In this era of politically correct rock, what to make of AC/DC, still drooling in song about the teenage girls lined up backstage? The band can still fill up hockey rinks around the country, but then so can countless leftovers from the 1970s. Yet the band commands respect from a series of musical generations sustained by a two-decade diet of Angus Young guitar riffs, its praises sung by everyone from Wicker Park producer extraordinaire Brad Wood and the Smoking Popes’ Josh Caterer to Keith Richards and Rick Rubin.
A dinosaur it may be, but AC/DC’s music has aged well, in part because it rarely strays from its single-minded course. From the band’s genesis in 1974 amid the flying fists, beer bottles and insults of the Australian pubs to its current tour of arenas, which brings it to the United Center on Saturday, AC/DC has made the same album roughly 16 times, without apology.
Young, the group’s diminutive guitarist and onstage lightning rod with his schoolboy knickers and lascivious leer, laughs when it is suggested that every AC/DC album shuffles the same deck of guitar chords.
“I prefer to look upon it as consistency — we always try to do every album like AC/DC plus, a step forward each time,” he says. “But when we work with a producer, no matter if it’s `Mutt’ Lange, Bruce Fairbairn or Rick Rubin, we don’t want someone to rearrange our sound or style. This is how we play. Do we need extra this or that? The answer is always, `No, no, no.’ My big line to producers, my big theory if they try to get too clever, is, `I’ve gotta be able to tap my feet.’ If not, it’s not us, it’s not AC/DC.”
Or as singer Brian Johnson puts it: “We stick with what we do. We refuse to change.”
The no-frills style was born of necessity in the no-frills Australian pubs. A band either rocked the house or it was barraged with glass.
“It was a very hard-drinking crowd, people who, when they went to a bar, went to a bar for one reason only,” Young says. “And you had to entertain them in a way that would enable them to still enjoy drinking. You had to give them blood. Otherwise they had subtle ways of letting you know you weren’t, and you better be quick to get out of the way. That’s where I learned my act.”
Young’s act was to a wear a schoolboy outfit, an idea suggested by his sister to distinguish the band from its pub-rock competition. “I figured if I fall flat, I’m gonna be a dead man,” Young recalls. “But when I was still standing after the first night, I figured we’d won ’em over.”
What did the talking was the band’s brutally succinct distillation of the blues. Young and his older brother Malcolm, the band’s rhythm guitarist, used to study Downbeat magazine for every kernel of information they could pick up on their blues and early rock ‘n’ roll idols, particularly artists such as Buddy Guy and Chuck Berry, who recorded for Chicago-based Chess Records.
“That transformed me,” Angus Young says. “That’s my world in Chicago, and I’m in awe of those guys still.”
The Youngs found a sound by amplifying those influences. “Malcolm was always saying that whatever we played has got to be tough,” Angus Young says. “We’d been in local bands before AC/DC, and the one thing missing out there was that toughness — toughness with a blues influence. So we’d play stuff like `Baby, Please Don’t Go’ at 100 miles an hour and tear the audience apart.”
The band’s version of that 1944 Joe Williams blues is documented on ” ’74 Jailbreak,” an early EP that finds the band’s trademark sound already in place. On the band’s ’70s albums, the unwavering rhythm guitar of Malcolm Young meshed with the no-nonsense drumming of Phil Rudd to create a greasy, hard-rock groove that actually had some swing to it. Angus Young’s best riffs had a Stonesy swagger, while his solos were simple blues variations. Equally limited but just as distinctive was Bon Scott, his raspy voice capable of conveying exactly two emotions with transcendent attitude: boozy menace and boozy mirth.
When the band found a riff it liked, it played it into the ground, often recycling it over several songs. The song “Problem Child” not only appears on three AC/DC albums from the ’70s, its central riff would later be reworked as “Highway to Hell” and then “What Do You Do for Money Honey.” The “Highway to Hell” album, released in 1979, was the crowning achievement of the Scott era, a series of songs about drink, lust and depravity that rocked with a fury not heard since Aerosmith’s mid-’70s landmark, “Rocks.” It’s packed with defining moments, but for one listener the two best occur on “Shot Down in Flames,” first when Scott wails for a guitar solo — “Angus! Shoot me! Shoot!” — then mumbles his approval: “That’s nice.” Later, as the song tailspins to a close, he wheezes like the Wicked Witch of the West as she melts into a black puddle. A few months after the album’s release, Scott would be found dead, drowned in his own vomit after a drinking binge.
The band’s remorse rang down in the celebratory fury of “Back in Black,” a 1980 release that went on to sell more than 10 million copies. Given the circumstances of Scott’s death, the inclusion of the punch-drunk anthem “Have a Drink on Me” seemed particularly tasteless, but then Scott probably wouldn’t have had it any other way. The singer’s replacement was Johnson, who had a bigger vocal range and could hit the high-end notes that became increasingly necessary as the band graduated from playing halls to headlining arenas. But the band lost a large chunk of its personality.
Though lame-brained enough to reduce all women to predators (“Soul Stripper”) or receptacles (“You’re lookin’ so good under me” is what passes for pillow talk on “Walk All Over You”), Scott also had humor and a poison presence that the band in its later incarnation could never match. On songs such as “The Jack,” “Show Business” and particularly the wicked class satire of “Big Balls,” Scott embodied a rebelliousness every bit as a valid as Johnny Rotten’s or the young Elvis Presley’s.
The post-“Back in Black” AC/DC has always been good for a couple of memorable riffs every few years, such as “Who Made Who” and “Thunderstruck.” But as the band members enter their 40s, the jailbait double entendres no longer offend; they merely sound like the tired, hairy-men cliches they always were. Johnson even ceded the lyric writing on the band’s 1995 album, “Ballbreaker” (EastWest), to the Youngs, acknowledging: “To be quite honest, I dried up on lyrics. You can only write so much on a certain theme.”
But the band hasn’t softened its sound. After a long absence, Rudd is back on drums, and the Youngs’ power-drill guitars still don’t waste a note. Their rocking blues still sounds succinct, savage, snotty.
“We’re the only alternative band left,” Johnson barks. “All these bands squealin’ about save the trees, I wanna throttle ’em. You wanna dictate, or you wanna rock?!” Even over a long-distance phone line, he sounds like he’s ready to go to war. And by leading with its fists, and a fistful of chords that it keeps planting in the listener’s face year after year, AC/DC remains a hard-rock Gibraltar.
– In last week’s column, I condensed a quote by the Mermen’s Jim Thomas that left the impression Jimi Hendrix pronounced surf music dead in the song “1983 . . . (A Merman I Should Turn to Be).” As a caller to this column pointed out, Hendrix said, “You will never hear surf music again,” in the midst of “Third Stone From the Sun.” My apologies to Thomas for not making that more clear.
– On Yoko Ono’s brief tour of the U.S. with Sean Ono Lennon’s band IMA, she is being joined on stage by admirers such as Ween and the Beastie Boys for her encores. At the Park West on Sunday, The Jesus Lizard is likely to do the honors.
“I’ve heard a couple of songs she’s doing, kind of static groove things that she goes wild over,” says Lizard guitarist Duane Denison. “I imagine we’ll get up there and encourage the shriek-fest.”
The local quartet drops its first album for Capitol Records next month — a typically nasty affair — and will celebrate with an April 13 show at the Vic.
– Liz Phair’s on-again, off-again show at next week’s South By Southwest Music Conference in Austin, Texas, is now a “go,” says her Matador Records label. She’ll perform solo, and perhaps provide a glimpse of her work-in-progress third album. . . . Dave Grohl and Steve Albini have been trading faxes of late. Grohl would love Albini to record the next Foo Fighters album. “I need to be insulted, whipped and hurt for a while,” Grohl says with a laugh. . . . Fresh off a recording session with Albini, the B-52s’ Fred Schneider will play the Empty Bottle on Tuesday with members of the defunct Didjits, the defunct Tar and the still-living Dis as his backing band.
