CLASSIC TRACK: AC/DC – Rock N Roll Train

It’s not easy to single out individual songs from a band who have so many classics. With only mild apologies to Bon die-hards, this one picked itself...

It was a song good enough to have been on AC/DC’s all-conquering ‘Back In Black’, and it’s on the last of the studio albums recorded by the ‘Back In Black’ line-up. Rock N Roll Train also has the distinction of being one of only two songs recorded after 1981’s ‘For Those About To Rock’ to remain in AC/DC’s live set after a first touring cycle, the other being the mighty Thunderstruck. And in a long-running tradition of great AC/DC songs with ‘rock’n’roll’ in the title, albeit spelled in slightly different ways, Rock N Roll Train is right up there with the best of them, alongside Rock And Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution from ‘Back In Black’, and others, such as Rock ‘N’ Roll Damnation and It’s A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘N’ Roll), from the years when the legendary Bon Scott fronted the band alongside their talismanic lead guitarist and eternal schoolboy Angus Young.

Rock N Roll Train didn’t actually start out with that title. When the song was written by Angus and his rhythm-guitarist brother Malcolm, it had the working title Runaway Train. And that’s how the chorus remained in the finished version, with Brian Johnson yelling ‘Runaway train’ and gang vocals adding ‘Running right off the track’. It was changed to Rock N Roll Train only after the Youngs considered that there were already other songs titled Runaway Train (one of them a hit for Soul Asylum in ’93, another recorded by Elton John with Eric Clapton in ’92). But changing it to Rock N Roll Train was for AC/DC a no-brainer. As Angus told Guitar World in 2009: “Certain songs just seem to come to life when you add that phrase.”

And as with those earlier songs, the new title was perfectly in tune with the simple ethos that had driven AC/DC from the very start, an ethos summed up by Malcolm in 2003: “It’s just loud rock’n’roll, wham bam thank you ma’am!”

They knew instinctively how good a song they had with Rock N Roll Train. It was chosen as the opening track for AC/DC’s 2008 album ‘Black Ice’ for the simple reason that it was the best track on it. The same logic had been applied to previous albums of the Brian Johnson era, in which the first shots fired were mighty anthems — Hells Bells, For Those About To Rock (We Salute You) and Thunderstruck. And in every respect, Rock N Roll Train was classic AC/DC — knock-out riff, typically no-messing, straight-ahead beat from drummer Phil Rudd, shout-it-out-loud chorus, killer guitar solo from Angus, and Brian singing at scrotum-tightening pitch about getting it on and, indeed, getting it up.

There is, however, a sad postscript to all of this. Rock N Roll Train was the last great song that Malcolm Young saw through to the end before he succumbed to the dementia that led first to his withdrawal from the band and then to his death in 2017.

But what he left behind — with this and so many other classic songs — was some of the greatest rock’n’roll music of all time.