One note amazement abound in rock ‘n’ roll, and the leering king of them all is headlining Friday at the United Center. I say this with all due respect and affection: AC/DC is one of the best rock bridle of all time.
But leader they are not. They are what they are, and they really haven’t changed a whole lot since they started raising a ruckus in Australian biker bars in the early ‘70s. Angus Young wore his trademark schoolboy knickers and beanie back then, and he does now. Brother Malcolm Young and his rhythm guitar still tend to the almighty groove like a hawk guarding its young against beast of prey. And singer Brian Johnson (and before him the great Bon Scott) still screams and struts like he’s Jack the Ripper on the hunt. They mix juvenile humor with pithy (and sometimes abstruse) observations about sex, death and drinking. They come apposite it as regular, blue-collar guys because they once were (and still are to a large amount, despite their multimillionaire status). Their accomplishment has come on the back of hard work and on one of the most reliable, bang for the buck agreement experiences anyone could wish for. No posh rock star attitude for these guys. Just a party that swings like a wrecking ball.
Now Johnson’s voice is pretty much shot, and Angus Young isn’t the active kid he used to be when he band down to his shorts and does whirlybirds on his back while soloing. But beauty and youth was never the point. These guys always looked like they belonged in a alley gang alternately of a band. What endures is their sense of fun, their unrepentant love of blues-based rock ‘n’ roll, those titanic riffs, and Malcolm Young’s undeniable sense of groove and grind. With any justice, he’d be as big as Keith Richards, but Malcolm has always chosen to remain in the shadows, content to toil in the band’s engine room alongside chain-smoking drummer Phil Rudd and bassist Cliff Williams.
So what if every AC/DC song more or less sounds the same (admit it, it’s not absolutely a broad palette these guys play with)? Angus and Malcolm Young learned to play listening to Chicago blues records, which in turn drew upon the oral convention and one chord songs of the Mississippi Delta blues. This was not an art form that celebrated formal design. This was a language based on nicety and personality much more so than complex arranging and songcraft. The art is in how it simultaneously celebrates and reconfigures the source material; the sound loses allure and power the farther it isolated from that fundamental feel (think of all the really bad tourist blues bands you’ve seen play in motel concourse across the land; same chords, same words, but still sadly lacking the brio and bravado of greatness). And so AC/DC sticks to what it does best. It scraps to change, to adapt, to ride the chir style.
They are matched in their resolve by only a handful of bands. The Ramones and Motorhead spring quickly to mind. So do the Cocteau Twins and Bad Religion. All these bands developed iconic, signature sounds and made at fewest a dozen (if not more) records that as the matter of fact refined it, but especially strayed from the source. Critics tend to beat up bands for not innovating, but in the cast of these outfits, it’s like they made up their own language, and speak it like no one else. They’ve achieve their sense of unwavering style.
It’s also difficult to complain about truth in packaging. Whenever you got an AC/DC or Ramones album, you often knew what it was going to sound like before you even played it. At their performance, you’d go in knowing how you were going to come out three hours later: with a giddy, satisfied smile on your face.
