AC/DC keeps coming back every few years with what sounds like the same album: a series of songs consisting of three ear-shattering guitar chords, a piston-pumping drum beat and a gravel-voiced banshee screaming about sex, booze and/or damnation.
It`s a formula that music critics love to hate, as evidenced by a stack of bad reviews spanning 15 years and 14 albums.
”We`ve got `em memorized, because they all say the same thing,” says singer Brian Johnson with a throaty laugh. ” `This guy can`t even sing! And look at that guitar player mooning the audience! The kids are going crazy! Am I the only sensible one here?` If we`d read `em and believed `em, we would`ve been washed up in two months.”
But the critical tide seems to have shifted with the release of the band`s latest album, ”The Razors Edge” (ATCO), and American tour, which brings AC/DC to the Rosemont Horizon on Friday. ”The Razors Edge” is approaching 2 million in sales and remains the only hard-rock entry in the pop top 10, alongside the likes of Vanilla Ice, the Simpsons and Bette Midler.
Perhaps that explains why guitar-starved music writers are now embracing AC/DC, one of the few remaining commercially successful bands that revels in the hammer-and-tong basics of rock `n` roll.
”We always said once we got all good reviews we`re in big trouble, and we still get the odd bad review,” Johnson says. ”We never want to become totally acceptable.”
Only the kids have been smitten from the beginning, using such testosterone-driven AC/DC classics as ”Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap,”
”Highway to Hell,” ”Whole Lotta Rosie” and ”You Shook Me All Night Long” as a soundtrack.
So what if the words were all but indecipherable? All the message a kid needed was in that dirty beat and throaty howl. No wonder when the Berlin Wall tumbled, Eastern European teens crossed the border in search of two major items from the West: American blue jeans and AC/DC tapes.
Like their music, the AC/DC image is raw, unpretentious and bratty. If the band has a trademark, it`s the schoolboy outfit worn by the 5-foot-2-inch guitarist Angus Young. But the rest of the quintet (Young`s brother Malcolm, drummer Chris Slade, bassist Cliff Williams and Johnson) is clad in blue-collar basics-T-shirts, jeans and gym shoes-on a bare-bones stage.
”The kids see right through the silly stuff,” Johnson says. ”We have a name for all those bands that try to make a fashion statement: Dancing Coats. They pick up a guitar and the next thing they look for is the wind machine, so they can strike the very famous all-chin-and-butt look. Chin out. Butt out. Hair and coattails flying.
”There must be a book out that all of them read. `Men Looking for Wind,` I think it`s called.”
Johnson laughs uproariously. Angus Young`s idea of a pose is to lower his knickers and expose his bare bottom to the audience in midsolo.
Otherwise, the Youngs are all business, tearing into one great riff after another like pit bulls, letting go only when they`ve played it into the ground.
”Angus would be the first to say he knows only one guitar solo,”
Johnson says. ”He and Malcolm are the geniuses in the band, even though they`d hate to hear that word applied to them.
”They`re basically two quiet fellows who have taken boogie-woogie, the blues of B.B. King and Muddy Waters, and electrified it. It`s great, timeless stuff. The kids may not know it`s coming from B.B. and Muddy, but they`re tapping their feet to it just the same.”
For his part, Johnson acknowledges that ”I`m not a proper singer. I`m just another instrument, screaming to be heard over the din.”
It`s a style born of the players` hard-scrabble backgrounds. The Youngs were born in Scotland, but moved with their family to Sydney, Australia, in 1963. Their older brother, George, became a star in the Easybeats (”Friday on My Mind”) and Angus quit school at 15 to follow in his footsteps.
After a series of blistering albums (coproduced by George Young) and pub tours that won them a cult following in the mid-`70s, AC/DC hit big in America with the million-selling ”Highway to Hell” in 1979. That success heightened the sense of loss when singer Bon Scott died of acute alcoholism soon after.
With his hard-partying, hard-rocking attitude, Scott was both a mentor and close friend to the Youngs, who nearly dissolved the band before plowing into the next album.
But even though the songwriting went quickly, AC/DC was having little luck finding a new singer. Then, while rehearsing in London, they hit it off with Johnson, from the factory town of Newcastle near the Scottish border.
The burly singer was nonchalantly shooting pool with an AC/DC roadie when the band called him upstairs for a tryout.
”We hit it off right away, instant magic,” says Johnson, who had had minor success with British band Geordie in the mid-`70s. ”We came from the same backgrounds, working-class guys who left school at 15. No talk of college or big universities, just go to work and make some money.
”I think that`s why you get a lot of musicians from the more industrial towns,” Johnson says, citing fellow Newcastle alumni such as Sting, Mark Knopfler and Eric Burdon, ”because you gotta fight to get out of that rut.” The Youngs made Johnson feel welcome by asking him to rewrite the lyrics for the new album, ”Back in Black.”
”They missed Bon a great deal, but from day one they made me feel like a full-fledged band member,” he says. ”Malcolm and Angus wanted to do a tribute to Bon without making it too morbid, which is where the idea for `Back in Black` came from.”
Perhaps even a bigger tribute was that the record went on to sell 10 million copies, turning AC/DC into a superstar act that a decade later shows little sign of slowing down.
As trends ebb and flow in the music business, AC/DC`s faith in the power of guitars, drums and a stack of amplifiers hasn`t wavered. Equally unchanged is their attitude toward women. Though the band members are well into their 30s, they continue to dwell on subject matter befitting a 16-year-old.
In the age of 2 Live Crew, however, a ribald ditty such as ”Mistress for Christmas” from the latest AC/DC album seems playful, even clever, by comparison.
”All the anti-sexist women in the world can`t change what a man thinks. Men lust after women. They always have and they always will,” says Johnson, explaining, if not excusing, the band`s unrepentent sexism. ”But I think most people have come to realize our lyrics are just tongue-in-cheek stuff.”
That attitude is the saving grace of ”Razors Edge.” For all its ultra-virile lyrics and thrust-and-jab rhythms, it never takes itself too seriously.
”That`s the whole point of music: Have a good time,” Johnson says. ”I mean with the whole world about to go to war in Iraq, do we really need another musician who wants to become a legend by the time he`s 25?”
