Wayne, Wayne, Indiana. They rested for a week and a half, did some press for the live album, then plugged in and cruised through Germany, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Sweden, and the U.K. for thirty-two more ear-splitting shows, highlighted by boisterous crowds. They played two sold-out nights at the Hammersmith Odeon in London in November and a wild gig at Essex University filmed •

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for the Rock Goes to College television show, show, during which which Bon carried Angus on his his shoulders through through the sweaty, sweaty, knocked-out crowd as smoke poured from Angus’ book bag. They caught their breath and laid low at home during the Christmas holiday, their thoughts turning toward the final year of the decade. They didn’t have a hit song in America yet. Were they wondering what was missing? Did they think back on a song like “Sin City” that has everything rock & roll should have except the indefinable element that was keeping it out of the worldwide, collective fantasies fantasies of boys and girls? The name “Eddie Kramer” had a capital ring to it. An engineer and producer from South Africa, Kramer had made his name in the Sixties working with wit h Jimi Hendrix. In addition to to helming the the boards for Hendrix’s Hendrix’s albums, Kramer helped design and build Electric Ladyland Studios in New York City. He worked levels and faders for, for, among others, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, the th e Rolling Stones, and Peter Frampton, but his ascendance came in the mid-Seventies with KISS, whose career-making Alive! album album he produced, creating a lasting pop-culture artifact that helped to define the era of FM radio and arena-rock bombast. He stuck profitably with KISS through Rock and Roll Over (1976), (1976), Alive II (1977), (1977), Love Gun (1977), and Ace Frehley’s solo album (1978), the latter an especially rocking record of tough, cannabisand-Cristal grooves that proved that Kramer could get muscular, dangerous rock & roll onto American radio. Atlantic Records executives loved what they heard, and they wanted the money-making money-making Kramer to produce the follow-up to Powerage. The decision would prove to •

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be infamously vexing. AC/DC — a notably insular, tightknit outfit — bristled at the ousting of their longtime production team of Young and Vanda, not only because Angus and Malcolm would be forced to cut loose their older brother, but because the producers had provided sound musical direction and a supreme level of trust, a bunker mentality forged over a half-decade. Mark Opitz, a successful Australian music producer (INXS, the Divinyls, Hoodoo Gurus), engineered both Let There Be Rock and Powerage, and he became friendly with the fellas outside of the studio. He fondly remembers he, Phil Rudd, and Malcolm Young renting a dinghy with a small outboard engine to go fishing in Sydney harbor during morning peak hours after a night in the studio. Opitz witnessed the working and close-fitting frontlines built by Young and Vanda at Albert Studios. “It was quite a tight circle in the studio, with not many outside visitors invited in,” Opitz acknowledges. “We worked closely together for long hours, usually starting late in the day and going through until the early hours, so naturally everyone bonds together.” The Young brothers eventually gave in to the bottom line and to the promises it made. Michael Browning, the band’s manager at the time, explained the situation: “As much as I think Vanda and Young were totally crucial in the role of creating the sound and developing the music and bringing the best out of Malcolm and Angus and Bon, as good producers as they were, they weren’t switched on to what American radio was sounding like. You had to be in America to really understand what the mentality of the kids was, the listeners and their programs.” He added, “We just reached the stage where you can have all the attitude and all the vibe but you’ve •

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got to disguise it as something slicker with a more full production.” The move, Browning felt, simply had to occur: “Atlantic were 100 percent right.” A call was put in to Kramer. He agreed to fly in January to Albert Studios in Sydney to record demos with Angus and Malcolm. Five years earlier to the month, AC/DC had recorded their first, hesitant tracks in a Sydney studio, filtering ill-fitting glam style through Chuck Berry and the Stones, and working their way toward a familiar sound. What a difference half a decade would make. “We did attempt some demos in Australia, and I don’t think they were that good,” Kramer says flatly. “I think the problem was that from my perspective — and this is with thirty-plus years of hindsight — the band resented the fact that I was being asked to produce them. I don’t think that I was the right person for them. Me being foisted upon them was not a good idea, because they pretty much had their own ideas and their own way of doing things, they had their own particular sound that they had in mind.” Kramer adds, “I think that the record company pressure was enormous. And the fact that I had a pretty good track record with the KISS guys and other bands like that, Atlantic probably thought, Well, we can make these Aussie guys into KISS-type popular heroes .” Putting largely unvoiced concerns behind them, Kramer and the band flew to Miami in February and met at Criteria Studios for more formal recordings. There, Kramer rehearsed Malcolm, Angus, and Bon’s new songs and taped a handful of pre-production tracks (some with Bon playing drums), but it quickly became apparent that the arrangement was unhappy. Kramer •

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says, “I was just not the right guy for the gig. Sometimes you meet a band and you think you might or might not be. You learn over the years: You know, this band is not for me. And I should have said that. I blame myself for a little bit of it.” Kramer had recently concluded an arduous production session with another group, and discovered that he wasn’t in the right frame of mind to start over with a new band, let alone one who were indirectly sending doubts his way. Kramer had difficulty corralling a posturing Bon Scott (“I had no clue as to how to deal with an alcoholic singer,” he acknowledges, “though I know how to deal with them now!”) and didn’t get from the band the response that he was used to. A few song ideas became keepers; one riff the guys made sure to get back to the next day, because, as Malcolm decorously explains, “it stuck out like dog’s balls.” But the sessions sputtered. Allegedly, at one point Kramer suggested that the band expand their musical horizons; “[Kramer] tried to strong-arm them into recording a cover of Spencer Davis Group’s ‘Gimme Some Lovin’,” writes John Doran, “something Atlantic saw as a license to print money.” For his part, Kramer has no recollection of this. After a few frustrating weeks, Kramer was let go. In a bit of a panic, and turning an anxious eye to a possible tour of Japan, Malcolm called Michael Browning, who suggested Robert John Lange, a thirty-year-old producer and client of manager Clive Calder, in whose New York apartment Browning providentially was staying. Lange agreed to step in and listen to the band’s demos. He had a modest industry reputation, having turned to music production after his own group, Hocus, had •

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failed to ignite. He’d moved to England in the midSeventies, and produced albums by Graham Parker and the Rumour, XTC, Motors, and the Boomtown Rats, among others — but there is little indication in those records of the mammoth, tuneful clamor that Lange would come to create with AC/DC. The fellas needed to clear their head and refocus. Confident if a bit gun-shy after the Kramer disappointment, they met with Lange at Roundhouse Studios, in London. An epochal album, ascension on worldwide radio, charts, and tours, and tragedy in the subsequent ten months would forever alter AC/DC’s career and legacy. Little was foretold at the start. Production began on March 24, 1979, a week before Angus turned twentyfour. Lange entrusted recording and engineering duties, respectively, to Mark Dearnley and Tony Platt, valued studio tech men with solid track records. Dearnley, one of Roundhouse’s house engineers, considered his task clearly. “I regarded the engineer’s role as one of getting the best sound possible onto tape,” he says. “This was sometimes achieved in conjunction with the producer, but often it was the engineer’s sole responsibility. In this case, it was a joint effort and clearly something must have gelled as Lange and I continued to work on other projects over the years.” He adds, “Later on, I realized that another aspect had to be added to the definition — that was, ‘to do nothing that would get in the way of the performance’.” Recording AC/DC, Dearnley quickly discovered, became an intuitive balance of studio knowhow and hands-off recording. “I think I realized fairly early on that the AC/DC sound was ‘in the fingers,’ and •

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my job was to keep out of the way and not to colorize what they were doing.” To this day, Dearnley is asked how he got the brutal yet clean guitar sound on these sessions. His answer: “Put a few microphones in the right position and then stay out of the way.” Dearnley had worked at Lansdowne Studios in London prior to coming to Roundhouse. At Lansdowne, known primarily for its large-scale orchestral film scoring, he’d been taught the “correct” way of recording, which was invaluable knowledge, he insists. “With the move to the Roundhouse, we were much freer to creatively explore the wrong way of recording — just ask the tech who often had to repair abused equipment, all for the sake of our alleged ‘art’.” The plan was to record AC/DC live in Roundhouse’s single large room. Angus has claimed that many Powerage tracks were recorded in a single take; just listen to “Up To My Neck In You” on which Angus doesn’t overdub his Berry-on-speed solo, he just steps forward and lays right in from the rhythm track. The hope was that Lange would help to capture a similar spontaneity onto Roundhouse’s twenty-four tracks, with overdubs limited to lead vocals and solos. In hindsight, Dearnley recognizes that his contribution came at a gut level. With the goal being to capture the feel of a performance, high-tech doodling be damned, this enduring approach helped to shape the massive but warm tunes at these sessions, and to relieve them of a vibe that could become dated. “I worked on sounds until they sounded good to me,” he says. “I have adopted this approach throughout my career. It may be a little arrogant, but I have never found that trying to copy styles was worthwhile. At best, you end up with a great sound that is two years old.” Of Lange, •

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Dearnley recalls, “Mutt clearly knew what he was up to. I do know that he spent a lot of time listening to what was happening in the U.S. and was consciously steering things that way.” Malcolm and Angus knew what they didn’t want: audio flawlessness as conventionally defined. Lucky for them, Tony Platt’s recording philosophy is borne from a similar attitude. “I’m not a technophobe by any stretch of the imagination,” Platt says. “But I prefer to use the technology to enhance the music rather than letting the technology start to become the master. The problem that has come about with the advance of technology is that quite often people get a little bit too focused upon the technology and what they can do, and they lose sight of what they actually want to do.” It helped that Platt was a fan of the band. A couple of years earlier, on a buddy’s recommendation, he’d listened to High Voltage and loved the album by the “Australian punk band.” A mutual friend introduced Platt to Lange, who wanted to capture the quintessentially British sound of hard rock bands such as Free, whose “All Right Now” was a classic of unadorned, uncluttered rock & roll. Lange knew Platt and his mixing work, and was aware of his history recording bands at the seminal Island Studios, and figured he’d be right for the blend. Lange had his team. Says Platt now: “It’s absolutely, definitively the fact that Mutt pulled together the attractiveness of AC/DC, the commercial edge that it needed.” What Mutt Lange heard when he listened to the tunes that the Young brothers and Bon Scott brought to Roundhouse were anthemic choruses, the timeless appeal of adolescent uncouthness, and the giddy propulsion of eighth-notes. •

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What he and the band would create was Rock & Roll Platonism. Interviewer: “Do you know what you’re doing in musical terms?” Angus Young: “I haven’t a clue.” Three halting, growling chords issue menacingly from the right channel. There’s faint reverb, the guitarist muffling the strings with the edge of his picking hand. It’s a deceptively simple progression that anyone can master, witness the hundreds of tutorials from garages and teenage bedrooms to cover-band rehearsals and YouTube. The sound, from a familiar solid-body Gibson SG, is snarling but controlled, loose though coiled tightly. It’s somehow both nasty and inviting. It’s all you hear for the opening few moments, and it’s hard to place where the downbeat will come, though your head’s rocking already. Ten seconds in and the drum lands, centered in the mix, and fat. Nothing fancy or virtuosic, just steady, dragging slightly behind the riff. If you’ve been following the band up to this point, you’ll notice that the snare and hi-hat are much crisper, and mixed higher. The snare virtually rings, and the kick drum, playing off the silences left open in the chords, pounds straight into your chest. You feel that you’re in the room and, man, it sounds almost slick. Almost. Twenty seconds in and the stupidly simple four-on-the-floor groove is official and irresistible. Now the singer enters. He sounds wasted, he sounds like he’s drooling a bit, he sounds funny, he sounds completely unique, and you know who it is. He’s spitting out declarations of easy living and season tickets on one-way rides. He doesn’t want to be asked •

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anything or to be bothered by anyone, but he doesn’t sound obnoxious or precious, he sounds, well, sincere. And damn appealing. A half-grin crawls onto his face and now onto yours, and it’s there for good. Here’s the kicker: it’s party time, he’s going down, and — as the guitar strikes a new chord and the rhythm guitar and bass join in confidently on the left and the middle — his friends are gonna be there, too. You’re gonna be there, too, if the singer has anything to do with it. Invitation in hand, surrendered to the simple over whelming groove, you anticipate the chorus before it comes, but love the grinding, noisily ascending trip to it anyway, and crash now you really hear something new if you’ve been a fan of the band, hear what millions of others around the world, some of whom had been only casual fans of the band or of rock & roll, will hear: an effortless, head-rocking, arms-elevated, smile-lifting chorus so appealing and fun and full of filthy guarantees, and so layered with harmonized, gang-bellowed vocals that you feel surrounded at a smoky party. You’re yelling along about riding the highway and maybe shaking your head at the silliness of the words but beaming at the huge, answering riffs, and before you know it the thing coyly suspends for a moment before the second verse kicks in with the same dynamics, only this time you’ve rubbed your eyes and see where you are. And if you’re worried — I shouldn’t be here, I feel kinda guilty for being here, there’s a lot of open bottles and girls and I’m gonna get in trouble but these are the guys who made the pretty convincing argument that hell’s got a rocking band while heaven is stuck with harps — that’s good, the song’s

promises are a little scary and the singer, even behind •

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his grin, is a little scary and he should be. But the beat is so impossibly cool. You’re in. Just have fun. The title track to Highway to Hell is not only an AC/DC classic and in many ways their signature song, it’s about as perfect as a rock & roll song gets. In three and a half minutes, AC/DC manages to translate Dionysian excess, the lure of naughty behavior, and the promises made by twin-guitar riffing across all languages and culture. The peak fever of the band’s combustible sum, “Highway To Hell” has become a touchstone for many, from besotted fans to worried evangelicals, dyed-inthe-wool hard rockers to indie hipsters who can grin and ironically head-bang their way through the song’s fun inanity. Not that Malcolm, Angus, Phil, Cliff, and Bon were aware of this at the time — they were just going to work under immense pressure, reviving that “dog’s balls” riff from the sessions with Kramer. By the second verse, those riffs, played by the Young brothers in big, troublefree, open chords, have become indelible. “It’s the sound quality of open chords that’s the thing,” Angus explained in Guitar World . “They’re big-sounding buggers, and they ring for ages, if you want them to.” Sandwiched between the final hollered choruses is Angus’ solo, another great chapter in his churning, blues-based style (quite possibly the best solo that Keith Richards never played) — a grooving lick that makes the lift into the final chorus palpably inevitable. And here, the band, maybe at Lange’s prompting, does something interesting: in between the bars of the chorus they halt their playing for a couple of seconds as Angus runs his pick up and down the strings in a •

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maniacal screech — a stop-time equivalent of the party’s funniest, over-the-top moment, the one that we’ll all laugh about tomorrow through our hangovers, though we’ll barely remember it. Critic Steve Huey describes this “wild freak-out pick-slide down the strings” as “nothing so much as Bon Scott’s insanity being let loose upon the world.” Mad and wild as Scott’s vocal is, he manages to get it together in the closing moments, the brothers sustaining their chords as Angus, the dervish in the middle channel, picks impatiently. Scott slows down and asserts passionately that he’s going all the way down (did we doubt him?) as the band builds up the chord in deafening volume and Rudd creates an ear-splitting storm on his ride cymbals. And then it all slams shut. His name derives from the Greek, diabolos : “accuser.” He’s on your shoulder, in the dregs at the bottom of your glass. At the dark end of the alleyways you shouldn’t go down. Licking your ear, leading you to bed. The scarlet figure who dances in your dreams loves rock & roll, his accusations leveled at our hapless attempts to stay good, his slanders on our pure name ringing in our ears, tolling at the front doors of every establishment we shouldn’t enter but want to. “Bon Scott epitomized the role of a God-hating rebel who abused drugs and indulged in sinful living,” David J. Stewart declares confidently on the Jesus Is Savior website, before adding the backdoor lament that Bon’s death “is just one of hundreds in the Rock ‘N’ Roll Hall of Shame.” Since its release, “Highway To Hell” has become fodder for those citing Satanic influences in rock & roll, anxieties that have been with us since the genre became popular with teenagers in the late Fifties, •

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and will likely be with us forever. AC/DC has always rolled a collective eye at this, even as they’ve actively courted devilish scandal throughout their career. When onstage, Angus makes the “devil’s horn” sign with his hand, when they write about rock & roll damnation and urge that hell ain’t a bad place to be, and is, in fact, the promised land, they’re having fun being honest about life’s libidinous lures at the same time that they’re being crassly, happily mercenary. Sin sells, and the band knew this, and sensed it from the start. As early as 1976, the guys found themselves solemnly denounced in the Australian Parliament, officials concerned that the band’s popularity was an ingredient in the corruption of the country’s youth. “When we first went to America there were guys in bed sheets and placards with prayers on, picketing the gig,” Angus remembered. “I said, ‘Who are they here for?’ And they said, ‘You!’.” For their part, the guys have long claimed that the lyrics to “Highway To Hell” originated in Angus’ weary observation that riding around for years in a tour bus with the singer’s reeking feet in your face is nothing short of a highway to hell. Locker-room humor, no evil spirits around. My favorite origin story is this: near where Bon Scott was living, in Fremantle, Australia, was a favorite pub of his, the Raffles. To get there, he had to take the Canning Highway. As the pub approaches, the road dips into an infamously steep decline; allegedly, scores of people died at the intersection near the bottom of the hill, and its descent into mayhem became known luridly as “the Highway to Hell.” Bon loved the joke and the joint, and when the band was off of the long road and out of the studio he flew down that hill to drink and carouse at the Raffles regularly with like-minded •

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folk. He always managed to avoid tragedy, but what a ride it must’ve been, drunk and high and zooming down the Australian night. Duly inspired, likely shaking his head at yet another near-miss, Bon channeled no stop signs and no speed limit, the daring spin of the steering wheel, the happy memory of his friends gathered at the pub after he’d survived the journey. Virtually a night out with AC/DC at your favorite bar, “Highway To Hell” is also one of rock & roll’s great driving songs. We rev up again quickly. “Girls Got Rhythm” follows on the heels of the title track, and in its insistent fouron-the-floor drive and awesome, hip-shaking riff it feels as if the party’s headed in a different, no less risky direction. And it’s still early. An unbridled riff of a song, “Girls Got Rhythm” is given ballsy swagger by an unhinged yet committed vocal from the helium-voiced Scott, propelled excitedly by the Youngs’ riffing and Williams’ eighth-notes. Two songs in and you can hear the difference that Lange has made: light virtually glints off of the shiny surface of this performance, so tactile is the mid-range, so compactly made and energetically focused is the performance. An aspect of earlier records that Lange seems to have vetoed is the recording of the room’s atmosphere, studio details such as amp feedback, fingers on live strings, count-ins. In doing so he might’ve lost a bit of the band’s immediacy, but he compensated for it with an air-tight but punchy — and radio-ready — album sound. I can never think of “Girls Got Rhythm” without pairing it with the opening track, and when the album was released the two were usually played back-to-back on DC101 where I lived, and on hundreds of FM stations •

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around the country. A perpetual motion machine, “Girls Got Rhythm” was made equally for boomboxes at the public pool and for pounding systems in the back of cars transporting happily juiced-up guys downtown for a Friday night out. Lyrically, Scott was mining his favorite source of inspiration. I thought that I knew who these girls with the back-seat rhythm were, the ones who looked through me at school, the ones who after three o’clock would shed their regulation plaid skirt, white blouse, and saddle shoes to paint on their makeup, feather their Sun-In hair and, defying the laws of physics, stuff a hairbrush down the ass pocket of their skin-tight Calvin Kleins to hang out and smoke at the park in Kemp Mill shopping center or the ice skating rink at Wheaton Regional, flirting with guys who were already shaving. Or: those prohibited girls at E. Brook Lee, the public school located over the hill feet away from St. Andrews, but culturally a continent-sized distance. When Scott sings about the girl moving like sin and then letting him in, the colloquialisms worked well enough for us boys, giddily tense as we were with the twin pulls of head-down piety and up-skirt peeking. “It’s like liquid love,” Bon squeals, barely suppressing the grin that knows just how outrageous the line is. The band is fantastically loud and tight by the end of the song, Malcolm the foreman steering the smirking riff as Williams and Rudd provide the solid chassis. “ Rock & roll rhythm! ” the guys shout seconds from the song’s end, and it’s that moment that I loved when I first heard the tune; these girls don’t just hang out in the back seat, they’re silhouettes for everything that rock & roll promises. •

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To young guys, at least. Bon Scott’s lyrics catalog an epic sweep through the triumvirate of men’s needs: pussy, rock & roll, drink. There’s little room in his oeuvre for fealty, or subtlety, or sensitivity to the nuances of the male-female relationship dynamic, or for extended reflection on the tension between desire and conscience, surrender and smarts. There shouldn’t be. He knows what he wants, we know what he wants, she knows what he wants. The music makes it irresistibly so. But that doesn’t mean that, Catholic-trained, I didn’t raise an eyebrow at some of Scott’s lyrics, even when as a hopeless teenager the language I spoke was equal parts English and Hormone. When Highway to Hell appeared in the summer of 1979 I had sex on the brain. The previous summer, the Rolling Stones had released Some Girls , and “Miss You” was in heavy rotation on D.C. area radio stations. Laying out at Wheaton Pool in the radiant, suburban sunshine, off of school for a few months, heady with the thump of “Miss You”’s filthy beat and the surrounding tableau of girls moist with Coppertone, the enduring, insistent tradition of rock & roll and sex was working its lasting way through me, and I was happily helpless in its grip. (That my sixteen-year-old sister was among those innocently posing against the backdrop only complicated the pleasures.) Buzzing in the air the next few summers was the rumor that Joan Jett had gone to Wheaton High School a few years earlier and she comes to the pool sometimes! (She had indeed gone to Wheaton High. I looked eagerly for her bad reputation to strut onto the pool deck area in those years, but she never materialized.) There was sex in the breezes and the shimmering girl-curves, and though I hardly had much of it figured out or even named, the throb of •

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“Miss You” (and of Exile’s “Kiss You All Over” and Nick Gilder’s “Hot Child In The City” and Foreigner’s “Hot Blooded”) pulsed in my chest as a girl walked by me on her way to the snack stand and I rubbed my eyes, and rising through the eyespots and glare was the mythic, long-off promise of sex. Bon Scott was writing out of a tradition that we might charitably call the Penthouse School of Realism, but he was also writing within the time-tested conventions of Dirty Blues (no doubt with autobiographical inspiration — witness “Whole Lotta Rosie,” “She’s Got Balls,” “The Jack,” “Go Down,” etc.). He’s hardly the first or the last musician to mine the blues for lyrical tropes as well as for chord changes, but his knowing humor and knack for memorable turns-of-phrase made him one of the best rock & roll lyricists of his era. “People began singing about sex as soon as they began singing,” writes rock & roll historian Jim Marshall. “Dirty ballads, lewd couplets, poems, limericks, rhymes, drinking songs, all ripe with sex, have always been an important if shunned part of western culture, from the first broadside balladeers to the most current heavy metal acts.” He adds, “Blues in general is a lyrically limited form — broads, booze and sex have a virtual stranglehold on the primitive blues singers’ mind, give or take a cameo appearance by the devil himself . . . and filthy blues records make up a large portion of the recorded body of work. Since that immortal day when Blind Lemon Jefferson beheld his pecker and decided it had the same leathery quality as a black snake, getting the biggest hit record of his career out of it — ‘Black Snake Moan’ (which he recorded several times) — sex on blues discs sold.” •

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What Marshall calls “the golden age of the double entendre and the crude metaphor” never ended, of course. From obscure 1950’s R&B singers to Seventies hard rock to daring New Wave through last month’s R&B and Hip Hop: popular music has always made room for gutter thought, memorably expressed. A sliver of history’s badly behaved: Barrel House Annie’s “If It Don’t Fit (Don’t Force It)”; Lil Johnson’s “Sam — The Hot Dog Man”; Art Fowler and his Ukulele’s “No Wonder She’s A Blushing Bride”; Louise Bogan’s infamous “Shave ’Em Dry”; Bo Diddley’s “Greatest Lover In The World”; the Sonics’ “Dirty Old Man”; the Vandals’ really racy mid-Sixties ode to a onenight stand, “I Saw Her In A Mustang”; Grand Funk Railroad’s paean to groupies, “We’re An American Band”; Naughty by Nature’s catchy, acronymic “O.P.P.” Et cetera, et cetera. Guilty even were the tidy Everly Brothers, whose “Wake Up Little Susie,” duly sanitized for Eisenhower’s America, nails the morning-after fears of a teenage couple waking up where they shouldn’t be. Common to these and other grinding songs are reliance on witty metaphors and an understanding that the listener’s in on the (dirty) joke. When Wynonie Harris sings “Keep on churning until the butter comes” or Bon howls about being “up to my neck in you,” you don’t have to have a second pair of eyes in the back of your head to see in two directions at once. “There were always ways in which popular singers could be suggestive of sexual desire by subtle emphasis or inference,” blues historian Paul Oliver says. In the fall of 1979, as Highway to Hell was laying the foundation for its assault on the charts, the Knack were selling millions of copies of “My Sharona,” and later “Good Girls •

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Don’t,” teaching suburban kids everywhere burdened with teenage madness and in between sadness the Top 40 code for oral sex. She really got the rhythm. Writing in 1976 about AC/DC’s London debut, Caroline Coon casts an incisive eye: “A more macho and less sexually ambivalent lot” would be hard to find, she sighs. Blending a reporter’s unbiased eye with a general weariness at sexual politics, she adds that the band’s songs “pay homage to the myth that men have gotta be goddamn tough to stand up to all the puritanical females who reject them, plus being physical supermen to withstand the gonorrhea-ravaging consequences of those women who make a habit of accepting their advances.” Notwithstanding the fact that Coon’s observations sit on the same page as a review of Elvis Presley’s appearance at the Long Beach Arena, the sentiments might have been stated at any time in AC/DC’s career. Though Bon Scott’s lyrics lacked the emotional complexity of some of his hard rock contemporaries — Thin Lizzy’s melodramatic sincerity, say, or Van Halen’s “Jamie’s Crying,” with its notions of heartache and disappointments I could read on the complicated faces of some of the girls sitting next to me at St. Andrews — AC/DC did manage to create its own drama on Highway to Hell in song arrangements, particularly on “Walk All Over You” and “Touch Too Much.” The former offers the listener a bit of a breather in its opening, isolated power chords, before settling in as the fastest-paced tune so far. This dynamic repeats when the band moves into a quasi-menacing half-time for the chorus before revving up again for the verses. The effect is unsettling — it sounds like the deep breath you take to control your •

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emotions — matched by the lyrics’ dubious back-andforth between domination and surrender: the singer wants to walk all over his girl sexually, but also urges her to do anything she wants to him. Well. It was the Seventies. I’ve always looked for art in art, not in rock & roll, but it’s hard to look past some of AC/DC’s more brutal lyrics. That the sentiments are delivered with a meaningful grin deflates the misogyny a bit and, after all, Scott is simply reaching in to the well-worn bag of boys’ adolescent (wet)dreamscapes. Testosterone muscles its way into the better intentions of a lot of men, and maybe Bon’s working out that tension here, to the degree that he employs much therapy at all in the screeched words that are often indistinguishable from the loud guitars. (“Gonna bend you like a G-string,” he’ll drool a few songs later.) Anyway, the band really works out on “Walk All Over You,” the second-longest song on Highway to Hell . And that’s what matters. Malcolm and Angus lock in with the rhythm section, the song’s pumping, well-oiled engine allowing me to rocket past the more questionable lyrics. But the unease is there, and creates some of the disquieting moods and tensions of the album. Listening to the record when it was released, I heard both lust and violence in “Walk All Over You,” guessing that in some forlorn circumstances the two are more closely aligned than I might wish. Scott had a checkered past before joining AC/DC in 1974. Phil Sutcliffe relates in an early profile of the band that Bon made regular appearances in the scandal sheets: “He made it when he was jailed after a fracas with a cop in his late teens; when he was busted for dope; when he was dragged through a garden full of rose bushes by •

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a father who found him in bed with his daughter, and when his flat was raided for ‘pornographic’ photos.” After recounting the lyrical origins of “Whole Lotta Rosie” (Scott had dutifully bedded a 270-pound woman as much for the other guys’ kicks as for his own, and, to be fair, she counted Bon as a conquest, too), Sutcliffe writes, “They stand for everything I disagree with about our chauvinist view of the women’s role and yet they’re so totally honest, open and funny about it I got carried away with liking them and became aware again how life, for all the fine ideals we raise and cling to, insists on turning out like a seaside cartoon postcard.” He adds: “A belly laugh is often the sanest reaction and that’s what AC/DC are into.” Sutcliffe is sharp to emphasize the band’s humor. Nervous record executives removed the hilariously titled “Crabsody In Blue” from Let There Be Rock, and Angus pretended to be a milk-gulping sixteen year old throughout the band’s first U.K. tour, when in fact he was twenty-one, the more to crack up his audience via his schoolboy get-up. When asked once by a winking reporter whether he was the “AC” or the “DC,” Bon famously replied, “I’m the lightning bolt down the middle!” The band’s sometimes crude sense of humor consistently pops the puffed-up bubble of their macho posturing; they never took themselves all that seriously, a prerequisite in my book for making great rock & roll. If this all sounds a bit defensive, well: head-banging doesn’t allow for much intellectual rigor. Bon has a lot of lascivious fun on “Touch Too Much,” the song that most reflects the freshness of Lange’s production style. The opening four bars march in assertively •

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but don’t much sound like AC/DC; I remember thinking that the guitars, so spiky and New Wave-ish, could’ve been airlifted from the Cars’ Candy-O or Panorama albums. Soon enough, Bon steps in to start the story, and we know who we’re dealing with, the dude who once described his voice as a “weasel on acid.” Six bars in, the band changes chords and the song vividly changes mood. The mid-paced performance is starkly different from the rave-up of “Walk All Over You” and the land-speed record that follows, and that gives the song a unique place on the album. (The most pop-sounding thing that AC/DC could yet manage, “Touch Too Much” would be released as the third single in early 1980, following the title track in August of 1979, and “Girls Got Rhythm” in October.) The Young brothers’ tensely executed staccato chords emphasize the tensions the singer’s howling about: a woman with the face of an angel who’s so wickedly tactile in bed that she drives him insane. The slow, sleazy chord ascension in the chorus creates the languorous bedroom vibe, and a cool, extended breakdown near the end allows Malcolm and Williams to knowingly answer Bon’s punning complaint/adoration with the chanted title line. Bon actually sings a semblance of a melody in this song, a new trick allegedly tutored to him by Lange who had to do hard work convincing Bon that breathing exercises would help him as a singer in the long run. The band’s performance is tight and controlled. The final song on the first side, “Beating Around The Bush” sounds as if the band took a quick glance at the clock and discovered that they had little time to let it rip. Fast, riff-driven, the song is an exercise in sweaty delivery and fret dexterity as much as it is another sexual •

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lamentation from Bon, this time of cunnilingus gone wrong with a girl who’s two-timing him. I think. The incomprehensible lyrics are virtually drooled out, and Bon must know that the words take a back seat to the show-off performance between Malcolm and Angus, reprising their twin-lead attack from Powerage’s “Riff Raff.” A testimonial to the noise kicked up by a tight, rockin’ band firing off one more before a well-deserved intermission. I’m staring at the keyboard looking for the right combination of letters, numbers, signs, or symbols that might translate the sound let loose by Bon Scott at the end of “Shot Down In Flames,” the kickoff to side two of Highway to Hell . It’s tough enough finding language for the cheerful howl eleven seconds in. The funniest song on the album goes a long way toward self-satirizing the band’s macho posturing. It begins with a two-chord shoulder shrug of acceptance, an off-mike whoa! from someone, then a phlegmy whoop from Bon that sounds like a mental patient’s party invitation. One two and we’re in, locked rock-solid inside Angus’ and Malcolm’s simple riffing and Williams’ eighth-note bottom. The story’s simple enough: the singer’s at his second home looking for love when he sees a girl up against the jukebox looking “like she’s something to sell.” He asks her rate. She tells him to go to hell. Repeat self-mocking tale of a night striking out. The band wisely leads off the second side with a tonal shift that reminds us that the man who moments ago was showing off his hard cock as a bedroom-wall shadow will be the loser some nights. It’s hardly feminist stuff, but it’s amusing and refreshing to hear a bemused Bon •

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admitting to disgusted no’s rather than lustful yes ’s. And the song grooves and rocks, simply and powerfully, with Rudd’s punch-line snare shots and a solo made insane by Angus’ pick runs up and down the neck of his Gibson, mocking Bon’s romantic nosedives and growing frustrations. (“That’s nice!” approves Bon during the solo.) After the band slams the song home, Bon lets loose a blurt of mock-anguish, a cackle only he could come up with, probably drunk and weaving in the sound booth, getting off on the riotous story with which he’d just implicated himself, cracking up his bandmates who miraculously refrain from guffawing on-mike. It’s a goofy moment of weird Bon Scott lightheartedness. Much of that off-kilter joy would evaporate within the year. A tried-and-true Chuck Berry model refitted for Seventies Camaro culture, “Get It Hot” serves its purpose well. Bon describes a classic, and comical, scenario: he’s riding in a car, a girl by his side, the night’s young, and, most crucially, no one’s playing Barry Manilow or soul music on the tape deck. Soul might’ve been code for disco — a genre never visited by the band in their recordings — but Bon doesn’t pull any punches with Manilow, who in the late Seventies was traipsing along the charts with such MOR classics as “Copacabana (At The Copa),” “Looks Like We Made It,” and “Can’t Smile Without You,” theatrical soft-rock that was the antitheses of AC/DC. Now that we know who’s in charge of the songs, the ride picks up speed (are we headed to the Raffles?) and the song cruises along nicely, muscular and self-assured. At the time, I remember feeling that “Get It Hot” sounded like a song that KISS •

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might’ve tossed onto side two of Rock and Roll Over , and that wasn’t entirely a compliment. In retrospect the tune, riff-driven and virtually transposed from the band’s collective chromosomes, works well in keeping up the party’s momentum. Festivities take a darker turn in the final quarter of the album. A slammed chord and snare shot open “If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It),” sounding at first like the close of “Get It Hot.” Malcolm’s exciting, ascending riff that follows begets the most interesting song on Highway to Hell . Bon would occasionally visit social issues beyond STDs: “Jailbreak,” “Ain’t No Fun (Waiting ’Round To Be A Millionaire),” “Big Balls” (from Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap); “Dog Eat Dog” ( Let There Be Rock); and “Down Payment Blues” (Powerage) all explore the resentment that the singer feels trapped in an economic system that makes it difficult for the working class to aspire and achieve. Bon often sang with a grin at the chip on his shoulder: he’d dodged the law as a kid, had issued a false name and address to the police, done time in youth detention centers, and been placed into care of the Child Welfare Department in Fremantle until he turned eighteen. Hardwired in him was a skepticism that conventional life could lead to riches and renown. As a young man, he’d placed his belief firmly in rock & roll, testifying to it, and with it, as a force that not only liberated girls of their underwear but also Bon and his mates from a lifetime of Sisyphean toiling at dreary day jobs. By 1979, Bon may have felt that he’d relieved himself of a good deal of this class resentment. He was wealthy, famous, well liked. Perhaps it was his elevated social •

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status, the worldwide traveling and numbing routine of anonymous hotels rooms, the money, or perhaps it was his increasing and dangerous intake of top-shelf bourbon and lager — but by the Highway to Hell sessions something seemed to have dulled Bon’s need to create the incisive character sketches and details of daily, working-class life that had enlivened many of his earlier songs. His lyrics on Highway to Hell are more universalized and less political, if no less personal — the telling details often sacrificed for a broader tale of hedonistic victory (and in the case of “Shot Down In Flames,” one night of defeat). All of which makes Bon’s howling in “If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It)” about a “human zoo,” dealing with “the shit that they toss to you,” getting “nothing for nothing” and feeling like “a Christian locked in a cage” all the more startling. Disgorged on top of one of Malcolm and Angus’ most stirring riffs, and backed with an exhilarating band performance, Bon’s words feel urgent and necessary. The slightly slower demo version of the song (released in 1997 on the Bonfire box set) is even more explicit in its defense of the rights of the working man, who’s “doing everything he can” but still shouting hoarsely into the wind. Perhaps Bon or Malcolm, or Lange, felt that these lyrics were too politically overt, and they were replaced. Meanwhile: in the spring of 1979, the Ramones were in sunny L.A. with Phil Spector and an orchestra, and the Sex Pistols were finished; within the year, the Damned were recording material like the heavily riffing “Hit or Miss,” a song that I could hear AC/DC playing. “If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It)” sounds punk to me. •

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Common to many fans’ and critics’ discussions of Highway to Hell is a dismissal of “Love Hungry Man” as filler and a throwaway, or otherwise unrealized. The song opens by stealing from “Walk All Over You,” and doesn’t get a whole lot better. The lyric is clichéd, and the sluggish playing never really lifts. The arrangement tries to disguise the blandness — Williams drops in some uncharacteristically fluid, funky lines — but relative to the grinning urgency of rest of the album, the song and performance remain inert. Malcolm has claimed that the demo was much rougher. “In the studio it didn’t happen right,” he admits. “But we had to settle for it. But it doesn’t mean the band have to like it or listen to it.” It’s not on my iPod. Six years after Highway to Hell was released, Richard Ramirez was apprehended in Los Angeles. Between June of 1984 and August of the following year, Ramirez had murdered and raped sixteen people in the L.A. area, often leaving behind a sick signature of scrawled demonic ciphers, including a pentagram. Los Angeles police stated that Ramirez was a self-described fan of AC/DC, wore AC/DC t-shirts, and at the grisly scene of one of his violent sprees left behind an AC/DC cap. Allegedly, Ramirez’s favorite song was “Night Prowler,” the final track on Highway to Hell . A haunting, haunted slow-blues, the six-and-a-half minute “Night Prowler” is remarkable for a number of reasons, not least of which is the controlled, vivid band performance in which Angus reaches deep into his love of blues-styled playing and offers affecting, evocative playing. An eerie crawl in 6/8 with the guitars tuned a half-step down, the closer colors in an unsettling way •

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what comes before it. The tune begins with a sharp intake of breath, three chords that outline the music’s dark terrain, and then a tumble into the band performance held aloft by a long, sustained note by Angus that nearly perishes on the strings. Before Bon begins singing, the mood has been established: foreboding, fearful, and dark. Ten years earlier to the month (and only a few miles away) the Rolling Stones had recorded “Midnight Rambler,” a slow-blues similar to “Night Prowler” in its menace and lurch. Some see the Stones’ classic as an influence on Bon and the Young brothers; both songs begin and end in the source material of the blues, Malcolm and Angus’ first love. “Anyone can play a blues tune,” Angus noted to Vic Garbarini, “but you have to be able to play it well to make it come alive. And the secret to that is the intensity and the feeling you put into it.” He adds, “For me, the blues has always been the foundation to build on.” One of the few songs by other artists that AC/DC would cover was Big Joe Williams’ standard “Baby, Please Don’t Go,” issued as the first song on their debut album in 1975. The guys likely dug Big Joe’s biography: he was a belligerent, itinerant bluesman who spent his formative years in the Delta as a walking musician who played work camps, jukes, store fronts, and streets and alleys from the South through the Midwest. Williams was a hard-working, highly unique and ramshackle kind of player who favored a funky nine-string guitar and a jerry-rigged, homemade amp. The brash and confident punks in AC/DC certainly favored what historian Robert Santelli describes as Williams’ “fiercely independent blues spirit.” The chugging “Baby, Please Don’t Go” became a favorite for Sixties and Seventies •

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rock & roll bands to cover, extend, make their own. Williams’ 1935 version is acoustic mania. Critic Bill Janovitz notes that “the most likely link between the Williams recordings and all the rock covers that came in the 1960s and 1970s would be the Muddy Waters 1953 Chess side, which retains the same swinging phrasing as the Williams takes, but the session musicians beef it up with a steady driving rhythm section, electrified instruments, and Little Walter Jacobs wailing on blues harp.” AC/DC loved it. Their take on Muddy’s take of Big Joe’s lament was immortalized in a version broadcast on ABC’s (Australian) Countdown in April of 1975. The band seems to be having a blast with the galloping number, Angus and Malcolm running up and down their frets with a delinquent’s glee, but the kicker — of course — is Bon: he comes onstage dressed like a demented Pippi Longstocking, complete with a short skirt, blonde pig-tails, dark lipstick, and blue eye-shadow. During the solo breakdown, he stands next to Angus and theatrically lights a cigarette, and Pippi’s knee-sock innocent turns into the whore dear to Bon’s heart. Watch Rudd in the video: he can’t keep from laughing at the spectacle. The blues in “Night Prowler” is slower, sexier, much more sinister than Big Joe’s, and no less indebted to the tradition within which the band has always worked. (I would have loved to have heard John Lee Hooker moan and turn it inside-out.) The tale of a shadowy stalking, though packed with narrative details, wouldn’t have won Bon a Pulitzer. The images in the first verse are hoary, well worn: the full moon; the clock striking midnight; the dog barking in the distance; a rat running down the alley. But Bon’s howling delivery — fully committed, and trusting the time-honored appeal of a dark night’s •

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eeriness — sends tremors throughout the song. Because he believes this stuff, now so do we. The imagery in the second verse is more intimate; we’re in the girl’s bedroom now where she’s preoccupied and scared to turn off the light, fearing noises outside the window and shadows on the blind. Anticipating the second chorus, the verse ends with the singer slipping into her room as she lies nude, as if on a tomb. What’s going on here? Autobiography, or a spec script for a slasher movie? A little of both, likely, given Bon’s personal history and juicy imagination. He sings in the end that he’ll make a mess of her, and I always disliked the line; it adds explicit violence to a scenario that at the fork of fantasy and reality could’ve gone either way. Bon felt that it added to the mise-en-scène, I guess, or he was honestly owning up to hostile tendencies inside himself. Most likely, he was giving his listeners vicarious thrills on the dark side, what they wanted all along. I didn’t want it. I hardly listened to “Night Prowler” after I bought the album, though I liked the slow burn of the band’s playing and how Angus’ soloing added a voice to the song. The song scared me a little, and I resented having to like a song that I disliked because it’s on a great rock & roll album. Richard Ramirez admitted to loving “Night Prowler” to the point of heinous identification, in part prompting L.A. media to dub him the “Night Stalker,” a nickname that will last in perpetuity. My friends and I rolled our eyes when we heard Ramirez’s story; another nut job trying to use rock & roll as an excuse, as a defense. I remembered years earlier watching The Dukes of Hazzard on television and marveling at the fifty-foot jumps that Bo and Luke would make in the General Lee in some hilly Georgian •

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county. The moment that I belted myself into a Chevy Chevette in the high school parking lot for my first driver’s-ed lesson, I intuited Damn, this thing weighs a ton, and the disconnect between fantasy and actual life was made pretty clear. Ramirez didn’t or couldn’t make such a distinction, and because of that, the closing song on Highway to Hell will be forever linked to a homicidal maniac who tragically took sixteen innocent lives in brutal ways. When news of Ramirez’s comments made its way into the insular AC/DC camp, the band recoiled, claiming that Ramirez wildly misunderstood the song: it’s just about a horny guy sneaking into his girlfriend’s bedroom at night, innocent, hormonal, high school stuff. Yet Bon Scott’s more treacherous imagery pushes the song into regrettably mean places. I’m not sure that the band can have it both ways. A typically winsome gift from Bon himself ultimately rescues “Night Prowler.” In the closing moments, as the chords wane, Bon utters under his breath a weird, nasal phrase that I couldn’t figure out at the time. (What is that, some bizarre Aussie mantra?) Eventually I learned that he’d said, “Shazbot, Na-Nu, Na-Nu.” As AC/DC were recording in the Spring of 1979, Mork and Mindy was ranked third in American television Nielson ratings. Robin Williams’ interstellar character from the planet Ork was invading living rooms and rec rooms at a happy rate, and Bon was watching. “Na-Nu, Na-Nu” was an Orkan greeting; “Shazbot” an Orkan curse. Maybe that’s what appealed to Bon: at the end of the band’s best album he gets to say hello and swear at the same time, channeling his inner alien. It’s testament to the •

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band’s sense of humor that they kept the aside on the album. It’s a perfect way to send up the danger and fear lingering after “Night Prowler.” The album ends with a joke, the final words from by Bon Scott on an AC/DC album. Shit! Hello! Perfectly weird. Recording for the album was finished on April 14, 1979. Mixing and mastering took just over a week. Highway to Hell was released worldwide in July. Its secure place in the AC/DC pantheon was hardly immediate. Like the band itself, Highway to Hell faced a long way to the top. Billboard weighed in with a review a week before the album’s release, an assessment that did little to boost early sales. “Just as a tiger can’t change its spots,” said the anonymous critic, “this veteran Australian band can’t change the style it has been playing since its inception. High energy, lowbrow heavy metal is what this quintet plays and it is played well. Outside of two blues flavored tunes each cut is up-tempo in a Foghat/Foreigner vein. Without the visual stage antics of guitarist Angus Young, however, the pulverizing instrumentation and sameness of subject matter (girls) gets to be wearing.” Highway to Hell debuted at 107 on the “Top LP & Tape” chart. From this lowly position the band could barely make out the Top 10 starred brightly at the top by the Knack’s debut, followed by Supertramp (Breakfast in America), the Cars (Candy-O), Donna Summer (Bad Girls ) , Earth, Wind & Fire ( I Am ), Electric Light Orchestra (Discovery), Charlie Daniels Band ( Million Mile Reflections ), the Who (The Kids Are Alright ), Neil Young ( Rust Never Sleeps ), and John Stewart (Bombs •

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Away Dream Babies ) . Not an impenetrable fortress

but not one enthusiastically welcoming of a raw, hard rock & roll album made by pint-sized kids from Down Under. The following week, as grade schools and high schools were gearing-up across America and kids were glumly buying pens and pencils, Highway to Hell hit number 50, sandwiched between Billy Thorpe and Elton John. The album leapt KISS’s Dynasty the next week to 42, rested patiently there for a week, rose to 36 the following week (leaving behind the Who and Van Halen II ), and held down that spot for another week while fighting off Cheap Trick’s Live at Budokan. On November 10, its twelfth week on the charts, Highway to Hell reached number 17, the highest spot that the album would attain, destined forever to stare up the backsides of, among others, Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall , Kenny Rogers’ Kenny, Foreigner’s Head Games , and — in what must’ve galled Bon Scott — Barry Manilow’s One Voice. After four weeks, something funny happened: the title track stalled briefly on the “Hot 100” singles chart at number 69. That likely gave the guys a dirty chuckle and went a long way to diminishing the Manilow affront. One of the great rock & roll songs of all time would ultimately reach no higher in America than number 47. AC/DC would play more than a hundred and fifty shows in 1979. After finishing the album, the band briefly rested before flying to the U.S. and commencing a grueling fifty-six-date tour three weeks before Highway to Hell ’s release, beginning May 8 at the Dane County Coliseum in Madison, Wisconsin. They were supporting UFO, Journey, Cheap Trick, Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, and the Scorpions on different legs of this •

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long circuit. Their brief, eight-song set usually featured “Girls Got Rhythm,” “Shot Down In Flames,” “If You Want Blood,” and “Highway To Hell,” though they were sometimes dropped in favor of older crowd-pleasers. Of the June 12 show at Massey Hall in Toronto, critic Alan Niester, raving about Angus’ playing onstage (“If ever a musician were in need of a full-time exorcist, Young is the man”), virtually drops his jaw over the exhilarating crumbling of the wall between band and fan. “The gimmick which had the audience, including this jaded old observer, up and stomping,” he writes, “was one in which Young, aided by a radio-miked guitar which allowed him to roam the hall at will, rode the shoulders of a pair of exhausted looking roadies around every nook and cranny of the hall. After circling the ground floor, Young took his act up to the first balcony, then the second, giving virtually every pair of eyes in the audience a close-up of his contorted, emaciated and heavily sweating little body. Despite the fact that AC/DC do absolutely nothing novel musically, you can’t help but cheer for a band that puts out 110 percent.” Niester ends his account presciently: “In the end, when the largely male audience hit the streets, it was not UFO, but the insane antics of Young that provided the fodder for conversation.” The guys had precious little time to enjoy any afterparty street jawing. On July 13, sandwiched between gigs in Omaha, Nebraska and San Diego, California, they flew 4,500 miles to Rijnhallen, Arnhem in the Netherlands where they were filmed for the VeronicaCountdown TV show. “Hey! You’re on TV now so I want you all to smile!” Bon barks at the delirious crowd after he bares his chest and for the thousandth time the fellas behind him walk onstage with their gear, plug in to the •

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giant 350-watt amps, and go to work, dashing through a blistering five-song set. Afterward, they dried off and drank up and got back to the U.S. in time to pick up the course through small and large towns, including an appearance at the mammoth “World Series of Rock Festival” in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 28. The tour wrapped up on August 5, following a show at the Spectrum in Philadelphia. The guys flew home but had little time for rest. A nine-show European tour began in Belgium only twelve days later, highlighted by a slot at massive Wembley Stadium in London supporting the Who, on August 18. On an enormous stage in front of 55,000, AC/DC played a wire-tight, nine-song set culminating with “If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It).” Writing a week later in Melody Maker , Harry Doherty, likely still stunned with tinnitus, noted that the “instinctive and positive audience reaction” to AC/DC was “much more impressive and entertaining” that what the Who received (and, for that matter, the Stranglers and Nils Lofgren, also on the bill), “confirming that good hard rock owes much to hunger. The band were determined to leave their mark on what was their largest-ever British audience, and they were aware that they could finally establish their reputation here, deservedly so.” He adds, “This could be just the break the band needed to finally push their point home to Britain.” Whirlwind gigging continued. On September 5, with Highway to Hell now out but struggling on the charts, the band flew back to the U.S. for a thirty-sixdate leg as a headlining act. In the Los Angeles Times , Don Snowden wasn’t as impressed as his Melody Maker counterpart: “AC/DC operates on the musical principle that the best way to an audience’s heart is to hammer it •

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into submission with a collection of hoary, heavy-rock clichés,” he complains. “Concepts like subtlety, refinement, and dynamics don’t exist in its musical dictionary, and Monday the band never deviated from its bludgeoning attack.” Though the show was ultimately “boring in the extreme,” Snowden, too, was captivated by Angus, who played to perfection “the twin roles of traditional guitar hero and bratty problem-child.” As always, AC/DC played to the crowd, not to the commentators, who consistently misunderstood the mission, as the band saw it. Observed Bon of a typical show with two encores in front of a rowdy audience, “I read the review next week and he puts his shit on the crowd — ‘How could 2,000 mindless people like this bunch of idiots?’ He didn’t see what we were doing for the crowd and what they were doing for us.” On October 25, the band headed back over the Atlantic for the final tour of the year, a fifty-date swing through England, Scotland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and France. Throughout it all they drank and whored and whooped it up and drew upon staggering reserves of energy and wondered if this was finally it, if the lengthy road was at last leading to them to moneyed nirvana and the lifestyle that they dreamed about. On December 9, AC/DC played two sold-out shows at the Pavilion de Paris. The second set was filmed and released theatrically in 1980 as the documentary Let There Be Rock, intercut with interviews and clips of the guys decadently drinking champagne, racing sports cars, running around goofily on a football field — an indelible document of a punishing year now culminated, and of a bruised and proud band of five mates poised for renown and infamy. •

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“Like the Ramones, AC/DC were never as dumb as they seemed,” Joe S. Harrington writes in Sonic Cool: The Life & Death of Rock ‘n’ Roll . “What they were was a harmonically compressed engine that reached peak performance around the time of Highway to Hell , which, in America, accomplished what the Ramones and Sex Pistols never could: mainly, it became the soundtrack for social dropouts — i.e., literally, punks — everywhere.” In the late Seventies, AC/DC was closer in form and spirit to basic rock & roll than they were to heavy metal, the latter a tag that was already being applied to the band by 1979 — because of Angus’ long solos? — and that would gain considerable traction throughout the Eighties. “OK so there’s nothing advocating the twin punk concerns of anarchy or nihilism,” Steve Taylor says in The A to X of Alternative Music , “but ‘Problem Child’ — ‘what I want I stash, what I don’t I stash’ — offers a similar sentiment.” When asked the difference between AC/DC and heavy metal bands, Angus was clear to journalist Vic Garbarini: “Rhythm, basically. We always keep that in mind. It’s still got to have that swing. Heavy metal can sometimes seem very theatrical and pre-planned: ‘We start here and race and I’ll see you at the finish!’ The beat doesn’t swing — it’s almost become like German oompah music sped up.” Earlier in the interview, Angus had qualified praise for guitar virtuoso Eddie Van Halen: “He sounds like he practises. A lot of them do . . . They could play what they’re doing on stage at home. It really sounds like they’re practising scales. And that’s fine, but then to me it sounds rehearsed.” On the spectrum between straightforwardness and virtuosity, AC/DC always turns toward simplicity. •

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Advocating feel above technique, Angus argues, “If you hear something that’s very complex you have the ability to break it down into something very simple. Instead of playing six chords or notes you play just one to get that same feeling across — and maybe by simplifying it you make it even better, more direct.” It took a while for critics to catch up to the marriage of loud noise and pleasure, but over the decades, Highway to Hell has become a sonic touchstone for directness and simplicity. “This is a veritable rogue’s gallery of deviance, from cheerfully clumsy sex talk and drinking anthems to general outlandish behavior,” enthuses Stephen Thomas Erlewine at allmusic.com, adding, “it wasn’t just Scott who reached a new peak on Highway to Hell ; so did the Young brothers, crafting their monster riffs into full-fledged, undeniable songs . . . Filtered through Mutt’s mixing board, AC/DC has never sounded so enormous, and they’ve never had such great songs, and they had never delivered an album as singularly bone-crunching or classic as this until now.” Carlo Twist in Blender says the album makes “disaster sound like the best fun in the world. AC/DC’s message was simple: Get wasted, have sex with dangerous women, repeat.” In Rolling Stone, Greg Kot summed up the album and the band’s future well: “The boys graduate from the back of the bar to the front of the arena.” Julian Marszalek, writing in The Quietus , sees the album in even broader terms. “It was the arrival of Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange that sealed AC/DC’s disco credentials,” he insists. “The resulting Highway To Hell album is a dance monster of epic proportions. The title track’s disco credentials are sealed thanks •

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to a dynamic that finds Phil Rudd taking centre stage once more as Angus Young weaves in and out of those infectious dance beats.” Marszalek describes AC/DC’s 1980 appearance on Top of the Pops promoting “Touch Too Much” as “one of the most surreal TV appearances ever, as their usual headbanging constituency is replaced by teenage girls employing the same moves they’d use to Odyssey’s ‘Native New Yorker’ at the youth club disco.” I’m not sure what Bon would’ve made of this cultural observation, but I’m sure he dug the girls’ efforts. In 1979, Creem magazine’s Reader’s Poll placed AC/DC number 20 out the 25 Top Groups, Highway to Hell the sixteenth of the 25 Top Albums. Bon and Angus were ignored among top singers and guitarists, an indication of how far AC/DC had yet to travel in conquering American audiences. (The “Top Fads” of this last year of the decade? “Roller Disco, Disco, Drugs, Punk/New Wave Rock, Anti-disco, the Knack, Sex, and Designer jeans.” Creem readers: a discerning bunch.) The fellas rounded out the year and the Christmas holiday among friends and family. Sales for Highway to Hell had peaked; the band and Atlantic had hoped for better, but at last the relentless work promoting the album was done, and the fellas could relax. The new year found the Young brothers noodling around on their Gretschs and Gibsons, sniffing the air, nabbing hesitant riffs and musical ideas. On the long road, Angus historically stuffs the pockets of his jackets with cassettes onto which he captures nascent riffs, and by the end of tours his pockets will be bulging with two hundred or more tapes “full of little riffs and tunes, maybe just a good guitar break or something a bit different.” Bon, •

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too, was scribbling away in his notebook, following racy impulses toward new fantasies. The band got together for rehearsals and a week-long series of shows in France from January 16th to the 23rd, then rested for a couple of days before playing two rescheduled gigs in Newcastle and Southampton in England. They spent the following month songwriting, doing a bit of promotional work, and generally recovering from the lengthy year. Casually crossing a parking lot during a moment in Let There Be Rock, Bon is asked what he thinks his bandmates mean when they call him “special.” Without hesitating, and with a twinkle in his eye, he responds, “I’m a special drunkard. I drink too much.” On February 9, AC/DC flew to Madrid, Spain for an appearance on Aplauso, a popular, Top of the Pops -style television show. They were filmed in front of an enthusiastic, hilariously diverse audience of young and old, lip-synching to “Beating Around The Bush,” “Girls Got Rhythm,” and “Highway To Hell.” Director Hugo Stuven remembers the event fondly: “They were very kind with us, especially with me. I’m an old rocker,” he laughs. “We were always joking.” Good humor aside, the band looks iffy and not entirely committed to miming to pre-recorded tracks in front of a live audience. But Bon looks great. Indeed, at the start of the 1980s, Bon Scott had perfected his rock star style. He’d let his hair grow evenly. Gone was the dire mullet with which he’d battled willingly for most of the Seventies. Now his long, dark hair fell fully to his shoulders, a soft but still treacherous look contrasting with the muscled ink and the wiry frame below. •

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Nine days after the Aplauso appearance, Bon and a mate, Alistair Kinnear, went out to London’s Music Machine, a sweaty, three-story Victorian theater-club renowned for its seat-free, rowdy atmosphere and its roster of punk bands. Bon hung at the bar, threw back double whiskeys and enjoyed the women and the autograph-seeking fans and a night free of industry pressures or obligations. At the debauched end of the evening, Kinnear carefully drove the two back to Ashby Court, where Bon was living. Unable to waken Bon, who’d passed out on the way home, Kinnear decided to leave him in the car to sleep it off, to dream whatever dreams he was dreaming, to awaken to the winter sun, cracked and in pain but half-grinning and full of drive for an even bigger year.

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D/F#

Sickly sweet incense. Vivid promises of black-light posters and rolling paper. Kemp Mill Record Store in Wheaton, Maryland, circa 1979. Five bad-ass guys are glaring at me. They’re definitely older than I am, but the guy on the left kinda looks like that kid at school, the one who’s given me problems. He’s got shoulder-length, greasy hair, a skin-tight, dingy white t-shirt on, and he’s wearing hooded eyes that look like he’s really pissed-off or really hungover, or both. He looks like a burnout, one of the public school guys. But I know one or two of them at St. Andrew’s. The guys with bared-chests and skin-tight jeans who walk up and down the boardwalk at Ocean City, Maryland, cutting through the night salt air under the lights and past the kids on the rides, trying out moustaches and carrying huge stuffed teddy bears so that the girls will run up to them and go awww. The guys cruising up and down Coastal Highway in Trans Ams? He looks like one of those guys. Kinda scary, actually. I’d never talk to them. The two guys in the back must be his buddies. They look like they want to sell me something. Or buy something. The guy on the right’s laughing at me. What the hell •

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did I do? The three other dudes must’ve said something to him. He’s got long hair, too, longer than I’d wear, and a night-black shirt and, what’s that on his chain, a pentagram? Dunno, it looks like one. He probably thinks it’s cool. The little dude in the middle looks kinda creepy. He’s got a suit jacket and a tie on but he’s disheveled, like at school at the end of the day when you can’t wait to get out of the uniform, dress shirt, tie, dress shoes. (I wonder what’s in his book bag?) He’s wearing a cap and only now do I notice that he’s got on devil’s horns and he’s holding a devil’s tail like he’s beating off. That’s pretty funny. He’s snarling, though. That other guy’s laughing. “I lit the photo for a dark and slightly scary look,” Earl Steinbicker acknowledges, before adding, “We were led to expect five tough young Aussies, but they turned out to be completely friendly and cooperative.” The infamous image adorning the cover of Highway to Hell dates from December of 1977, and was originally intended for the Powerage album. Steinbicker and Jim Houghton took the photo in New York City a couple of days after AC/DC shared the bill with the MC5 in Flint, Michigan. On December 7, they’d recorded an eightsong promotional set for radio at Atlantic Recording Studios, and on the 9th flew down for a gig in Memphis, Tennessee; sometime in between they posed for a shot that would become iconic. Steinbicker was in charge of atmosphere. “I created just enough of a highlight on the grey background to separate them from it and yet retain a ‘dark’ feeling,” he says. “The horns on guitarist Angus Young’s head, by the way, were later airbrushed on, as was his devil’s tail.” •

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Bon’s contentious pendant? The cultural history of the pentagram is centuries-long, and predictably complicated; from Christians and Jews to Wiccans and Neopaganists, the five-pointed star has been claimed as a vivid symbol of spirituality or magic. (It has stormy political and mathematical heritages, as well.) Historically, Satanists have coveted the polygon for its shapely conjuring of a Void. In conventional Satanist use, the five points are encircled, with two points facing up, the remaining three facing down, suggesting a rejection of the Christian Holy Trinity. The pentagram that Bon wears around his neck isn’t worn in this Satanic manner, and was likely a cool trinket that he dug and loved to wear, for any number of reasons. I’m fairly certain that Bon got off on alarming anyone who pegged him as a devil-worshiper — he had an image and a band to sell, after all. Before the Richard Ramirez incident, AC/DC’s reputation as Enemies of God was good, laddish fun for the guys. They’d innocently protest in interviews that their name had been suggested to them by Malcolm’s and Angus’ older sister Margaret, who noticed the insignia for alternating current (AC) or direct current (DC) on the back of a vacuum cleaner. Or was it a sewing machine? The origin story has changed over the years; Murray Engleheart and Arnaud Durieux in AC/DC: Maximum Rock & Roll suggest that George Young’s wife was the source for the name. Whatever the truth, the guys liked the notion of powerful electrical surges, not what cultural critics later dubiously claimed was an evocation of bi-sexuality or acronymic code for “Anti Christ/Devil’s Child.” Like all smart and famous pop culture figures with an eye on the bottom line, the guys have long stayed •

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coy about their private lives, spiritual or otherwise. True: Bon’s all-black attire on the cover of Highway to Hell hardly suggests a preacher, posed as the singer is inches from Angus’ horns and tail. But Bon’s toothy grin relieves the cover of any heavy-handed Luciferian testimony: he’s laughing at the whole damn thing. The Australian cover of Highway to Hell was visually hotter, as it were. The same photo is used, but the guys’ heads are disembodied and surrounded by lurid flames, shot through with a drawing of a guitar neck leading to a vanishing point in the netherworld. The Void, indeed. Engleheart and Durieux report that the original cover art might’ve preemptively dashed any controversy: it was “an illustration of good versus evil, with AC/DC framed as the nice guys. The initial design bathed the band in an angelic white light on a lonely road at night, dead in the sights of a car driven by a demonic creature.” The fellas rejected the idea as too “arty.” Atlantic executives concerned at a Bible Belt uproar, be damned — AC/DC wanted to have some devilish fun. The back photo was taken with the Highway to Hell album explicitly in mind, and “was much trickier, and involved advance planning and arrangements,” Steinbicker remembers. “This was to be shot at night on a dark highway with the smoky fires of Hell behind them.” Baffled as to how to secure an abandoned artery close to Manhattan, Loughton and Steinbicker were happy to receive assistance from the Mayor’s Office for Film Production, which arranged for the use of a closed section of road under construction in Staten Island. The band rendezvoused in New York City, buzzing at the renowned Big Apple sights, boarded a rented van with the photographers and cruised across the Verrazano •

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Narrows Bridge, arriving at the unfinished West Shore Expressway. There, the guys gamely posed in front of a smoke machine for a series of shots. “Looking back, I think that we should have used more lights behind the smoke,” Steinbicker laments, adding, “The backlit smoke would have been much more effective in color. As it is, it looks like mist, not the fires of hell. I have never been happy with this photo.” Relegated to the back of the album, it’s still a strong image. Centered, hilariously of course, is Angus, dressed as a schoolboy, leaning back open-mouthed, screeching out something that’s making Rudd and Bon smile; even Malcolm — who looks brutally hungover, again — is amused. Bon’s pentagram is gone, and his hands rest casually in his sport jacket; his face looks relaxed. Rudd’s handsome, wearing black leather. On the whole, the scene of urban camaraderie is a lot less menacing than what the photographers had captured two years earlier, but no less evocative of a close-knit bunch of guys poised between hard knocks and the easy life. The photos on Highway to Hell go a long way toward dramatizing the stories and energy inside, group-shots that emphasize the band’s solidarity and that play off the threat and peril embodied in hard rock & roll. Images of AC/DC onstage and on the road tell an equally evocative story. “To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event,” says Henri CartierBresson, the French maître of candid photography. He’s describing his art’s “decisive moment,” what he elsewhere refers to as “the recognition of a rhythm in the world of real things.” Among the reasons why •

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Cartier-Bresson is exemplary is his faith in the structural happy-accident, the organic, instantaneous comingtogether of form and content. “Composition,” he writes, “must have its own inevitability about it.” I think of Cartier-Bresson when I look at great photos of AC/DC, images that capture the band’s (loud) rhythm in the world. “Rock & roll is an attitude, not a genre,” curator Thomas Denenberg notes. “Rock is a performance, onstage and off.” He adds: “The relationship between rock & roll and the camera is intimate and profound. The photographer encounters the musician and something is born that lives both between and beyond them.” Rock photography has a long history and a rich tradition: what the best photographs capture is the reckless excitement and seam-revealing wildness of live, amplified music, especially where and when the wall between performer and audience is virtually scaled, pulled down, or otherwise ignored. Rock photographers have more recently lamented the limitations placed upon picture-taking at shows, in particular the so-called Three Song Rule; intended to relieve bands and musicians of incessant flashbulbpopping for the duration of a show, the edict is now generally accepted and strictly enforced. Complains music critic Mark Paytress, “Hampered by restricted access, harassed by security guards, and handcuffed by contracts — from both artists and magazine publishers — photographers feel robbed of their own work.” Michael Putland, ex-Sounds photographer and former head of the estimable Retna photo agency, wonders if “the role of a rock photographer even exists any more.” But sometimes a moment is all that’s necessary. •

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A howl and a scowl. CBGB, August 24, 1977.

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AC/DC showed up at the soon-to-be-legendary dive on the Bowery for a spontaneous gig. Perhaps inspired by the band they’d opened for that night at the Palladium, the Dictators — who were described as “just a bunch of regular guys” in Asylum Records advertisements — Bon and company wanted to experience the no-frills, ground-level rock & roll club where the New York band had played.

Robert Francos snapped this photo of Bon and Angus doing their thing that night, their first visit to New York City. “The most important thing to note about the photos of AC/DC playing at CBGB is their sheer velocity,” Francos says, “and not just of their musicianship: the stage was smaller at the time, yet Bon still managed to get to full speed across it, and Angus was able to find the room to do his leggy strut at the same time.” What Francos finds most interesting is that despite having just finished a long set “at a relatively uptown gig at the Palladium, which possesses a huge stage, AC/DC obviously were having a hell of a fun time being in CB’s smaller space.” The energy level? “Magical. Which is saying a lot considering

J O E B O N O M O

AC/DC showed up at the soon-to-be-legendary dive on the Bowery for a spontaneous gig. Perhaps inspired by the band they’d opened for that night at the Palladium, the Dictators — who were described as “just a bunch of regular guys” in Asylum Records advertisements — Bon and company wanted to experience the no-frills, ground-level rock & roll club where the New York band had played.

Robert Francos snapped this photo of Bon and Angus doing their thing that night, their first visit to New York City. “The most important thing to note about the photos of AC/DC playing at CBGB is their sheer velocity,” Francos says, “and not just of their musicianship: the stage was smaller at the time, yet Bon still managed to get to full speed across it, and Angus was able to find the room to do his leggy strut at the same time.” What Francos finds most interesting is that despite having just finished a long set “at a relatively uptown gig at the Palladium, which possesses a huge stage, AC/DC obviously were having a hell of a fun time being in CB’s smaller space.” The energy level? “Magical. Which is saying a lot considering the bands that were spawned in that club.” Howard Bowler recalls that his band Marbles was scheduled as the headliner on this night. “Then a rumor started that a famous band was to show up for a midnight show. We didn’t know who it was to be but someone said they were playing at the Palladium and would show up after their set. Now, Marbles could pull in crowds, but the crowd that night was ridiculous, so we knew it wasn’t us creating all this interest.” After Marbles played, AC/DC stormed the stage. “And they were amazing.” And they possessed a certain sex appeal, apparently: “Ooh, those legs!” a girl squealed when Angus climbed on stage . . . •

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Symphony Hall, Atlanta, August 11 1978.

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We’ve got the basic thing the kids want. They want to rock and that’s it. They want to be part of the band as a mass. When you hit a guitar chord, a lot of the kids in the audience are hitting it with you. They’re so much into the band, they’re going through all the motions with you. If you can get the mass to react as a whole, then that’s the ideal thing. That’s what a lot of bands lack, and why the critics are wrong .

—Angus Young

He looks like a twelve year old playing his older brother’s guitar in his bedroom, fantasizing about a crowd with raised arms (having first made certain that his door’s locked). That might have been how it happened, actually. Part of the great appeal of Angus Young is his lack of pretension and his utterly ordinary looks, pushed as he was by older brother Malcolm into the image- and history-making footlights. Asked about his stage presence in an interview in Let There Be Rock, Angus reflected on what the average fan must think when he sees the

J O E B O N O M O

We’ve got the basic thing the kids want. They want to rock and that’s it. They want to be part of the band as a mass. When you hit a guitar chord, a lot of the kids in the audience are hitting it with you. They’re so much into the band, they’re going through all the motions with you. If you can get the mass to react as a whole, then that’s the ideal thing. That’s what a lot of bands lack, and why the critics are wrong .

—Angus Young

He looks like a twelve year old playing his older brother’s guitar in his bedroom, fantasizing about a crowd with raised arms (having first made certain that his door’s locked). That might have been how it happened, actually. Part of the great appeal of Angus Young is his lack of pretension and his utterly ordinary looks, pushed as he was by older brother Malcolm into the image- and history-making footlights. Asked about his stage presence in an interview in Let There Be Rock, Angus reflected on what the average fan must think when he sees the guitarist onstage: “Who’s that ugly man up there?” That he is only five-feet three-inches and a hundred and ten pounds will forever endear him to his acolytes, who marvel at the spiraling energy and enormous sound that he creates. He doesn’t look like a conventional rock star onstage — he’s not pretty, he doesn’t come across as preening or narcissistic, and any larger-than-life attitude issues from his Gibson, not from a spotlightseeking personality. What I love about this photo, taken by Rennie Ellis at Symphony Hall in Atlanta, Georgia on August 11, 1978, is Angus’ virtual accessibility; he looks like a little kid given his big chance, and who can’t dig that? Except that he’s not a kid, of course, he’s the •

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very talented lead guitarist in one of the world’s great hard rock bands, and he looks as if there’s nothing more important to him than playing and transmitting that to others. Look at the faces in the crowd: they’re enthralled, they’re psyched, they’re getting off. We know that it must be late in the show because Angus is practically naked — he’d stripped down during “Bad Boy Boogie,” or otherwise shed layers of clothing as the sweaty gig progressed — and his body looks like the body of the average guy in the crowd who’s no more handsome, articulate, or ripped than Angus, who’s spent an adolescence embarrassed in front of his bathroom mirror. Thus the identification, the shared joke, the unadulterated love and worship: He kinda looks like me and he rocks!

But he’s onstage, and you’re not. As slim as the division is between the sticky, nearly nude guitar player in beat-up sneakers and the nearest rocking fan, the division is there. From the runty looks of him, though, quite the unlikely Guitar God.

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7 2 •

All Hail the Conquering Migrant.


Part of AC/DC’s great excitement live, early in their career, was the interaction between musician and fan — before the gargantuan success of the 1980s and 1990s during which the stages got larger, adorned with giant bells and cannons and blow-up Rosie dolls and videos and telescreens, during which the distance between the band and their crowds by necessity increased and Angus was obligated to run miles a night instead of prowling the edges of a small or theater-sized stage, sweating and drooling on his audience. This photo was taken by Ron Pownall at Boston’s Orpheum Theater, the year after Highway to Hell was released. The band was on the cusp of Arena Rock Dominance, but Angus wasn’t distanced from the crowd yet. Contrast the anxious look on the roadie’s face behind Angus with the gleeful adoration of the surrounding fans, stoked that Angus made his way up to their box. The guffawing we’renotworthy we’renotworthy bowing, the glinting Gibson, the headbanging splash of hair — all of this loud and exhilarating rocking so


Part of AC/DC’s great excitement live, early in their career, was the interaction between musician and fan — before the gargantuan success of the 1980s and 1990s during which the stages got larger, adorned with giant bells and cannons and blow-up Rosie dolls and videos and telescreens, during which the distance between the band and their crowds by necessity increased and Angus was obligated to run miles a night instead of prowling the edges of a small or theater-sized stage, sweating and drooling on his audience. This photo was taken by Ron Pownall at Boston’s Orpheum Theater, the year after Highway to Hell was released. The band was on the cusp of Arena Rock Dominance, but Angus wasn’t distanced from the crowd yet. Contrast the anxious look on the roadie’s face behind Angus with the gleeful adoration of the surrounding fans, stoked that Angus made his way up to their box. The guffawing we’renotworthy we’renotworthy bowing, the glinting Gibson, the headbanging splash of hair — all of this loud and exhilarating rocking so close to the fans that could literally grab hold of it if they wanted to. If Caravaggio had been summoned by the future to paint a classical representation of the elation of twentieth-century popular music, he might have rendered this image. And the sanctifying spotlight that trailed Angus during the ascension was prescient. AC/DC was on their way to the stratosphere, and their days of playing 2,800-capacity theaters were numbered; few in the future would be lucky enough to have Angus show up in their seats.

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7 4 •

1974, Moorabbin Town Hall, Melbourne, Australia. Photo by Rennie Ellis.


Such is the charisma that Bon Scott possessed. I don’t know where his right hand is going, but I know that most of the girls’ eyes are fixated on his face. For all of the bad-boy, hard-drinking, women-bedding stories that have been erected on top of the Bon Legacy — many true, some embellished — a common thread that runs through these stories is of Bon’s kindheartedness. Watch him during interviews: his eyes flash between wild and gentle, his hair is as long as his adolescent-flavored voice is soft, and there’s something curly and yielding about his mouth that likely had as much to do with his sex appeal as anything. Historically, rock & roll front men are adored, of course, and Bon played it (and enjoyed it) to the hilt, but macho posturing and boiler-plate double entendre become tiresome after a while, even to the dimmest girl. Bon had a soft-spoken nature made irresistible by his joie de vivre and a rough-and-tumble, wandering life. Nikki Goff, in charge of Electric Outlaws , a U.K. AC/ DC fan club, once weighed in on Bon’s merits, noting that in his blues singing style and his demeanor he appeared


Such is the charisma that Bon Scott possessed. I don’t know where his right hand is going, but I know that most of the girls’ eyes are fixated on his face. For all of the bad-boy, hard-drinking, women-bedding stories that have been erected on top of the Bon Legacy — many true, some embellished — a common thread that runs through these stories is of Bon’s kindheartedness. Watch him during interviews: his eyes flash between wild and gentle, his hair is as long as his adolescent-flavored voice is soft, and there’s something curly and yielding about his mouth that likely had as much to do with his sex appeal as anything. Historically, rock & roll front men are adored, of course, and Bon played it (and enjoyed it) to the hilt, but macho posturing and boiler-plate double entendre become tiresome after a while, even to the dimmest girl. Bon had a soft-spoken nature made irresistible by his joie de vivre and a rough-and-tumble, wandering life. Nikki Goff, in charge of Electric Outlaws , a U.K. AC/ DC fan club, once weighed in on Bon’s merits, noting that in his blues singing style and his demeanor he appeared to have had a tough upbringing, and an interesting life, something that a dreamy girl might sympathize with: “He was a real ‘seize the day’ kind of bloke. He was shipped out to Australia at the age of four or five and that must have had a big effect on him.” He may have been working through darker sides of his personality in his lyrics and under stage lights, or he may have been simply having fun with a rocking persona — the truth is somewhere in between. Look at the girls in this photo. That’s not only lust for a leather-pants-wearing Rock Singer and dreams of exclusive backstage glamour glinting in their eyes, there’s also great affection for the hometown guy with the rough edges and the kind spirit. •

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Peachtree Plaza, Atlanta, August 1978.


Not quite the tableau of hotel hedonism that I’d fantasized about as a teenager. “[Sex on the road] was more about bravado, really,” Malcolm said in 1990. “It happened more when we were young and inexperienced, of course, but as far as lyrics are concerned we’ve always used sex for inspiration. We never have a problem with sex in the words. It doesn’t embarrass us. The reality is that there were a few stories to tell back then, and now they’re just good memories.” This photo was taken by Rennie Ellis in Bon’s hotel room at Atlanta’s Peachtree Plaza in August of 1978, as AC/DC was thundering through the South promoting Powerage. The girls lounging on the bed with Bon are Rose Whipperr and the Heathen Girls, an all-girl punk band from Atlanta, “four stunningly beautiful, heavily made-up girls whose singing act at the local gay bars could loosely be called ‘bizarre chic’,” as Ellis recalls. (Rose is in the center, dragging on a cigarette; her left arm is draped around Wanda Sylvain, New York Doll guitarist Syl Sylvain’s wife, who happened to be visiting.)


Not quite the tableau of hotel hedonism that I’d fantasized about as a teenager. “[Sex on the road] was more about bravado, really,” Malcolm said in 1990. “It happened more when we were young and inexperienced, of course, but as far as lyrics are concerned we’ve always used sex for inspiration. We never have a problem with sex in the words. It doesn’t embarrass us. The reality is that there were a few stories to tell back then, and now they’re just good memories.” This photo was taken by Rennie Ellis in Bon’s hotel room at Atlanta’s Peachtree Plaza in August of 1978, as AC/DC was thundering through the South promoting Powerage. The girls lounging on the bed with Bon are Rose Whipperr and the Heathen Girls, an all-girl punk band from Atlanta, “four stunningly beautiful, heavily made-up girls whose singing act at the local gay bars could loosely be called ‘bizarre chic’,” as Ellis recalls. (Rose is in the center, dragging on a cigarette; her left arm is draped around Wanda Sylvain, New York Doll guitarist Syl Sylvain’s wife, who happened to be visiting.) Whipperr had become friendly with Cliff Williams on the band’s earlier visit to Atlanta, and he’d called to invite her over to the hotel. “So I brought my galpal back-up singers along to hang out,” she recalls, before adding, “Obviously an exciting prospect for all concerned.” Her memories of the night and of the band are indelible, and affectionate. “I found Bon to be convivial and sweet,” she says. “A caring person, and much more gentle than his stage persona would imply; the tough guy with the tender heart! Angus was brilliant and charming, as well as much better looking than all the guitarist mugging and short pants would suggest.” And her friend, Cliff? She laughs, “Cliff was ‘The Dreamboat’ in the game, •

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Mystery Date: The Hard Rock Edition.”

An acclaimed professional photographer with a long career, Ellis had artistic and commercial considerations (he was on the road with AC/DC documenting the tour for an Australian Music to the World television special) yet the photo conveys elements of the snapshot esthetic, a seemingly candid but composed image, what critic Colin Harding describes as a “naive document.” There’s something loose and casual to the image in its fortuitous marriage of structure and happenstance, and it’s also a terrific time capsule. “Photography can only represent the present,” Berenice Abbott has observed. “Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.” A wedding of late Seventies punk and New Wave culture on the sixty-eighth floor of the second-tallest hotel skyscraper in the Western Hemisphere, the image captures rock stars and sex and promises stewing amidst cocktails, ashtrays, and polyester-blend bedspreads. Bon is what I love most about this photo. Slumped against the wall, sipping his drink, he looks louche and careless, certainly, but also bored — not with the company of Whipperr and the girls, who by the looks of them know how to amuse, but with the rock star lifestyle writ small in yet another hotel room in yet another city. (“Hotel, motel, make you wanna cry,” Bon sings in “It’s A Long Way To The Top.”) A photograph can simultaneously deceive and tell the truth: Bon’s either brazenly uninterested, or he’s simply caught offguard, his eyelids drooping in the midst of an exuberant after-hours party. He’s on a bed with four hot-looking, glammed-up girls and two of them are already touching and . . . these chicks look smart and tough, well aware of hotel sport, yet what has all of the makings of nirvana •

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is compromised by Bon’s distant posture. The only one not looking into the camera, he’s saying, I’ve seen it all before. In 1999, Howard Johnson, an AC/DC fan from Manchester, England, published Get Your Jumbo Jet Out of My Airport , borrowing the title from a cleaned-up line in “Ain’t No Fun (Waiting Round To Be A Millionaire),” from Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap. Johnson subtitled his book Random Notes for AC/DC Obsessives , and that it is; a good-humored, thorough, and ultimately thoughtful culling together of his essays on the band, fan reminiscences, tour diaries, random interviews with band members, various subjective “Best Of!” lists. I love the book, because in many ways it’s the quintessential AC/DC tome: by the fans for the fans about a band that, though identifiable with a “common man” sensibility, has become virtually inaccessible over the decades, made distant by large stages and cocooning publicists. Get Your Jumbo Jet Out of My Airport reminds us that were it not for the fans, AC/DC might not have much to face after the next decade passes and they decide to record and tour again. During the 1990s and 2000s the band’s enormous following happily made the technological leap from self-printed fanzines to flash-driven websites. AC/DC has thriving fan clubs in nations around the world, and fervent online groups devoted to compiling extensive discographies, arcane FAQs, and catalogs of every concert they’ve played since their inception. AC/DC fan club presidents and online archivists act as unofficial, unpaid middlemen between genuinely besotted, passionate fans, and a band that, though celebrated as friendly •

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and approachable, is in many respects light-years away. Online and in parking lots before a show, the excitable communing maintains personal connections among friends and strangers united worldwide by little else than love for the band and the diversions and deliverances from the daily that Angus, Brian, and Bon provide. When I was ten, my sister Jane saw Wings at the Capital Centre in Largo, Maryland. I was excited for her, and jealous. The next morning, she confessed to me that she was so keyed up while waiting in line before the show started that she nearly tore her ticket to pieces. I asked her what song Paul McCartney opened with — I couldn’t wait to ask her — and she looked at me blankly. “I don’t remember,” she said. “I was too excited.” I was annoyed with her for forgetting, but I understood the mind-erasing thrills that she must’ve experienced next to her screaming girlfriends, seeing a Beatle emerge from the darkness into spotlight. Ten years after my sister stood trembling and expectant at Capital Centre, a couple of guys with naive nerve and a video camera roamed the exterior of that same venue, talking with pumped-fans fans waiting to go in to see Judas Priest. The resulting video, Heavy Metal Parking Lot , has become a classic document of hard rock fandom, dramatizing the innocent, alcohol-soaked excitement coursing through fans tailgating in the tailing sun at the cusp of paradise. Officially released in 2005 after a brief run on cable access television in the mid-1980s and years of unauthorized and online distribution, Heavy Metal Parking Lot is an hilarious record of un-ironic, unadulterated, spaced-out enthusiasm, well deserving of its cult-classic reputation. •

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“Believe me, it was all purely by accident, not by design,” admits co-director Jeff Krulik, who with partner John Heyn lugged an oversized camera, cords, and mic into the sprawling parking lot on a beautiful May late-afternoon in 1986. Neither were metal fans nor Judas Priest fans. “We just picked a nice spring Saturday that happened to be when Judas Priest were in town. We didn’t have a script, or a plan, except to protect the camera gear borrowed from my public access TV studio. Since videotape is cheap and plentiful, we just let the camera roll.” He adds, “Some would call it vérité filmmaking. I would call it letting the electrons fall where they may. We came, we saw, we taped. We left after two hours. We didn’t even go inside to the concert.” Krulik and Heyn wandered the lot and asked dozens of shirtless guys and puffed-haired girls what they loved about Judas Priest and the freedoms that come along with that love. Edited among rolling shots of parked and cruising vans and Camaros spilling over with drunks, the answers are, depending on your perspective, either moronic or incisive, but they are always genuine. The film celebrates inebriated attempts to defend, analyze, and explain the majesty and release of hard rock. When asked why his girlfriend doesn’t like Judas Priest, one guy answers, “Because she’s dumb.” A couple of girls drunkenly blurt out their desires to “fuck the shit” out of the band members. “It was a miraculous coalescence,” Krulik marvels. “Everything went according to the non-plan — John and I picked the right day, the right band, the right fans, and were smart enough, or lucky enough depending on how you look at it, to just let them be themselves on camera. Most of the fans we recorded were pretty high, •

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but not necessarily on any substance. They were high on the music, the camaraderie, the spirit, the gathering of their tribe. And some alcohol and drugs. But somehow, whatever they offered up on camera was a genuine and sincere glimpse inside a metal fan’s psyche. There wasn’t a phony note in the bunch, and we couldn’t have scripted it.” And there’s the rub, Krulik continues: “As passionate and note-perfect as these exaltations are, they are also funny as hell, and perfect fodder for derision and ridicule. But if you just simply treat them as a joke, then you are missing something much deeper — I’ve always said you were either at that concert, or you sat next to someone in homeroom who was at that concert. In other words, I’m looking at the man in the mirror, we have met the enemy and they is us, I am me and you are he and we are all together. Or something like that.” One immortal dude, tripping on acid, shirtless, his jeans painted on, swaying in place and looking like Malcolm Young’s Yankee cousin, fantasizes rhapsodically about a joint so large that it would span the entire country. There are mullets, much Budweiser consumption, lots of raised devil-horn hands, crude behavior, some Madonna trashing. One guy’s wearing an AC/DC t-shirt. It’s immortal stuff. Two decades later, Saul Levitz directed, produced, and edited FanNation, a Columbia Records-commissioned online documentary about AC/DC’s Black Ice warmup show in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 2008. Nationwide, contest-winning “fan caravans” streamed toward the fans-only gig, armed with video cameras and resolve. An excursion into the lives of those who good-humouredly straddle the line between enthusiasm •

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and obsession, FanNation is part twenty-first-century Heavy Metal Parking Lot — teens and twenty-somethings outflanked by middle-aged men and women psyched to see their favorite hard rock band — part corny and profound fan testifying, and part mythic road-trip. Slickly and lovingly made, FanNation proves that whether drunk and hoarse-voiced or sober and reflective, AC/DC’s fans are still a rabidly dedicated and starry-eyed bunch. “I thought of FanNation as a cross between Heavy Metal Parking Lot and Detroit Rock City,” says Levitz, a Los Angeles-based producer and director of branded content, documentaries, and music videos. “I wanted to capture that glee of traveling to a show, and having that freedom.” He adds, “There’s a weird gap of fans with AC/DC. There are the O.G. fans in their 40s, and then a new breed which has come from Rock Band or the Tony Hawk video games, with a lot of father-son and father-daughter stuff being passed down. It was really cool to see.” Drawing from numerous geographic points, and looking for memorable on-screen personalities, Levitz selected caravan “route leaders” based on videos submitted to the band’s website. The leaders met the contest-winners at local Wal-Mart parking lots, and on a first-come/first-served basis distributed passes to the warm-up concert. All involved then drove to WilkesBarre. One desperate kid whose car broke down enlisted the help of Pennsylvania police; another cash-strapped dude slept in his car for days. In Wilkes-Barre the crowd gathered at a local park, where they drank, hugged, drank, and compared AC/DC tattoos. “And they all had stories,” Levitz marvels. “And a lot of dedication.” One •

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woman claims that AC/DC got her through the shattering grief of losing her husband; one man says that he quit drinking after being inspired by Malcolm’s sobriety. The one hundred and twenty contest-winners congregated at Wachovia Arena the next afternoon, tailgated, shared more stories for Levitz’s crew, and generally reveled warmly and boozily in the communal embrace of AC/DC parking lot fandom, awaiting the evening show. (Fans were united in their love for the band, though certain long-standing if friendly allegiances were borne out; of the preferences for lead singer, Levitz says, “I would say it was seventy-five percent Bon, twenty-five percent Brian Johnson. Because the majority were older people at the show, all of those people grew up with Bon, and that’s why they got into it.”) Levitz is fascinated by fan identification with AC/DC, even as the group has been rendered essentially untouchable by fame and success. “The fans respect the band’s jeans-and-t-shirt, meat-and-potatoes approach, that they come across like you and me,” he says. He cites an early-morning moment that he witnessed in Chicago during the Black Ice tour. After the show, a small pocket of ravenous fans correctly identified the beat-up tour van that AC/DC employs to throw kids off of their track; thus exposed, an exhausted Angus dutifully emerged from the van to sign autographs. “He didn’t have to do that,” Levitz notes. “There’s definitely respect for their fans.” Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers understands hard rock fandom and stadium culture well, and he threads an honest, detail-rich empathy throughout his band’s great 2001 narrative album, Southern Rock Opera. Conceived originally as a screenplay, the two-CD album •

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investigates the fallacies and folklore of contemporary South using the gloomy story arc of Lynyrd Skynyrd. The second disc leads off with “Let There Be Rock,” not a cover of AC/DC’s statement-of-purpose from 1977, but, as Hood puts it, “A pretty damned autobiographical account of my teenaged years, and how partying and going to arena rock shows kept me from going off the deep end in High School.” The song dramatizes a male’s adolescence tuned to the twin attractions of drop-out drug use and hard rock romance: now clear-eyed, the singer reminiscences about dropping acid at a Blue Oyster Cult concert at age fourteen, getting pulled over by cops with marijuana and cheap beer in the car; nearly drowning at the end of the night while vomiting into a toilet but for the benevolence of a buddy’s older sister; rocking out in a cover band playing Thin Lizzy. Set against these small details of an ordinary teenager’s life are larger-than-life bands Lynyrd Skynyrd, Molly Hatchet, and Ozzy Osbourne that enact the seductive mythologies of rock transcendence. Hood recalls this era fondly. “A lot of the arena rock shows I saw in those years were of B-grade or lesser bands, as I lived in a small town a couple of hours away from some mid-level B-market towns, Birmingham and Huntsville, Alabama, respectively,” he says. “We didn’t get the Stones, Zeppelin, or the other top-level bands very often, but we got Kansas and Foghat and those kinds of bands every year, so it was basically as much the experience of going, partying, and having my ears blasted off as much as anything.” He adds, “A lot of the bands I saw and often loved in those days made records I really wouldn’t want to listen to now, or even then. I was in love with the Clash and many of the punk bands, •

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but they didn’t come my way very often and I missed seeing them. Still, I loved the concert experience and went to every show I possibly could get to see. “AC/DC was a big exception to all of this, because I did get to see them, very early on, and they, of course, went on to become an A+ level band.” Hood caught AC/DC on Thanksgiving weekend in 1977, in Charleston, West Virginia, during their first American tour with UFO and the Motors. “Tickets were three bucks, and I talked my Grandmother into taking me to the run-down Charleston Civic Center to see them. She waited in the parking lot while I was inside.” He laughs, “My Grandmother was the best!” He later read that AC/DC considered the handful of shows that they played with UFO to be their favorites of their first tour, “since the two bands really clicked and kinda egged each other on to higher heights. “I probably smoked my first pot in that show. It was truly the first great show I ever saw, and still one of my all-time favorite rock show memories. It’s one of my life’s best memories.” In the song’s powerful and poignant refrain, Hood laments never getting to see Lynyrd Skynyrd live, though he did get to see AC/DC, “with Bon Scott singing ‘Let There Be Rock’.” That line repeats as the anthem concludes, a basic declaration of the immense influence that Bon has had over teenagers worldwide: in crudely grand fashion, Bon encouraged kids to live a little recklessly, to explore the risky side, but to return and crash into bottomless sleep having won a hardearned glimpse into the dangers and the pleasures of the deep end. Then he urged them to wake up and do it all over again. •

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Bon Scott didn’t wake up. He died sometime during the early hours of February 19, 1980. When Alistair Kinnear returned to the car to check on Bon after their night out drinking, he’d found Bon unresponsive. He swiftly drove to Kings College Hospital in Denmark Hill, where Bon was pronounced dead of acute alcohol poisoning; the official description on the certificate read “Death by Misadventure.” Stunned and shaken, band and management gathered in London. Malcolm, Angus, Cliff, and Phil flew back to Australia with Bon’s casket beneath them in the plane’s storage. Bon was cremated, his ashes interred by his family on March 1, in Fremantle, Western Australia. He was thirty-three. Of course, the End was in many ways the Beginning. Within weeks, the Young brothers summarily decided to continue with AC/DC. They felt that that’s what Bon would’ve wanted, and really, what else could they do after the grieving and the numbness lifted — return to day jobs that they’d despised? Malcolm told Rolling Stone, “I just rang up Angus and said, ‘Do you wanna come back and rehearse?’” After several weeks of auditioning singers, they selected Brian Johnson, late of •

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the English glam band Geordie and, at the time of his anointing, a vinyl car roofing salesman in Northern England. They rapidly banged into shape and rehearsed the songs that Malcolm and Angus had been writing, enlisted Johnson to write lyrics (though some accounts suggest that the band also used lyrics penned by Bon before he died), and in April began recording sessions, again with Mutt Lange, at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas. By the end of the next month, they were finished. Sheathed in a stark, all-black, funereal cover, Back In Black was released on July 25, 1980, a year to the month after Highway to Hell . To date, the album has sold more than forty-five million copies worldwide, second only to Michael Jackson’s Thriller . When Bon Scott died, AC/DC not only lost a mate and a frontman. They’d first met Bon in 1974, when he was the band’s grinning, hell-raising, part-time chauffeur; from the moment he joined as singer, he drove AC/DC in a much more profound way. Australian music journalist and cultural writer Clinton Walker has observed AC/DC for decades. In 1994, he published Highway to Hell: The Life and Death of AC/DC Legend Bon Scott . His perspective has been shaped in part by the years that have passed since Bon died. “Certainly in my long and arduous years in rock & roll, one thing I’ve learned about bands is that they have to have a charismatic front man,” Walker insists. “In a way, the front man is where everything comes together, and now that front man can be one of a number of types.” He cites Mick Jagger. “He is what he is, globe-hopping, glamorous, all that, or you have Lou Reed in front of the •

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Velvets who was something different, and then you have someone like Bon, and the great quality that Bon had was maybe what you’d sometimes call the common touch. He was not above his audience, but he had something special, and the audience saw themselves in him but could also admire that bit that made him special. Perhaps you’d call that bit ‘talent.’ He was a great writer and showman and singer.” Walker has considered Bon carefully, but is still unsure what it was that wholly drove the singer, apart from that which drives all of us: “to try and do something with our lives that leaves a mark, or is it just to do something that just makes sense to you on a daily basis?” Bon never forgot his working-class origins, and the unrewarding hard work that had characterized his father’s life and which he had done himself in his younger days. “He was always thankful for the life he did create for himself,” Walker insists. “He also spent some time in a juvenile correctional facility and I think he was smart enough to realize that some of the qualities or aspirations he might have shared with those errant youth back then were actually pretty dumb and certainly offered no future. He was surrounded by all that stuff, and I think he was pretty clear that he wanted to avoid that.” He continues, “Bon saw the kids he grew up with either go into the factories or jail, and I think that would have killed him. But then rock & roll killed him anyway, so maybe he was just too big a character to be contained by life. I think one of the things about Bon was just intelligence, he was no moron and so, I think, he just tried to find a way to do justice to his intelligence. And so, of course, the only medium that meant anything •

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to him was music, and he just felt his way through a career.” When Bon joined AC/DC, Walker feels, the singer pulled things together and gave the band focus. “Malcolm and Angus have even paid the credit themselves. I mean, they were all very good at knocking a few chords together into a killer riff but even that’s still not enough, to me at least, and I think that’s demonstrated in the quality of the songs the band’s produced since Bon died. Obviously Bon was a great writer and that sort of elevation he bought to the songwriting is precisely the thing that lifts the other components in the music and makes it greater than the sum of its parts.” Among Bon’s contributions was his innate ability to broaden the band’s appeal. “I do think Bon provided that sort of bridge between the Youngs and the world. I could be wrong since the band’s sold a lot more records since Bon died than when he was in the band, but I think he opened up the possibilities and gave a broader audience a possible sense of purchase on it. After Bon died, AC/DC become more of a closed shop with a limited appeal. “Put it this way: AC/DC with Bon in the band was capable of pop hit records, but after that, they were a rock ghetto act, admittedly a huge ghetto but not one that reached out the way Bon and his songs always did.” Another Australian reached by Bon’s songs is Dave Faulkner of Hoodoo Gurus. Born and raised in Perth, he remembers watching AC/DC’s infamous appearance on Countdown in April of 1975, wide-eyed at Bon in his schoolgirl get-up. “I was a kid, I just thought it was funny,” he says. “This was before cable TV and all of that sort of thing, so it was compulsory viewing •

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for nearly every household in Australia. Every Sunday night, everyone had to watch Countdown . And then things that were on there would invariably chart the following week.” Not too long after, Faulkner was happily caught up in punk rock, making noise in a DIY band and in self-imposed exile from popular album charts. “I was really a punk rock true-believer at the time, and I didn’t think AC/DC were in any way connected to that scene.” In February of 1977, AC/DC played the Perth Entertainment Centre. “For some reason, I decided to buy a ticket,” Faulkner remembers, “though I wasn’t a particularly huge fan at the time. It was just something to do. I went to the concert, and they blew me away.” What surprised him, he continues, “was how many songs I knew. So many of their songs had been on the radio, or on TV, or playing in a store when I was buying jeans, whatever, that I hadn’t realized how many of their songs I’d been living with. I respected the fact that they were no-bullshit rock & roll. I’m still surprised that I had the nous to buy a ticket. It remains one of the more memorable concerts I’ve been too, and I’ve seen a lot of great ones.” The show was the only AC/DC gig that Faulkner would see in the Bon era, and he noticed something a few years later when he saw the band with Brian Johnson out front. “It’s quite a different experience,” he says. “Now, the focus of the show is Angus. He’s an amazing entertainer, and obviously it was always true, that’s what he’s done from day one. But back then, Angus was actually the second banana! You came to see Bon, and Angus was, like, icing on the cake. They were like a two-headed monster, as far as crowd revving-up, and pure stage presence. Bon had personality for days, •

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you couldn’t take your eyes off him.” Faulkner recalls hearing that when Bon felt that the band was getting too complacent or becoming too stock-standard, he’d put a boot up Angus’ ass, “and kick him off the stage into the audience! Just to shake things up a bit. That’s very revealing about Bon.” Having memorialized Bon in “Let There Be Rock,” Patterson Hood considers the singer’s legacy. “Before Bon’s death, he was probably almost as famous for his partying as for his music,” he says. “For many years, his artistry was probably overshadowed by all these things and how much bigger than life he became. I think it has been more recently, after having their music continue to be loved generations later, that people have really begun to realize what a great artist he was.” He adds, “He was a great songwriter, performer, and above all a great Rock Star. You could argue that in death he’s been able to remain just as we all remembered him from our youth, but honestly, the entire band, including Brian, have basically been able to do that.” But Bon gets extra points, Hood feels, “for writing really smart songs that come off as stupid in the best sense of the term, in that Stooges, New York Dolls, even Ramones kind-of caveman kind-of way.” Particularly interesting to me is Clinton Walker’s keen sense of Bon’s Australian-ness, an attitude and way of thinking that the transplanted roughneck came to intuit. “I know that Bon and the Youngs alike were all Scots born,” Walker says, “but even putting aside the fact that Australia has always shared a great Celtic influence in a way it certainly doesn’t an English one, the fact is that they all grew up in Australia and certainly paid their •

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musical dues in Australia, and we in Australia do see the world a bit differently to the way Americans and the English do.” He adds, “Whilst there was probably never anything absolutely specific about that, there was always an essence of attitude and tone about AC/DC, especially when Bon was in the band, that I think set it apart from so many other bands.” Brian Johnson hails from Dunston, Gateshead, in Northern England, and when he took over the reins of AC/DC in early 1980, a certain Aussie panache born of pocket-sized men intensely hungry in their youth to play and conquer was diluted. Yet what the band would do with Johnson was triumph over a world in a manner that Bon had only dreamed about. In part due to its tacit honor and mark of respect to Bon, in part to its incredible sound and clutch of fantastic songs — “Shoot To Thrill,” “Hells Bells,” “What Do You Do For Money Honey,” the colossal, funky, stomping title track among them — Back in Black was an enormous commercial hit out of the box. Highway to Hell ’s closer, the retrospectively sorrowful and ominous “Night Prowler,” segued almost too perfectly into “Hell’s Bells,” Back in Black’s gloomy opener escorted by bells tolling in memoriam before surrendering to Angus’ somber and intense riff. The stage was set for an epochal, career-making album event. Every bit the rocking classic as Highway to Hell , Back in Black reached number 4 on the Billboard album charts; the single “You Shook Me All Night Long” reached 35. Telling of the band’s rising popularity was the reappearance of their earlier material on the charts: Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, first released in Australia in 1976, was issued in America in April of 1981, it reached number 3 on the Pop Albums chart. The title track •

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made it to 4 on the Mainstream Rock singles chart. ( Highway to Hell benefited too, of course: to date, the album’s been certified seven times platinum in sales in the U.S. alone.) Call it the “Dead Bon Factor,” it was certainly given ascension on the gales issuing from Johnson’s remarkable, cigarette-emboldened lungs. I remember in the early 1980s people laughing that they couldn’t tell Brian’s voice apart from Bon’s voice. I could. The differences were subtle, but as the years have gone by and as AC/DC has become an institution, those differences have been cast in sharp relief. Johnson is a remarkable rock & roll singer, but not nearly as unique a presence on the band’s songs as Bon was. I certainly grin and laugh less listening to the songs that Johnson sings, though the jokes and double entendres are still there. (Bon never snarled the word “bitch” quite like Johnson did, either.) Reviewing Johnson’s first tour with the band, Robert Palmer wrote in The New York Times that the singer “looks and sings something like a potential homicidal longshoreman,” yet to me Johnson seemed closer to a central-casting bad boy than Bon. Of course, most everyone seems orthodox next to Bon’s personality. Malcolm and Angus certainly chose well: Johnson’s a powerhouse singer and a hardplaying mate, and he puffed up his chest, tugged down his cap, bravely stepped into Bon’s lengthy shadow and threw himself into the songs and the band’s mission. He fit in. Only: the odd, bizarre edges that Bon sported were smoothed a bit as a consequence — especially as AC/DC continued to grow in worldwide popularity. The second album with Johnson, 1981’s For Those About to Rock We Salute You, was the band’s glossiest yet, Lange really buffing up things for the radio-friendly •

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sheen that he and the band rightly felt was theirs in which to glow. Hadn’t they earned it? Bombastic and a bit dated, the album might’ve been rescued by topnotch songs, but writing weariness was creeping in; the good riffs — “Put The Finger On You,” “Let’s Get It Up,” “C.O.D.,” the theatrical, arena-ready title track — never quite transcend into the band’s patented eternal groove. Rudd’s snare sounds like nothing in the natural world, and the album’s contrived, studio-enhanced sound dwarfs the songs. (Tony Platt, again the album’s engineer, feels that Lange was striving for audio perfection rather than for gut feel, to the album’s detriment.) And the lyrics were becoming embarrassing. Bon’s words sometimes fell flat, but by 1981 Johnson was regularly consulting the Book of Generic for inspiration. “I don’t think anyone would argue that AC/DC’s lyrics, after Bon, became and remain pretty much rote cliché,” Clinton Walker argues. “Whereas with Bon, the lyrics were absolutely something special and that fed back into the whole and made it something much more special.” Dave Faulkner agrees: “The only thing I think AC/DC did lose with Bon was a remarkable lyricist, a natural poet and humorist. His lyrics are hilarious . That was another edge that Bon added that any band would welcome. He was out of the box there, he had a natural, raw talent.” If the band was threatening to sound corporate, fans didn’t care. For Those About to Rock We Salute You was another enormous success, giving AC/DC their coveted Billboard number 1 album as well as two Top 10 singles (the title track, and “Let’s Get It Up”). They were everywhere on the radio in 1982. •

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And so, naturally, I turned off. The band’s worldwide triumphs ultimately bored me and my contrarian’s ways. My friends and I laughed scornfully at Johnson singing “ga ga ga ga ooh” in “Let’s Get It Up,” and I winced at the magazine photos of enormous stadiums and stages and bells and cannons. It was all looking very trite and corny to me, as I was generally turning my back on Top 40 and starting to embrace indie and under-the-radar bands. By the time AC/DC released the strong, scaledback Flick of the Switch in August of 1983, I was paying little attention (though enough to notice that the album circulated pretty quickly back into the cut-out and used bins in record stores). Others’ attention was dimming a bit too, it seemed, at least in the U.S. Flick of the Switch performed well in Australia and the U.K. but topped out at 15 on Billboard ; the title track single barely cracked the Top 30. Decent sales, certainly, but relative to Back in Black and For Those About to Rock, disappointing. But still, AC/DC was — and remains — a worldwide institution. As I was blithely ignoring them they were filling stadiums and coliseums, splitting eardrums at the Rock in Rio festival (where they played to half a million fans) and at their several appearances with the Monsters of Rock tours (most famously at Donnington Park, the DVD of which has sold more than 800,000 copies as Sony’s highest-selling video). By the middle of the 1980s, their sound, attitude, and modus operandi were all firmly, unalterably in place. Malcolm and Angus’ business-first philosophy steered AC/DC stubbornly down the same John Lee Hooker/left-at-Chuck Berry/ right-at-Rolling Stones paths that they’d burned years ago. “I’ve never felt like a pop star — this is a nine-tofive sort of gig,” Malcolm told David Fricke. “It comes •

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from working in the factories, that world. You don’t forget it.” Angus added: “I look at it this way — I got this far. I didn’t have any great prospects for a career, with the education I had. When I started doing this, I thought, ‘You gotta give it 200 percent.’ Because it was your survival. It was the job, what was going to put food on the table.” Such dogged, committed pursuit of an esthetic vision has served AC/DC absurdly well — among the reasons that there are now many years between albums is that the men are blessed with bottomless bank accounts — and it’s allowed them, perhaps unfortunately, to pay scant attention to contemporary musical trends outside of their purview. Watch the brothers whenever AC/DC plays “Highway To Hell.” During the verses, Malcolm stands with his right hand resting on his Gretsch, bobbing his head lightly, tapping his right foot, the job foreman who’s supervising Angus going down the manhole. It’s a job. And it’s a job with little employee turnover. Cliff Williams has consistently held down the bottom end since he joined the band in 1977. Phil Rudd left acrimoniously in 1983, replaced by Simon Wright, who was replaced by Chris Slade in 1989; as it turned out, both men were simply holding the chair for Rudd’s eventual return in 1994. The albums following Flick of the Switch have been consistent in their mixed results as well as their sound and arrangements. Fly on the Wall (1985) was awful: lazily written, dated, and wholly uninspired, with Johnson’s weakened voice buried deep in the mix. Who Made Who (1986) and Blow Up Your Video (1988) were a bit better: the former’s title track •

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is a slow, grinding, recursive song that doesn’t sound like much in the band’s catalog; the latter reunited the band with Harry Vanda and George Young and featured “That’s The Way I Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll,” lyrically moronic, but the Young brothers’ coolest riff in years. The slick The Razor’s Edge (1990) was a commercial surprise in the form of the hit singles “Moneytalks” (number 3 on Billboard Mainstream Rock singles chart) and “Thunderstruck” (number 5, and now justifiably a standard in the band’s catalog), and the band supported the album with a year-long world tour. Rudd returned for Ballbreaker (1995), produced by Rick Rubin; unfortunately the band didn’t bring top-shelf material to the noted producer. AC/DC again teamed up with Vanda and Young for the confident Stiff Upper Lip (2000), and the title track and “Satellite Blues” were modest gems that could’ve been rejected grooves from Let There Be Rock or Powerage. 2008’s Black Ice was a huge commercial success, debuting at number 1 on Billboard and prefacing yet another successful world tour of enormous stages, scaffolding, pyrotechnics, video accompaniment, an ironclad set-list of well-worn classics, and jubilant, graying, hairline-challenged men in the crowd raising devil-horns, or in some cases, their own kids. In the mid-1980s, I was a DJ at WMUC at the University of Maryland. One afternoon, a twelve-inch EP from Pontiac Brothers arrived at the station; I was a fan of the band, and I laughed out loud when I saw that they’d covered “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.” It had already become a gesture of semi-arch hipster irony to cover AC/DC (unless you were in an earnest tribute •

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band, a cottage industry that has thrived for decades). Really, how could you cover a cartoony song about a hitman delivered with a half-grin by Bon Scott unless you were going to ham it up? When I listened to the Pontiac Brothers rip through the song, having real fun with it, it felt, suddenly, as if AC/DC were an old band. Bored by their newer records, my buddy and I relied on some silly drunken inspiration: I recorded a few For Those About to Rock and Flick of the Switch tracks at 45 rpm, and we’d blast them top-volume in the dorms and at parties, guffawing at the hyper, nasal sounds but really digging them, too. It was an old trick I’d learned as a kid: when a song — say, the Beatles’ “Please Please Me” — had gotten samey-sounding after a few thousand listens, just nudge the turntable’s pitch dial toward the plus sign, and you’re hearing the song new again. “This is what AC/DC should sound like!” we yelled, stupidly, as “Let’s Get It Up” and “Flick Of The Switch” leapt out of the boombox at breakneck speed. Others in the Eighties and Nineties took more concerted efforts to revise and keep alive the classic AC/DC sound. The Cult were an English band of hard rockers that had shortened their name from the Death Cult (and, earlier, from the Southern Death Cult) for fear of being associated with Goth Rock; they wanted to revive psychedelia and heavy riffing, with a special debt to AC/DC. In 1987, as I was smirking along with Pontiac Brothers, the Cult hired Rick Rubin, and the result was Electric , a rocking and funny album that it was impossible not to headbang and smile along with, even as you rolled your eyes at the shameless appropriation. “Wild Flower,” “King Contrary Man,” and “Outlaw” feature Young Riffs®, propulsive eighth-notes, and Bon/ •

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Brian-styled vocals married to anthemic choruses. Rubin and the band obviously shared their love for the AC/DC back catalog during these sessions, and achieved a kind of perfection with the single “Love Removal Machine,” which sounded as if Rubin had collected genetic samples from Malcolm and Angus and imprinted them into the song’s tablature. (The tune also borrows happily from the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up.”) My buddies and I loved it, and scorned it, and loved it all over again — and all the while I wondered unconsciously, Where in the hell are the progenitors?

A few years later, Rubin was at it again, this time with the Four Horsemen, a Los Angeles-based band formed by an ex-Cult member. Nobody Said It Was Easy, released in 1991 as a renewed AC/DC were riding high with The Razor’s Edge, was a great-sounding amalgam of Southern-fried posture and Young licks, manifested terrifically in “Rockin’ Is Ma’ Business,” a fist-pumping groove of mammoth guitar and ironic bad-ass outlook. With “Love Removal Machine,” it’s among the best songs that Young/Young never wrote, and there have been a few contenders for that prize over the years, from bands of young guys, and sometimes girls, who came of age while listening to Highway to Hell , Back in Black, and For Those About to Rock and who, like the Drive-By Truckers’ Patterson Hood, surrendered happily to the myths and promises of stadium hymns and hard rock riffing. Some of the influence is sifted subtly: I hear AC/DC in the Supersuckers, the Hives, JET, the Datsuns, and the Donnas, among others, and in songs such as the White Stripes’ early “Hello Operator,” stomping, power-chord blues that I bet Malcolm and Angus would love if they’d only listen. The Hold Steady and the Flaming Lips have •

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readily acknowledged and/or admitted the influence of AC/DC on their songs, attitude, and tour vans’ mixtapes. On the tongue-firmly-in-cheek-side there’s the Upper Crust, a Boston-based group of guys dressed as and channeling eighteenth-century aristocracy with Gibsons, Gretschs and powdered wigs (think of AC/DC playing “Back In Black” as a castle’s house band). Less ironically, there’s Nashville Pussy, a hardcore rock & roll outfit powered by Blaine Cartwright and his wife Ruyter Suys, who plays a knock-off of Angus’ Gibson SG held high, and sports long, sweaty locks and the headbanging to match. “Learning how to play the SG got me to understand Angus’s playing style more — they are pretty directly related, one follows the other — and at one point in learning my craft I would ask myself, W.W.A.D?,” says Suys. “He is a personal god as far as inspiration.” Like others before her, she traced the amplified line from blues to Chuck Berry to Angus: “I swear you could play half the AC/DC riffs and main hooks on fucking church bells — they are that simple and clear.” She adds, “It ain’t easy being that simple, and they are able to take the same few chords and turn them inside out and every way possible to drain every last drop of rock out of them. Good old Pentatonic scale.” A band of hard-drinking, committed, road-tested rockers, Nashville Pussy filters their love of Bon-era AC/DC though resolute Georgian attitude. Suys recalls playing Melbourne, Australia, in the Little Annadale Pub: “I pictured how Angus got his moves, and it has something to do with dodging beer bottles on the stage! Stick and move! And Rockin’ out helps too — more rock equals less beers thrown and more beers merely passed up to you!” 101

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Nashville Pussy’s version of “Highway To Hell” on the Free the West Memphis 3 compilation is notable for its deference, however ear-busting; read grungy , not begrudging . When I watch and listen to Nashville Pussy in a small, sweaty club, I feel that it’s as close to late-Seventies AC/DC as I’ll get. Plenty of folk over the decades have called AC/DC to task for their unwavering commitment to their sound and approach. In a satiric column for Pitchfork, Brent DiCrescenzo offers a faux-investigative piece about a new AC/DC album, hanging out in the spirit of mock journalism “in the back alley of the Hard Rock, digging through hotel trash, sorting out the trademark gold penthouse Hefty bags.” He breathlessly announces that, though the band is holding their cards close to their chest “as they explained in their 1985 b-side ‘Hold Your Cards (Close to Your Chest)’,” he’s been able to piece together what he can of the new album. “These songs have been transcribed from doodles and poems off toilet paper, the back of Chinese take-out menus, hotel ‘Please Make Our Bed’ doorknob hangers, pool bar coasters, a brochure for the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre at Navy Pier, and a highlighted snooker instruction manual.” Among the song titles “leaked” by DiCrescenzo: “Makin’ the Bed”; “Downloadin’ (Ain’t Got Nuthin’ To Do With an iPod)”; “You Can’t Spell Rock ‘n’ Roll Without C-O-Apostrophe-K”; and “I’ll Swell If the End’s Well.” Hilarious, snarky, devastating stuff. It’s true that in the post-Spinal Tap era, AC/DC has come perilously close to self-parody with each release and worldwide tour. Many feel that they solidly arrived there years •

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ago. Any working rock & roll band courts this risk as they hit the bittersweet wisdom and sagginess of middle age. The risk might be treacherously high for a band whose most visible member is a graying fifty-something wearing a lad’s outfit. Yet, there are just as many staunch defenders of AC/DC in the twenty-first century, among them critic Chris Riemenschneider who says, plainly, “Anybody who says Angus Young is too old to be prancing around in his schoolboy uniform simply doesn’t get it. Not only do they miss the point of AC/DC. They don’t understand rock ‘n’ roll.” Yeah, he writes, Angus still wears “that stupid, hokey, beautiful velvet-jacket, tie and shorts ensemble, which is to rock ‘n’ roll what Dorothy’s rubyred shoes are to cinema or Superman’s cape is to comic books.” Riemenschneider offers his reasons why AC/DC is still relevant, including the band’s mind-boggling ongoing catalog sales, second only to the Beatles, their stubborn refusal to allow their songs to be sold on iTunes (“Most acts would be shooting themselves in the foot if they did this”), and the fact that Mutt Lange, Rubin, and Brendan O’Brien (“three of rock’s biggest record producers”) couldn’t leave their signature imprints on AC/DC even as they tried, or wanted, to. The most persuasive reasons for the band’s eternal coolness? The near-impossibility of discovering a used copy of Back in Black, so universally coveted is the album, and Malcolm and Angus’ antipathy to the dreaded if radio-ready power ballad. Discussing Stiff Upper Lip in 2000, critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine posed a simple but significant rhetorical question: “If making music like this was really that easy, why can’t anybody else do it this well?” The 103

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difficulty in answering that question goes a long way to getting at the heart and mystery of AC/DC’s success and of their steadfast justification of the playbook. Defending Powerage, Bon once said, “You progress, sure you do, but you move forward in the same direction. You do not shoot off on some tangent.” In 1988, literary critic Sven Birkerts re-read Jack Kerouac’s seminal novel On the Road ; twenty years had passed since Birkerts discovered Kerouac’s lyric prose and the Beat Generation’s yay-saying quest for kicks and beatific states of dirty grace. Revisiting the novel at the tail end of the cynical 1980s left Birkerts cold and disenchanted. “At some point I realized that I was not so much reading a book as taking stock,” he confesses, “of those times, of these times, of myself in both.” As a highly impressionable teenager in the 1960s, Birkerts had eaten it up — as had millions of kids worldwide — embarking on ragged road trips in emulation of the movement equals purpose philosophy, admitting later to wincing when learning of Kerouac’s political conservatism and skepticism of the counter-culture. Eyeing his dog-eared copy of On the Road , Birkerts writes: “There is simply no adequate protection against the ways we grow and change.” As I write this, thirty years have passed since Highway to Hell was released in the summer of 1979, and I wonder how and why the album can matter to me now. When I listen, I experience the same grinning, headbanging highs I first did, leavened a bit with some Birkertsesque misgivings. The sensations are different now, of course — I’m not hearing the album for the first time, I’m older — but they’re still there. Few rock & roll albums in my •

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collection have lasted as long with me and retained the spark and spunk as has Highway to Hell . The reasons have much to do with taste, probably. I don’t pretend that everyone loves the album or will get this far in a book devoted to it. But Highway to Hell testifies to a band at their peak and as an unintended swansong for a romantically reckless leader, and I’m convinced that AC/DC achieved Rock & Roll Platonism with the album. “Highway to Hell,” “Girls Got Rhythm,” “Touch Too Much,” “Shot Down In Flames,” “If You Want Blood”: these are pure and bedrock tunes that translate the True Ideas, the — should I say this? — “Rockness” of rock & roll. “For any set of tables, there is a single Form,” Plato stated over two thousand years ago, to which we might add in the twenty-first century, our ears ringing but our faculties undimmed, for any set of rock & roll albums there is Highway to Hell . (Plato: “For any set of tables, there is a single Form, and it is in virtue of some relationship to that Form that they are all made to be tables.” Look in the mirror, hair-metal bands.) Little else explains to me the continued freshness of these songs and performances so many years later. Malcolm, Angus, and Bon locked into something eternal in early 1979, the Rock & Roll of rock & roll, and Mutt Lange was smart and skillful enough to recognize and to help translate that. “The first thing ‘Mutt’ did on Highway to Hell was tune their guitars,” insists Ed Stasium, a renowned veteran producer who since the mid-Seventies has engineered and/or produced dozens of rock & roll albums common to his trademark clean but muscular sound. Notably, he was behind the board for the Ramones’ 105

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essential Leave Home, Rocket to Russia, and Road to Ruin albums, and he’s also worked with Motörhead, Soul Asylum, Living Colour, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, the Misfits, the Plasmatics, Reverend Horton Heat, and many others. Over the years, Stasium, too, has weighed the tangibles and intangibles of Highway to Hell ’s timeless sound. “You listen to AC/DC’s earlier records, and the guitars weren’t quite in the pocket yet,” he says. “I’m a huge fan of ‘tunedness’: in time, in tune, and on tape, the Three T’s, that’s one of my philosophies. And you can just hear the difference in the layering of the guitars on Highway to Hell . Those guitars were just so much tighter, and I’m sure that he worked with Malcolm and Angus on that. That album’s as tight as the Inca dry-stones at the walls of Machu Picchu. You can’t put a cigarette paper in between there, or a leaf. It just sounds so great, so crisp. “On the earlier albums, there were notes hanging over, little crud here and there. On Highway to Hell Lange cleaned that up, but the power is still there. The drums sound great, you can hear the kickdrum, finally. Everything’s very distinctive.” He adds, “And the background vocals — they were on the earlier records, but on Highway to Hell Lange stacked those suckers and spread them out in stereo. The band was there. ‘Mutt’ just brought clarity to everything.” Three decades down the line, Stasium vividly remembers driving into Manhattan from New Jersey, listening to WNEW-FM as “Highway To Hell” came over the airwaves for the first time. “I said, ‘Oh my god, what is this? It sounds killer!’ I knew that it was AC/DC. But it sounded so great .” •

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When I think about Bon’s lyrics on Highway to Hell , I’m reminded of another American narrative. Jay Gatsby was the Platonic conception of a young James Gatz, and this discovery on Nick Carraway’s part is a decisive moment in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Disgusted with and embarrassed by his humble Midwest origins, Gatz re-creates himself as “just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent,” Carraway reports soberly, “and to this conception he was faithful to the end.” The romance, sport, and tragedy of the novel results from a teenager’s fantasy — no wonder it ends with ruined dreams and bitter disappointments. There’s some Carraway-like disquiet for me when I rock out to Highway to Hell . Gatsby’s flaw is an adolescent vision of his world; is it AC/DC’s as well? When the band was writing and recording the album, they were no longer seventeen year olds — they were young men in their mid-twenties plus a geezer, with years of hard work and the long road etched onto their faces. Angus turned twenty-four during the Highway to Hell sessions; Malcolm was twenty-six; Williams, twenty-nine; Rudd, twenty-four; Bon, an ancient thirtytwo. The album may have been produced by men well past their teen years, but clearly it springs from their idealized notions of themselves as young kids, rocking out to the Stones and the Yardbirds and electric blues, getting off on the three-chord promise of drinks, joy, and fucking, against an air of quasi-menace. Shouldn’t such hormone-driven music and its clichés embarrass or bore me a bit now? Is my Platonist argument more selfdefense than discovery? My wife Amy laughs when she comes into my study and the music’s cranked and I’m 107

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rocking out, devil-horns and lightning bolts adorning the magazines strewn around me. She should, of course. That’s part of the fun. Bon intuitively recognized the need to exaggerate his adolescent drive and devilish taint. Michael Barson and Steven Heller write in Teenage Confidential , “Good and evil make themselves evident in real life not as absolutes, but as gradations along a virtually infinite continuum. The American mass media, however, has always operated most comfortably when presenting clearly etched polarities to its consumers. So it has always been with the teenager in American pop culture. There are good teenagers and bad teenagers, and being just a little bit bad is rather like being just a little bit pregnant — in America, you are either pure a newfallen snow or you carry an indelible taint.” Highway to Hell runs along that continuum: there’s something eternal about adolescence, about its promises and its deceits; and about the adolescent, blinking into light so bright that the horizon is obliterated. A teenager is pulled in many directions at once: between sensation and substance; between impulse and responsibility; between innocence and guilt; between shallowness and depth. Highway to Hell and the panting scenarios therein are sensational, impulsive, and shallow, and no less human because of it. When I listen to the songs now, my brain can go into sleep mode, and my body can listen and move, and that’s a great pleasure — one of the great pleasures that rock & roll gives us — and it’s a different thing altogether from pining for lost youth or regretting moves not made, girls not chased, drinks not downed. That Bon Scott was thirty-two when he wrote the lyrics suggests that he was an eternal adolescent, but the •

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longer I live with the songs, the more I feel that he was blessed by this state more often than he was burdened by it. He allowed himself access to a youthful pulse that beat into a future lifting with fun, not collapsing under regret. I won’t romanticize Bon Scott. I can’t forget that he was a self-destructive alcoholic who drank himself to death, but I can forgive that unhappy truth, and I listen to the songs that dramatize that hazardous dance with more than a little sympathy, and with rue at the human mistakes he made, however fun they were. Living easy, living free . . . asking nothing, leave me be . . .

So what was it like for other kids at the time? I wanted to talk about some of this with the classmates who graduated with me from St. Andrew Apostle School when Highway to Hell was released. Are these songs of any value to them now as adults, likely with a family in tow and a reliable burden of responsibilities? Do the songs still matter to them? I hadn’t spoken with many of them in decades, and when their names and faces floated back to me I was put in mind, after Birkerts, of the ways we grow and change. I needed to remind myself to listen in their reflections for adult voices, not for the hysterical, hormone-pitched noise of our early teen years. Their responses roam the fields of teen melodrama, real and imagined, with Highway to Hell as soundtrack. Drew Viland wrote to me, “Mid-8th grade at St. Andrew’s my family moved to Holland where I went to the American School of the Hague. New school, foreign land was the backdrop for much teen angst . . . When I heard the lyrics to ‘Highway to Hell,’ I was a bit taken aback and did not want to like the song, but could 109

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not help it. At the time, I did not care for the crowd that was ‘forcing’ their music on us. The boom box was a new novelty and this was their anthem.” He adds, “This music brings mixed emotions when I recall the time it came out. I have an 11-year-old son who found AC/DC through Guitar Hero or Rock Band . This music has taken on a whole new meaning for me since I associate it with my son as opposed to my youth. So there are two sides to this musical coin for me.” David Peake says, “Now that I am older, I can appreciate how great AC/DC’s music is/was (and yes, the ‘Best of AC/DC’ is on my iPod). The songs will always have a strong emotional attachment to them, as they reference a part of my life that is gone. I guess we can call that nostalgia, right?” Rob Thompson was one of the kids I remember as a good-hearted juvee trouble-maker, a paragon to me of cool rebellion. He spent one day in seventh or eighth grade swigging clandestinely from a bottle of cough syrup hidden beneath school books in his desk. He happily corroborated my memories, even if his transgressions were a bit more innocent than I’d imagined. “I didn’t have enough money in 1979 to buy the album, but my cousin had it,” he recalls. “She let me borrow it and I never gave it back to her . . . I used to come home from school about an hour before my parents. My dad had a great stereo system for the time and speakers with big heavy magnets. If he only knew how far I turned that knob when I put Highway to Hell on. His left speaker did eventually blow but he never figured out how it happened!” Andy Hofer, too, was a bit of a problem child who hung with the kind of crowd I was warned against — he was the kid who to me looked like Malcolm on the cover of Highway to Hell , which was the •

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first album that he bought. “I walked up to Kemp Mill and then ran home to listen to it,” he said. “The songs matter to me now to bring up visions of sitting in the living room, parents not home, and blasting it as loud as it would go. The memories are timeless.” Bill Pino and his older brother met Bon Scott in 1979 and got his autograph as the singer was lounging outside of Capital Centre smoking a cigarette — such was Bon’s graciousness, such was Bill’s charmed life. A hero to those of us at St. Andrews who were far less daring and far more burdened by adult supervision, Bill’s the classmate whom I most associate with the partying, decadent, romantic AC/DC of this period. (His bedroom wall was papered with Farrah Fawcett and Charlie’s Angels posters.) A few months after Bon’s death, armed with nerve, Bill and a kid with whom he was knocking about in a band caught AC/DC at Capital Centre, and they took fandom to the next level. “I had gone to a high school reunion of my mom’s in Lanham, Maryland,” he remembers. “This long-haired kid lived next door and was playing the guitar. I went over to see how he played, and he asked if I play; I told him I played bass, and he invited me to join the band. He lived 5 minutes from the Sheraton Hotel on Route 450, where the musicians that play at the Capital Centre stayed. So he knew how to sneak up in.” Recalling hiding out on Cliff Williams’ floor, nervously waiting for the bass player to emerge, Bill shakes his head now: “I remember saying to myself, This is stupid! ” Bill dug the show (“the loudest I ever heard”), and the next day he and his buddy, hoping for more kicks, returned to the Sheraton where they met Brian Johnson, 111

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who was outside talking to fans. “Very approachable, and a hell of a nice guy. The only thing I remember thinking to myself was this dude is so short, I mean like Lilliputian short.” Bill’s buddy calmed his nerves, puffed-out his chest, and started talking band stuff. The kids were floored when Brian invited them up to his room; on the way up, blinking in disbelief, they met up with Angus and Malcolm. “I think I actually bought Brian a pack of cigarettes, because he said his wallet was up in the room. When we got up there he tried to pay me back, but I refused. The rest of that night was a bit foggy but we did some shots of Jim Beam, and before I got too messed up we bid farewell. “Something that struck me about all the AC/DC crew was how incredibly approachable they were. I met David Lee Roth after a show one year. The next day I went to Joe’s Record Paradise and traded in my Van Halen albums. I had never met a bigger dick in my life. But Angus and Brian would not only sign anything, they would actually stay and chat until everyone was gone.” Bill says proudly, “They signed my Highway to Hell album cover.” The girls, too, have enduring memories. “The very first live concert I ever went to,” Jennifer Kathleen Garrett remembers. “It was amazing. The music was incredible, it is hard to put into words how it felt to be on my feet for most of the show, singing along to every song. I had listened to that album so many times I knew just about every single word (as I am sure most kids our age did at that time).” She adds a comical side note: “The stench of marijuana was so thick in the air I got high by association and fell asleep for the ending. I never was much of •

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a drug person, thank God!” Echoing a generation of kids lured by the promises in rock & roll, Jennifer says, “Today, if an AC/DC song comes on, I can still go back to that time. I will crank up the stereo in the Suburban and still feel like the badass that I never was.” Charla Ross graduated St. Andrew’s and then went to a local public high school, so I lost touch with her, as I did with so many kids. I remember her as a tough chick, one of the girls whom I’d imagine would drift away after school into a tableau of smoking and flirting and other feathered-hair, tight-jean misbehavior narrated by my storehouse of Easyriders imagery. One afternoon, a couple of years later, I happened to glance out the front window of my parents’ house, and there was Charla pushing a baby stroller down Amherst Avenue, a complicated look on her face. She’d tripped the line between adolescence and accountability much sooner than the rest of us. I was eager to get in touch with her. “My first specific thought about ‘Highway to Hell’ is I never have and never will listen to that song,” Charla told me. Oddly, my sense of her was a bit different from reality. “Maybe it was my Catholic upbringing, but even as a young girl I knew I wanted to avoid hell. Now, that’s not saying I was an angel by any means. I just was not going to listen to or sing about it. I also don’t listen to the Van Halen song ‘Running with the Devil’.” This admission both amused and floored me, until I thought for a moment about the lurid guarantees that Bon makes in the song and how they might scare a thirteen-yearold girl, however brazen she appeared to the public. “As for the album, it was great. Does it conjure up any memories. Hell yeah! It could have been the soundtrack to some of my crazy teenage years. Beer drinking, pot 113

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smoking, fist fights in some barroom where I had fake ID. It reminds me of running out the back door at high school to whatever badboy I was dating and jumping on the back of his Harley. “When I listen to it now mostly I shake my head and laugh. It’s a wonder I’m still alive. Would I change those memories? No — without all that I probably wouldn’t be the person I am today. The songs remind me that I have done a lot of crazy shit and that I’m not missing out on anything. I have a couple AC/DC songs on my iPod and they get me pumped-up when I’m working out.” AC/DC was Charla’s first concert, also, at Capital Centre. “I was thirteen. They were freaking amazing! They were not glamour rockers at all. They were in your face all night. When Angus Young mooned the crowd after one of his crazy guitar solos, you screamed and pumped your fist and yelled for more. “The thing about Highway to Hell is it has staying power. My kids know and like that album. My 21 yearold daughter is a huge fan and listens all the time. So even with my issues about the one song, I would have to say that Highway to Hell rocks to this day.” Recently, I came across this random posting on a YouTube AC/DC video: “I’m a girl, so this might come as a surprice [sic] . . . I LOVE AC/DC!!!” I guess I am a little surprised. I’ve always been interested in what feels like a disconnect between adoring female fans of hard rock and the genre’s tendency toward sexist, macho lyrics and boyish attitudes. Where does irresistible sex appeal fit into that clumsy equation? When I asked some women who are beyond their impressionable teen years what it was about AC/DC that •

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might have captivated them, their responses varied. “In general, not many girls were really into them,” Christina Gilleran admits. “But I don’t think misogynistic lyrics were the problem. This is my opinion: the metal or hard rock groups that garner a female following tend to include a member or members who have a physical sexual ambiguity — they aren’t sexually threatening but are still provocative. Long hair, flowing shirts, Robert Plant’s mannerisms, things like that endear a band to women.” AC/DC felt like a guy’s club to Christina. “We girls know the words and like the songs alright, but they don’t capture us. We liked the songs but did not worship the band. I never saw an AC/DC poster on a girl’s bedroom wall, but did see many others.” She adds, “And you also have to take into consideration the poseur tendency of teenage girls. There is no better way to get a bad boy to notice you than to cultivate an interest in a band he loves. The problem, in a nutshell: Bon Scot and Brian Johnson looked too much like our dads and brothers.” Charla agrees: “I don’t think there was a hot one in the band at all.” Betsy Alexander acknowledges the sexual potential of AC/DC. “They’re very tongue in cheek, and a younger Angus was a very approachable, almost cuddly, hard rock guitar god.” She adds, “School boy look for us is similar to the school girl look for guys.” She sounds as if she’s in on the joke, and Laura Micciche picks up the thread: “I think it’s all about sex. There’s something dirty, nasty, and downright sexy about the band, in a behind-the-garage-during-the-high-school-party (I shouldn’t have done that, but I’m secretly glad I did) kind of way. The music is made for drinking, smoking, and fucking. I think women like it for the same reasons 115

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men do, basically.” When she listened to AC/DC as a teenager, Laura knew the lyrics and sang them just like every other girl she knew, but she mostly responded to the raunchy feel of the music: “Made me feel sexual and exciting — like an object of desire. That’s a weird thing to say, I know, but I think it’s true. I didn’t care about the sexist stuff, for whatever reason; it was the music, and the scene it seemed to create, that interested me.” When we listen to rock & roll with our bodies and not with our heads we can transcend the politics of gender. Of course, this is both liberating and problematic. Kim Shattuck of the Muffs (and before that the Pandoras, an all-girl garage band) admits to having an initial physical response to rock & roll songs generally, and to not bothering to listen to lyrics until after she’s heard a song many times. “I think when people listen to rock lyrics they don’t usually think about what they mean so much as how they sound with the music,” she says. “If it were overtly sexist and it stuck out in the lyrics I would be turned off probably. I think a lot of gals who follow hard rock are a bit on the self-loathing side, anyway. Check out Heavy Metal Parking Lot . Also, the groupie phenomenon makes me think these girls have low self esteem.” Artist, writer, and activist Caroline Coon was a journalist for Melody Maker during the mid-Seventies U.K. punk era. She argues that asking the question “What do you think accounts for the popularity of AC/DC among women, given the puerile nature of most of their lyrics?” should lead logically to asking the same question of male fans. “In fact, AC/DC are not popular with many men,” she contends. “Perhaps those women •

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who do like AC/DC are sexist? Women are just as likely to be sexist, having learned their lesson well from men, as men are likely to be feminist.” She adds, however, “partaking in any dominant culture if you are one of an oppressed group — in the West, say, Jewish, black, female, homosexual — means a person has to acquire an Offence Filter. We admire the style of a creative work while rising above the offence. You can admire the architecture of cathedrals without believing in God! Many women flinch at the misogyny of the Stranglers, Sizzler, or Eminem while being fans of these musicians’ superb performance and style. And who are the rock musicians who are not sexist?” In the mid- and late Seventies, AC/DC’s music sounded like orthodox rock to Coon, seemingly older at the time than the Sex Pistols, the Clash or the Damned, “good of its kind but nothing innovative, unlike the Stranglers or the Police whose soundscape was ‘young’ because it included Afro-Caribbean world music influences and electronics.” She adds, “Paradoxically, nothing is more likely to make a man look ‘old’ than wearing the clothes of a child and, to me, Angus Young in his pervy school uniform has always seemed old and old fashioned.” A seasoned musician whose career began when she was a teenager, Suzi Quatro has long witnessed the cultural divide between men and women in rock & roll. On the cover of her self-titled album from 1973 — the year that AC/DC formed — she’s wearing black leather and jeans and a defiant countenance, looking pretty bad-ass, foregrounded against three beer-swilling guys straight out of Dirty and Loutish central casting. “I was well into 117

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my career by the time AC/DC happened, and therefore not influenced by them,” she says. “But I will say that I consider them an out-and-out rock & roll band.” At some point, Quatro was booked onto a German TV show with AC/DC. “We ended up at a bowling alley for a photo opportunity,” she recalls. “Angus pinched my ass. He was lucky to be left with any fingers.” Three telling recent developments for a band that may outlast us all: Robert Levine in The New York Times reveals an interesting disconnect. “Although AC/DC was criticized by religious groups in the ’80s for songs like ‘Highway to Hell’ (which is actually about the difficulty of life on the road),” he writes, “the band is so popular at Wal-Mart that the chain was responsible for half the band’s sales [in 2007], according to Columbia. The retailer is setting up special areas devoted to AC/DC in each of its stores, where it will sell the band’s albums, DVDs and Rock Band game, as well as a selection of T-shirts and other clothing.” Joe Matera reports that on “On October 1, 2004 the band’s old stomping ground of Melbourne — where between 1974 and 1976 the band lived, worked, fought, and partied — officially gave them their own street name too. In the heart of Melbourne’s financial and commercial district, Corporation Lane was renamed ACDC Lane.” In June of 2009, Converse released a line of AC/DC Chuck Taylor sneakers. From the Converse website: “More than three decades into a career that shows no signs of slowing down or letting up, AC/DC, like •

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electricity itself, provides the world with an essential source of power and energy.” The company hails the sneakers as “the AC/DC-inspired Collection, from — and for — those about to rock.” There are two designs, one all black, and one emblazoned with that careermaking photograph from the cover of Highway to Hell . I confess: I’m a fameist. I’m not always proud of it, and sometimes I fight it, but it’s in my DNA: I tend to grow irrationally indifferent to a band if they get too well-known. Fame per se is not the problem, of course; what disappoints me are the trappings of celebrity that can weigh down a band, lure them into lazy or bloated behavior, divert them from their better instincts. Though I’m hardly alone in this attitude, it feels silly and boyish of me to wish that AC/DC hadn’t gotten so popular in the 1980s that they were forced into stadiums and projected onto enormous screens. When I watch videos of the Bon years, even of the later shows on the larger stages, I’m enthralled and amped up by an edginess and a sense of controlled anarchy that are missing in the band’s later years. When I imagine AC/DC sharing a bill with the MC5 or the Dictators, or playing CBGB in 1977 and the smaller clubs and theaters along their bumpy road to the charts, I see and hear an ideal rock & roll band — rendered ideal, in part, by the excitement generated by the sweatier room, the closer crowd. Irresponsible and inaccurate, perhaps, but when I listen to Highway to Hell and the earlier albums, the room simply feels smaller, the party more intense. As in all great historical rock & roll origin stories, from the Beatles at the Cavern Club to Nirvana at the Pyramid Club, the thrills of proximity of fan to band are that much more palpable. 119

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On August 28, 1979, AC/DC gathered on a sound stage in Munich to film five Highway to Hell songs for promotional videos. They were at the tail end of the European tour, preparing to fly to the U.S. in a week. In many ways, these videos capture the band at its peak. Though lip-synched, the performances are tight. The guys look great. All pistons are pumping through “Highway to Hell,” Touch Too Much,” Walk All Over You,” “Shot Down In Flames,” and “If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It).” In hindsight, I can see just where this band was poised. Their strongest album to date was out. Atlantic Records was buoyed and solidly behind them. Their tours were growing more successful, their songs were climbing the charts, and there was a buzz about their shows’ ferocity and good-spirits. Since their debut on New Year’s Eve in 1973, the guys had worked their way to their most advantageous position yet. Watch Bon’s face in these videos: he’s tough, scary, lively, sarcastic, and funny, sometimes all at the same moment, as when he sings “We’ve got what you want, and you’ve got the lust,” or pantomimes his sexual frustrations in “Shot Down In Flames.” Each move that AC/DC makes in these clips looks perfect and iconic — Angus’ playing and manic strutting now nearly balletic, filtered through the grief and the years, Malcolm and Cliff’s well-rehearsed advance-andretreat on the microphones, Phil’s grooving synthesis of four-on-the-floor and eighth-notes, Bon’s leering, sleeveless confidence. In retrospect, it’s easy but maybe historically irresponsible and certainly clichéd to say that a bright future was awaiting AC/DC in August of 1979. Watching them tear through these songs from •

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Highway to Hell in a perfect blend of professionalism, anarchy, and joie de vivre, I’ll say it anyway.

“I would just like to be around a few years,” Angus said in the mid-1980s, “still banging away but not being boring. I just want to go further — make more noise.” “We have so many ideas for songs and so many good riffs in them,” said Bon in 1978. “And the more we work, the more we tour, we’re getting more ideas . . . It’s gonna get better and better. I can’t see an end to it, you know? “It’s like infinity rock & roll.” I can’t know what would have happened to Bon Scott had he survived that night with Alistair Kinnear, woken up hungover, gotten back to channeling his inner problem child, cut another album with his mates, and toured the world yet again. What we’re left with is the silly and beautiful noise that got him to that precipice, and from which perilously dangles in perpetuity one of the great rock & roll albums and one of the great rock & roll personalities.

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Gilleran, Christina. Email to the author. June 26, 2009 Hofer, Andy. Email to the author. June 30, 2009 Holmstrom, John. Email to the author. May 27, 2009 Hood, Patterson. Email to the author. August 27, 2009 ——Email to the author. August 28, 2009 Kramer, Eddie. Interview with the author. May 25, 2009 Krulik, Jeff. Email to the author. September 16, 2009 Levitz, Saul. Interview with the author. August 28, 2009 Micciche, Laura. Email to the author. July 1, 2009 Opitz, Mark. Email to the author. July 21, 2009 Peake, David. Email to the author. May 13, 2009 Pino, Bill. Email to the author. August 20, 2009 Platt, Tony. Interview with the author. May 16, 2009 ——Interview with the author. January 22, 2010 Quatro, Suzi. Email to the author. July 5, 2009 Ross, Charla. Email to the author. June 1, 2009 Shernoff, Andy. Interview with the author. June 2, 2009 Stasium, Ed. Interview with the author. June 3, 2009 Steinbicker, Earl. Email to the author. May 18, 2009 Stuven, Hugo. Email to the author. June 2, 2009 Sutcliffe, Phil. Interview with the author. June 23, 2009 Suys, Ruyter. Email to the author. February 22, 2010 Thompson, Rob. Email to the author. May 13, 2009 Viland, Drew. Email to the author. May 13, 2009 Walker, Clinton. Email to the author. June 18, 2009 ——Email to the author. October 27, 2009 Whipperr, Rose. Email to the author. May 29, 2009 •

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——Email to the author. July 8, 2009 Regrettably, I could not track down Robert “Mutt” Lange, and AC/DC management ignored my requests for an interview. Books and Articles

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(Morrow and Co., 1992) Cartier-Bresson, Henri. The Decisive Moment . (Simon and Shuster/Éds. Verve of Paris, 1952) Cavanaugh, Peter C. Local DJ: A Rock ‘n’ Roll History. (Xlibris, 2001) Clerk, Carol. “School of Rock.” Classic Rock. June 2009. Coon, Caroline. “AC/DC: Nashville Rooms, London.” Melody Maker . May 8, 1976. Deevoy, Adrian. “Persona Non Grata.” Q. October 1988. Denenberg, Thomas. “Rock & Roll and the Camera.” 125

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Denenberg, ed. (Yale, in association with Portland Museum of Art, Maine, 2008) Doherty, Harry. “Distant Encounters of the Wembley Kind: The Who/The Stranglers/AC/DC/Nils Lofgren, Wembley Stadium.” Melody Maker . August 25, 1979. Doran, John. “Hell Ride: Bon Scott’s Swansong.” Metal Hammer: Metal Hammer and Classic Rock Present AC/DC . (Collectors’ Edition, 2005) Engleheart, Murray, with Arnaud Durieux. AC/DC: Maximum Rock & Roll . (HarperEntertainment, 2006) Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. (Scribners,

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Klein, Howie. “AC/DC Hit California.” New York Rocker . November, 1977. Konow, David. Bang Your Head: The Rise and Fall of Heavy Metal . (Three Rivers, 2002) Levine, Robert. “Ageless and Defiant, AC/DC Stays on Top Without Going Digital.” The New York Times . October 10, 2008. Matera, Joe. “Hometown Heroes.” Metal Hammer: Metal Hammer and Classic Rock Present AC/DC . (Collectors’ Edition, 2005) Niester, Alan. “AC/DC, UFO Masters of Sonic Overkill.” The Globe and Mail . June 13, 1979. Nite, Norm N. Rock On Almanac: The First Four Decades of Rock ‘n’ Roll . (Perennial Library, 1989) Palmer, Robert. “Pop: AC/DC and Def Leppard.” The New York Times . August 3, 1980. Rockwell, John. “Rock: The Punk Circuit.” The New York Times . August 26, 1977. Santelli, Robert. “Big Joe Williams.” The Big Book of Blues . (Penguin, 1993) Snowden, Don. “AC/DC Plugs into Primitivism.” Los Angeles Times . September 12, 1979. Sutcliffe, Phil. “AC/DC: The Dirtiest Story Ever Told.” Sounds . August 20, 1976. Taylor, Steven. The A to Z of Alternative Music . (Continuum, 2004) Walker, Clinton. Highway to Hell: The Life and Death of AC/DC Legend Bon Scott. Second revised edn. (Verse Chorus, 2007)

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punk77.co.uk/punkhistory/venues_music_machine. htm ——Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. AC/DC. 2003 Inductees. rockhall.com/inductee/ac-dc Davidson, John. “Interview: The Flaming Lips.” The Big Takeover . bigtakeover.com/interviews/ interview-the-flaming-lips-part-ii ——“Interview: The Hold Steady.” The Big Takeover. bigtakeover.com/interviews/interview-the-holdsteady-part-ii •

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popmatters.com/pm/article/66013–10-reasons-whyac-dc-never-grows-old Robertson, Glen. “AC/DC — The Tragic Death of Ronald ‘Bon’ Belford Scott.” Crabsody in Blue. crabsodyinblue.com/acdcbon190280.htm Steinbicker, Earl. “Our Own Photo Studio, Part XII.” Life’s Little Adventures . lifeslittleadventures.typepad.com/lifes_little_ adventures/2007/05/our_own_photo_s.html •

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