The first wave of 16 studio and live LPs getting remastered on gold vinyl to celebrate the group’s 50th anniversary. By David Fricke.
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AC/DC
★★★★ AC/DC 50 Reissues
COLUMBIA/SONY LEGACY. LP
THINK OF EVERYTHING you expect from an AC/DC album – and get each time, with varying degrees of headbanging transcendence, because there is no deviation in formula and execution: the chugging power-chord assault and flying-gravel tone of the rhythm guitar; the train-kept-a-rollin’ beat; howlin’-wolf singing and macho-lyric lust. Then think of what lead guitarist and duck-walking stage imp Angus Young brings to that controlled mayhem – the curt razor-wire fills and frantic, crabwalk solos – and imagine this: he does it all, in rehearsals and in the studio, sitting down, head bent in concentration as he plays. Honest – I’ve seen it.
“I have to have substance first, to feel it in me, before I can do the show,” he told me in 2008 referring to his psycho-schoolboy act, a signature of AC/DC shows since he and his late, older brother, riffmaster Malcolm, founded the band in Sydney, Australia in 1974. Angus recalled an exchange with producer Rick Rubin during the sessions for 1995’s Ballbreaker, one of 16 studio and live LPs getting the remastered, coloured-vinyl treatment across 2024 for the group’s 50th anniversary.“He asked me, ‘Don’t you ever get off that stool and move around?’ No,” Angus replied. “I’m not going to put on a show for myself. I want the music to be right first.” The first instalment of these reissues is strict business (original US/UK track listings) from all over the first third of AC/DC’s half century, starting with 1976’s High Voltage ★★★★, their international debut with feral, vocal powerhouse Bon Scott. A mix of two ’75 Australian LPs, it was fair warning of the band’s mission – It’s A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock’N’Roll), sealed with Scott’s parade-ground lark on bagpipes – and ruthless method, meaning no ballads (The Jack was slow but hardly tender) or harmonies. As Angus put it, “The Beach Boys always reminded me of the nice kids in school.” This was hard rock, not heavy metal, produced by ex-Easybeats Harry Vanda and George Young (the brothers’ elder sibling) with severe attention to the Chuck Berry and ’65 Rolling Stones in AC/DC’s blues-gene pool. The title track and Scott’s hard-partying promise in T.N.T. (“Watch me explode!”) have never left the setlist.
At the other end, with Brian Johnson’s sandpaper larynx, are 1990’s The Razor’s
Edge ★★★★ – a return to form after a dry-spell ’80s, starring the fret-tapping hail storm Thunderstruck – and 1992’s AC/DC
Live ★★★, basically a double-LP best-of with stadium ambience. (The superior ’78
“This was hard rock, not heavy metal, with severe attention to Chuck Berry and the ’65 Rolling Stones.”
havoc, If You Want Blood You’ve Got It, is in the next batch of gold wax.) Malcolm’s contention that AC/DC was always his and Angus’s enterprise (“We’ve lived it from the beginning”) is clear in the personnel merrygo-round, especially in the engine room with the prime-time rhythm section, bassist Cliff Williams and drummer Phil Rudd, on only four of these reissues.
But that’s a mighty run, including AC/DC’s twin peaks with producer Mutt Lange: 1979’s Highway To
Hell ★★★★★, Scott’s last album before his death in February 1980; and the rapid multi-platinum rebirth with Johnson on Back In Black ★★★★★, released that July. (Disclosure: my essay for a 2003 CD reissue of Back In Black is reprinted in this vinyl edition.) Then there are the records before and after that Waterloo, 1978’s Powerage ★★★★ and 1981’s For Those About
To Rock (We Salute You) ★★★. Together, they are a stampeding testimony to the Youngs’ rough-hewn genius and their iron certainty that there is nothing a great riff won’t cure or conquer.
Powerage is the almost-Highway, produced by Vanda and Young but with Williams’s melodic grip on bass and in the street-gang chorale of Rock And Roll Damnation hinting at Lange’s FM-radio savvy in the wings. There is buried treasure too, eclipsed by the hits to come, in the Creedence-SWAT-team crunch of Down Payment Blues and Riff Raff ’s straight-line frenzy. But Highway To Hell was nearly a dead end. AC/DC spent three weeks in Miami going nowhere with producer Eddie Kramer (Hendrix, Kiss) before reaching out to Lange, then coming off a UK Number 1 with The Boomtown Rats’ Rat Trap.
The best thing that came out of Miami was a Malcolm-and-Angus guitar intro that ultimately triggered Highway To Hell, a brawling jubilee (“No stop signs/Speed limits/Nobody’s gonna slow me down”) that only rang like a death wish after Scott’s passing. Lange did not receive writing credits on Highway (as he later did with Def Leppard) but his focus on hooks and an enriched, studio framing of AC/DC’s raw gifts are composition nonetheless. He put enough commercial spin on Girls Got Rhythm, Touch Too Much and Scott’s “season ticket on a one-way ride” to get AC/DC into the Top 20 on Billboard’s album chart – a first with a vengeance.
Back In Black followed like an arena-scale Irish wake, the world finally showing up for the party after Scott left early. Johnson came to the job with laddish cheer and a high-pitch sustain in his Geordie rasp, able to carry the Armageddon in Hells Bells while actually expressing something like gratitude for the bedroom marathon in You Shook Me All Night Long. Malcolm and Angus, in turn, returned to their spiritual well for Back In Black, a hymn to Scott built on a stuttering-avalanche lick inspired by Johnny Kidd & The Pirates’ Shakin’ All Over. For Those About To Rock, AC/DC’s first Number 1 album in America, can’t help being a lesser blast in comparison. Lange brought the panoramic muscle one more time, but only the title cannon fire has endured. Notably, it was the lone song from that record in the show when AC/DC returned to live work at the Power Trip festival last year. As for Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap ★★★, this later variation on a 1976 Aussie release has great Bon but is uneven early days. And Who Made Who ★★★ was a 1986 soundtrack for a Stephen King film with one new song, some catalogue tunes and a genuine surprise: a stomping napalm-guitars instrumental called Chase The Ace that is pure, primal Youngs – with Angus, no doubt, sitting down.