AC/DC: The Bon Scott Years

I have a strange kind of love for AC/DC.  I've never been fanatical about them, but I've liked their music ever since my older brother bought a copy of their live album If You Want Blood, You've Got It in the early 80s.  I've always, though, been more of a fan of the band, rather than their music.  I mean, I'd have no trouble reeling off a top-10 of great AC/DC tracks, but even though I have eleven albums by them (and the '74 Jailbreak EP), aside from Highway To Hell and Back In Black, I haven't listened to any of them all the way through since some time in the 80s.  Some of them I've never listened to before now.

The main reason for this is that I've always found them quite fatiguing to listen to - although they have always had a very clean, uncomplicated sound, it's also very full on and the incessant hard rocking boogie sounds just wear me out.  So it's with some surprise that I find that I've rather fallen in love with their first two albums.

Released in 1976, their first album, High Voltage (say what you like about AC/DC, they know how to work a metaphor), isn't actually their first album.  Or rather, it is, but not the High Voltage I've been listening to.  AC/DC's first album, High Voltage, was only released in Australia and is almost entirely different from the later international release, which is what I have.  That particular High Voltage is pretty much the same as their second Australian-only release T.N.T.  I'm going to pretend here that their Australian albums don't exist - it's easier that way.


Anyway, High Voltage opens with one of the band's finest moments, It's A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock 'n' Roll).  On the face of it, it's a very AC/DC song - a mid-paced rocker about the travails of a rock 'n' roll band on the road.  It's only once the first verse and chorus are out of the way and the bagpipes - yes, bagpipes - kick in that you realise that this is something bizarre, beautiful and absolutely mental.

Mull of Kintyre, eat your heart out.  The story of how the bagpipes ended up on the song is really rather sweet.  The band's co-producers were George Young and Harry Vanda, former members of the Australian 60s group The Easybeats (most famous for the hit Friday On My Mind).  George Young is the older brother of AC/DC's guitarists Malcolm and Angus Young and the Youngs, like singer Bon Scott, were Scottish born emigrants to Australia.  George was aware that Bon Scott had been a member of a pipe band in his youth and suggested the bagpipe part (I'd imagine to emphasise the band's Scottish roots).  Scott, though, had been a drummer, rather than a piper, but put his skills on the recorder to use in learning the bagpipes specifically for the song.

In some ways, the rest of AC/DC's close to 40 year career is something of a disappointment after such an inspired beginning.  This doesn't stop High Voltage from being a great album, but I don't think they've recorded anything else quite so joyous as It's A Long Way To The Top.  Other album standouts, though, for me are The Jack, Live Wire (again with the electrical metaphors!) and Can I Sit Next To You Girl?  


Even when I was the young lad that so liked If You Want Blood... I really didn't like High Voltage's follow-up, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.  Bizarrely, I think this was because I didn't like the cover, in itself a dumb reason, but made all the more so by the fact that the cover is great.  Kids today, eh?

Dirty Deeds is largely more of the same after High Voltage (actually you could say that of all their albums...), perhaps slightly milder in tone, but generally quite excellent heads down, no-nonsense boogie.  The album's finest moment for me is the aptly titled all-out rocker, Rocker.

Having liked the first two albums so much, I was expecting great things of the next album, Let There Be Rock.  It is, after all, home to two of the band's most famous songs, the demented title track and the classic Whole Lotta Rosie.  I was sorely disappointed though - the album has a different, harder edged, sound to its predecessors, but it seems lazy and rushed and a bit messy (for example, the rhythm guitar on Bad Boy Boogie sounds out of tune, and the inclusion of a slightly edited version of Problem Child - which is also on Dirty Deeds, their previous album, for crying out loud - doesn't exactly suggest the highest standards of professionalism).  It's disappointing to hear after the rock-solid, super tight performances on the first two albums.  The song Let There Be Rock, though - that's ace:

While I found fourth album, 1978's Powerage, a satisfying return to the tighter sound of the first two albums without losing Let There Be Rock's harder edge, it was also around here that I started to flag a bit in my enthusiasm for AC/DC.  I can't honestly be negative about any of the individual songs, but they're not a band who suit prolonged listening.  The problem is twofold.  Firstly, as I mentioned above, the overall sound, while crisp and clear, just doesn't have much space in it and the aural barrage gets wearying after a while.

The second issue is slightly more complex.  The standard of songwriting in this early era is extremely high - in the six albums worth of material recorded with Bon Scott, there isn't a bad song and some are genuinely wonderful, but there is, at times, a samey-ness that gets hard to ignore.  It's hardly surprising - they're a blues-rock band at heart and there's only so much that you can do with the blues before you start repeating yourself.  There's also an entwined issue with the length of the songs.  Perhaps it's because they were primarily a live band, I don't know, but they do milk every song for all it's worth.  It never gets to the point of any specific song being overlong and boring, like I complained about when I wrote last month about A Weather, but taken as a whole, it would be nice if there was a bit more brevity alongside a bit more varying of the pace.

When they do pick up the pace, it always seems to be when the band are at their best, as in Powerage's finest track, Riff Raff:

That video was recorded at a 1978 concert in Glasgow's legendary Apollo Theatre and the film was broadcast by BBC Scotland.  The sound recording was released later in 78 as AC/DC's fifth album, the one that made me their fan, If You Want Blood, You've Got It.

I'm often quite leery of live albums, but this one is a cracker.  After four albums, the band are mature, confident and tight and they have the material to back it up.  My only complaint is that Rocker has been slowed from the manic pace of Dirty Deeds to yet another mid-paced, er, rocker.  It's still great though, and it's made up for by a fantastic, even more ludicrous than the original, version of Let There Be Rock.

In choosing to split my AC/DC blogging in two, the obvious cut-off point - and the one I've chosen - is between Highway To Hell and Back In Black.  In many ways, it makes sense - 1979 into 1980, old singer replaced with new singer - but if there was a change that marked the transition of AC/DC from boozy, bluesy rockers to the rock titans we know today, it was a less obvious change of personnel in the studio.

Highway To Hell is the first AC/DC album not to be produced by the team of Harry Vanda and George Young, the band having intially hired Eddie Kramer (most famous as a recording engineer with Hendrix and Led Zeppelin and as a producer for Kiss), before firing him for (allegedly) failing to meet with Malcolm Young's exacting standards.  Kramer's replacement, Robert John (known to all his friends as Mutt) Lange, lacked his sterling rock credentials, most of his prior work being for moderately successful pub rockers such as Clover and Graham Parker & The Rumour, but it was with Lange at the helm that AC/DC would shortly be transformed into rock's biggest band.

Listening to Highway To Hell as part of a chronological look at AC/DC and with all the questionable wisdom that hindsight offers, it's tempting to suggest that this was an attempt to commercialise the band's sound and to cater to an American audience.  There may be some truth in this - certainly the band's already crisp and clear sound is sharpened even further, the drums in particular being beautifully recorded.  As well as the actual sound of the drums, Lange's influence can also be heard in their style, Phil Rudd's solid, unflashy style being honed into something metronomic (his bass drum in particular is absolutely rock-solid).

More deliberately commercial the sound may be, but I think that hindsight is what's fooled me into thinking this Americanised.  It's easy to forget, listening to Highway To Hell, that this quintessentially 80s-hard-rock album was recorded and released in 1979.  I don't think it's possible to overstate the importance of Highway To Hell and its successor Back In Black to the development of rock music at the time - Highway To Hell doesn't sound like American rock, much of the American rock of the next decade sounds like Highway To Hell.  Of course, this isn't just down to AC/DC.  Mutt Lange would, during the 80s, go on to produce not just AC/DC's next two albums, but also hugely successful albums for Foreigner, The Cars and perhaps most notably, Def Leppard.  Lange's influence over rock's development at the time is also difficult to overstate (we'll gloss over his later career as producer for, and cheating husband of, Shania Twain...).

However, I'm not here to write a history of rock, I'm here to write hyperbole about my music collection - so what about the music?  Stylistically, things are rather different here - the songs are less reliant on the 12-bar blues, which is quite refreshing, and the focus is less on Bon Scott's vocals and Angus Young's lead guitar.  It's both more diverse and less flashy than their previous albums - it's about the band rather than their charismatic frontman and mentalist lead guitarist.  My favourite track is a classic, Touch Too Much:

By this point in their career, AC/DC were on the verge of great things.  It's tragic that the incident that pushed the band from being merely successful to being one of the  biggest rock bands ever was the death of their singer.

There have been plenty of futile, wasteful deaths in the history of rock, but I'd argue that none can quite match Bon Scott's.  Less than two weeks after that Top Of The Pops performance of Touch Too Much, Scott was left passed out in a car outside a friend's house in East Dulwich, South London, after a night of boozing in Camden Town.  By the following morning, he had succumbed to a combination of the February cold and acute alcohol poisoning and was pronounced dead on arrival at hospital.  It seems such a pitiful way for such a legendary rocker and boozer to die - particularly one who had six years earlier survived a drunken motorcycle crash and ensuing 3 day coma.

The band, of course, continued with Brian Johnson recruited on vocals and went on to greater things.  That's for another post though.  In the meantime, rather more cheerfully, here's more vintage Top Of The Pops:

Magic.