Ac/Dc - Hard-rock from Australia

In the mid-Seventies, Australia's AC/DC were able to draw a line and start afresh in the field hard rock and thus refound the genre devised less than ten years earlier by the English Deep Purple.

Hard rock is the rock style closest to rhythm and blues: Deep Purple achieved hard rock by pushing rhythm and blues to extremes and blending it with the nascent progressive. But as early as the start of the Seventies this rock subgenre had already slipped into mannerism, even though its spread across the world was leading, on one hand, to original reinterpretations of it (as in the case of the Blue Oyster Cult) and, on the other, to a definitive orthodoxy of its traits (as with the Aerosmith and Kiss).

In 1975, AC/DC were the unwitting, lone protagonists of a "new wave" that anticipated the New York one by a year, and which consisted of reacting against the false, dusty scaffolding that had come to weigh down the rock world — whether under the name of progressive, singer-songwriter music, or electronics. It was an anti-intellectual operation, a call back to nature, to simplicity and to the wildest instincts of rock 'n' roll. And mind you, with all due differences in means, ends and merit, this return to nature and sincerity was also the essence first of punk, and then of the new wave that followed. Music, rock, had to go back to meaning something, to being substance first and music second; it had to stop celebrating itself in long, self-indulgent instrumental jams or hiding away in singer-songwriters' dirges.

New wave would reach that goal with its more or less unspoken manifestos; AC/DC got there through ignorance, indifference, naivety, brute force — that is, by using the traits of old-school rock 'n' roll. The history of hard rock would be closed out by the Guns n' Roses, who would refound the genre for the third time in 1987, again at a moment of exhaustion for the genre, and again by drawing on another genre: just as Deep Purple drew on progressive rock over a blues foundation, and AC/DC stripped away the progressive excess to return to a more immediate rhythm and blues, so Guns n' Roses would be unthinkable without the punk era.

Raw, instinctive, unimaginative, petty, incompetent — AC/DC turned anti-value into value, and that's where their revolution lies. At the time they were seen as the hard rock extremists who would go on to foundheavy metal, but in truth they had nothing to do with metal except for commercial reasons, once, as the years went by, the fire of their early days began to fade while metal itself had by then been institutionalized by very different artists. No, AC/DC were, in their first and most important period, nothing more and nothing less than ferocious performers of the simplest, most primitive and most possessed rhythm and blues.

Over 30 years of activity, AC/DC have served up a dozen albums, but in their golden era, from '75 to '80, despite being perpetually on tour, they still managed to put out a new album every year. Touring and rock 'n' roll were, after all, their whole life, and playing — whether new or original material made little difference — was their air and their food.

AC/DC are the band that brothers Malcolm and Angus Young formed in 1973, when the former was twenty and the latter eighteen. Born in Scotland, they had an extra edge to add to their playful, childlike eccentricity, reviving — as if out of time and place — the myth of the delinquent minor on the city streets, perhaps caught up in tales of organized crime, operating in smoky, Babel-like towns like Al Capone's Chicago. Malcolm on rhythm guitar, Angus on lead, the former holding the thread together, the latter twisting it into the most spectacular shapes — after all these years, they're remembered not so much for any one riff, old as the history of rock itself, nor for a particular album, but for a tone, an unmistakable sense of epicurean fullness, achieved perhaps through risk, excess and sheer obtuseness, yet as solid as rock. It's a sound, that of AC/DC, that smells of a cathedral in the desert; of a titanic, baroque work built with bastions of plain, unadorned walls. There's an excess of matter, of sheer quantity, born of a scarcity of quality and variety. It's a world born from the sum of the simplest elements. And it captivates precisely because it seems too elementary, too stupid to be true or believable. AC/DC's songs may be more or less successful, and it's undeniable that once you've heard one you've heard them all, but even in the tired moments, the truly self-indulgent ones, the presence of that imaginative world conjured up by the Young brothers through their guitars still remains.

To the macho posturing typical of hard rock, the Young brothers added a peculiar touch of eccentricity, presenting themselves as devilish rock 'n' roll enfants prodige, keen to unsettle audiences with their poses as young sons of the Devil, poses whose line between joke and sincerity was never quite clear. Angus Young's outfit became iconic: shirt, jacket and school tie up top; short shorts and sneakers down below. With AC/DC, the satanism of the Black Sabbath became kitsch e trash. It went from something serious to a joke.

The Young brothers' rock-solid guitars were backed by the no-frills rhythm section of Mark Evans on bass and Phil Rudd on drums. Older — twenty-nine at the band's debut — singer Bon Scott also happened to be of Scottish origin, and boasted a pure blues voice, raspy and powerful, the sickly counterpart to the more jovial one of Robert Plant.

Dutch producer Harry Vanda, not yet thirty at the time, was for a long while of no small help to the Young brothers in getting their ideas properly in order. Alongside him stood the third and eldest of the Young brothers: George.

Before reaching worldwide fame, AC/DC had to overcome outright hostility from both the public and, above all, the critics. And how could it have been otherwise? In an era full of preciousness and intellectualism, bordering on a glam and rock 'n' roll revival either dictated from on high or rejected by the mainstream, AC/DC showed up looking like a farmhand in work clothes at a high-society gala evening. Even within hard rock, from the Led Zeppelin ai Rush, from Black Sabbath to Jeff Beck, everyone else was offering far more sophistication than the Australians, who could genuinely be pointed at as the country bumpkins in the big city. It took concert after concert, the first, the second, the third album, before things expanded like an oil slick. Above all, it took time to mature. It took '77. But up until 1980, with the blockbuster of Back In Blackthe AC/DC will have to keep their feet on the ground. Then success, as often happens, will crown them and never abandon them again, especially when they do nothing to deserve it. After all, classics can afford to live off their reputation.

Although the main offspring of AC/DC are Def Leppard and the whole host of Eighties hard rock bands that stemmed from them, not to mention an influence on metal bands like Judas Priest or Accept, both in the Eighties and the Nineties pretty much everyone had to reckon with AC/DC, with its raw riff, from the Metallica ai Nirvana. No one, however, would manage to continue a reactionary, untimely path built on the concrete power of singles rather than on theoretical manifestos. Moreover, given this type of music, the line between being AC/DC or being nothing more than a pedantic rhythm and blues revival act is a thin one. Often, even AC/DC themselves crossed it.

The debut High Voltage – released in 1975 for the Australian market, then reissued worldwide in 1976 – pursues three different strands. The first and most important features songs that would establish what would become the band's classic sound: "Live ware" and "TNT" are the best, but "It's A Long Way To The Top" and "Rock 'n' Roll Singer" are the ones that would influence countless imitators. The second concerns lively rock 'n' roll revival tracks: "Can I Sit Next To You Girl" and "High Voltage". And the third, rhythm and blues revival tracks: the demonic "Jack", the sensual "Little Lover", theHendrix-like "She's Got Balls". With this album AC/DC score on both fronts they had set out to conquer: innovation and tradition, which, on closer inspection, are really one and the same, since their innovation consists in a return to the roots.

In 1975 came out TNT, featuring a notable cover of Chuck Berry, but it's really just a kind of placeholder while waiting for the reissue of the debut album.

In 1975 Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap was also recorded, although its release would have to wait until 1981. The band's dazzling form is confirmed by the sincerity with which they perform otherwise bombastic tracks like "Love At First Feel" and "Big Balls", or tracks bordering on outright homage to Fifties rockers, like "There's Gonna Be Some Rockin'" and "Rocker". On this album, unlike the others, rock 'n' roll revival prevails over blues. There's also a certain arena-rock dimension taking shape in sing-along anthems like "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap", on whose template bands like Def Leppard or Poison would later build. The most interesting or unusual tracks are the two closing semi-ballads, "Ride On" and, above all, the venomous "Squealer".

Let There Be Rock, released in 1977, was the first AC/DC album to chart; in the US it reached number 154. The band's sound was getting heavier, sharper and more abrasive. Tracks like “Go Down”, “Dog Eat Dog” and “Let There Be Rock” mark significant steps in that process. The slide into the kind of mawkishness that certain Led Zeppelin fans so loved on “Whole Lotta Rosie” is redeemed by Scott's self-satisfied anguish on “Problem Child” and “Overdose”, the quintessence of blues-rock cliché.

Powerage in 1978 reached number 133 in the US and can be seen mostly as a holding-pattern record, though it does yield, besides the classic “Sin City”, lean tracks like “Kicked In The Teeth” or even reflective ones like “Gone Shootin’”, whose opening section sounds like a rawer take on the textures of Dire Straits.

After the important 1978 live album, If You Want Blood You’ve Got It, which captures the band at the peak of its powers and potential, as the explosive, striking cover photo attests, next up, in 1979, comes Highway To Hell, AC/DC's first real hit, which took them to number seventeen on the American charts and past the million-copies mark. The famous cover, halfway between prank and depravity, is matched by tracks equally celebrated in hard rock circles, like the anthemic title track and the cutting “If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It)”. On “Night Prowler” there's even room for slide; “Get It Hot”, “Beating Around The Bush” and “Walk Over You”, fast, mangled and streaked with grit, round off this classic of petty-bourgeois damnation, which in attitude can be compared to the early, dirty records of the Rolling Stones.

In 1980, the year of the Iron Maiden, another classic came out, in some ways the opposite of the previous one, Back In Black. A record not entirely without weak spots, as Kurt Cobain believed, and many others with him; running perhaps ten minutes longer than its inspiration could sustain, it still boasts some of the most memorable riffs of AC/DC's career: those of “Hells Bells” and “Back In Black”; and above all “You Shook Me All Night Long”, perhaps the poppiest song AC/DC had written up to that point, yet one whose appeal transcends such considerations, placing it among the definitive testaments of popular music.

Overall, the sound appears cleaner, more streamlined, cooler, compared to the molten depravity of the previous records. The album reached number four on the American charts, marking a definitive step forward for the band. Over time, in the United States alone, it would sell more than ten million copies. The thirty-three-year-old Englishman Brian Johnson had taken the place of the late Bon Scott. Perhaps more technically proficient, certainly less expressive and gifted, Johnson would only minimally shift the band's blues leanings toward rock. Just how much the blues element would fade over time would depend on the choices made by the Young brothers.

For Those About To Rock We Salute You, in 1981, finally reached number one on the charts, running through the whole gamut of hard rock and blues clichés that would become typical of the Eighties, and that AC/DC had, almost single-handedly, created in the previous decade. It's the hardest and heaviest album the band had made up to that point, as the title-track, placed as usual at the opening, testifies. However, it's weighed down by a verbosity and bombast no longer redeemed by Scott's bluesy demon. Even at this point, one can already foresee that AC/DC's commercial success will no longer be matched by a comparable quality in their work.

Previously, AC/DC's music wasn't meant to stimulate the brain, feelings or legs, but, like some stupid drug, to numb them, debase them, dissolve them; that was its demonic, apotropaic and therefore, in a sense, magical quality. With Scott gone, the band became the negation of what it once was: no longer spartan but lavish, no longer bitterly ironic, but pretentious in chasing the myths and self-indulgences of the hard rock star-system.

After a short break to enjoy their hard-won success, in 1983, on Flick Of The Switch, the eighth album in eight years of activity, only the near-heavy metal of "Landslide" and the riffs, at the very least spirited, of "Bedlam In Belgium" break free from the sterile routine.

Fly On the Wall, from July 1985, would be even more lifeless and half-hearted: on "Shake Your Foundations" they end up ridiculously brushing against disco-dance tones; were it not for "Danger", the obligatory novelty track "Sink The Pink", with its typically jagged guitar work, and "Playing With The Girls" alongside "Send For The Man", still capable of catchy, if well-worn, riffs. For the rest, it's little more than stale arena-rock, with unbearable choruses, born and dead within the era when it was fashionable. The best tracks are the ones where the instrumental parts take precedence over the vocals, or in any case, the best moments lie in the Young brothers' sheer craft; whereas in Scott's day, the opposite could just as easily have been said.

After a three-year gap, Blow Up Your Video is rather disorienting, given the band in question, for the range of different genres it offers, even if all filtered through the usual, sturdy rhythm and blues. From the almost rock-pop of "Heatseeker", to the rockabilly angularity of "That's The Way I Wanna Rock & Roll"; it then brushes against soul on "Meanstreak" and boogie on "This Means War"; on "Some Sin For Nuthin'" and "Nick Of Time" we then get two fine examples of hard rock with the rhythm section front and centre. It's unpleasant, anti-melodic, willfully stupid music, because it's stubbornly an end in itself; it is, in other words, music that follows Scott's own principle. That's why it manages, even in the era of the last great hard-rock band, Guns N' Roses, not to bore; no small feat. The album would reach number 12 in the US, after the mediocre placings of the two previous works and before the great acclaim that would greet those to follow.

The Razor’s Edge, in 1990, is in fact AC/DC's last great album, and a surprise for the looseness the band still manages to display, which allows them to flirt with both heavy metal and a certain melodicism without losing their own identity. However, tracks like "Let's Make", in their own way later exploited by alternative bands like Extreme, now sound dated beyond any revivalist excuse. The best moments: the progressive romp of "Thunderstruck", the riffs mainstream of "Mistress For Christmas", the syncopation of "Fire Your Guns" and the heartfelt darkness of the choruses on "Razor's Edge" and the confession of "If You Dare".

Five years later, Ballbreaker and five years after that, Stiff Upper Lip they may come across as relics, pointless affectations, even ridiculous games; but no one can fault their sincerity and dedication to the cause. Anyone who can appreciate AC/DC's classic period has no reason not to appreciate these later albums too; though one hopes no more will be added: that would really be asking too much of listeners' patience and understanding, not to mention of the band's own caricature of itself.

Which inevitably happened with Black Ice (2008), songs as ugly and pointless as the videos accompanying them and their own titles: “Rock'n'roll Train”, “Rocking All the Way”. Number one on charts worldwide.

Angus and company are no longer “in”, but are still welcomed as chart-topping champions every time. They allow themselves a few diversions, a box set here, a soundtrack there (“Iron Man”), hugely packed concert tours. It takes another five years or so before they return to the studio to work on yet another collection of songs that always sound the same, and are always just as irresistible: in 2014 Rock Or Bustis released, but Malcolm Young is not in the lineup, sadly undermined by senile dementia. Right after, the band also loses drummer Phil Rudd, arrested on charges of organizing a murder.

The album, the shortest of their career, has a more pronounced pop touch and an unexpected variety, even though it doesn't stray too far from the usual canons. In the second half of the decade, Brian Johnson announces he has serious hearing problems that compromise his performances. No big deal, because Angus, surprisingly, replaces him on tour with Axl Rose. A decision that sparks irony, curiosity and anger, but also thousands of tickets sold. Talk even begins of a new album by the band with the Gunners' frontman on vocals, but it won't come to pass. Meanwhile, Malcolm Young dies and his place is permanently taken by his nephew Stevie Young.

And so, toward the end of 2020, Ac/Dc fire up their engines again: the new album is titled Power Up, it's the classic string of 4/4 beats, riffs and grooves that shake everything up, but the songwriting seems a bit short of breath. There's no shortage of memorable passages, like the enveloping “Demon Fire”. Then there's Angus, who never gives up, willing a couple of years ago to even set aside his frontman, out of shape as he was, in order to carry on a mission more than a career. Listen to how he whips everyone into shape on “Realize”, while the classic baritone choruses answer in kind, and so the schoolboy raises his voice even more, as domineering as ever, and the valves smoke and the noise is shattering yet crisp, or how it barges in uninvited on “Rejection”, an invitation nobody turns down, because feet start moving in unison and the record flies to number 1 everywhere except Slovakia, a country notoriously fond of odd time signatures and more sophisticated harmonic developments. And then again: call and response, soft and loud and off we go with the usual blathering from the ex-Geordie, and the choruses, them again, à la Back In Black, just a little more tired, also because 40 years have passed and the shot in the dark isn't quite as precise anymore; it's midtempo and you start to feel a bit of fatigue creeping in, but “Through The Mist Of Time” has that pop touch that made the history of these Australians of Scottish descent so great, and they rightly quote themselves and pretend to be angry and horny, restless and adrenaline-fuelled, with voice and guitars pushing against each other, blending, resembling one another, moving in unison, inside an engine that never goes off the rails, though perhaps a few more swerves here and there would have done “Witch's Spell” or “Wild Reputation” some good, just so as not to stand still waiting for the solo, ever shorter, a quick hit and gone, or for the next song, which might just be “Demon Fire”, with Johnson's intro in a low, dark style, and a riff that's encircling, enveloping, with a liberating, glorious chorus; it resembles 10 other songs, or maybe 100, but even this time a new, genuine classic is present.

Nothing epoch-making, but nothing to throw away either. The album, as always, takes the top spot on charts worldwide.

Contributions by Davide Sechi (“Power Up”)