AC/DC - Back in Black
#289
by Jon Rosenberg
AC/DC
Back in Black
Genre: Hard Rock (NOT noise pollution!)
Allen’s Rating: 5 out of 5
Jon’s Rating: 5 out of 5
Highlights:
The whole fucking album!
But if I must choose…
You Shook Me All Night Long
Back in Black
Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution
Let Me Put My Love Into You
Have a Drink On Me
A lot of people are surprised to learn that a tie-dyed-in-the-wool Deadhead like myself also loves AC/DC. I can’t explain it either. Such is life.
AC/DC were riding high in 1979. Their brand of heavy, take-no-prisoners blues rock was finally bringing them worldwide notoriety. “Highway to Hell,” their sixth album, hit #17 on the Billboard 200, and they toured Europe and the U.S. as headliners.
Then their lead singer Bon Scott drank himself to death at the age of 33 on February 19, 1980. Lesser bands would have called it quits at this point, but after a few months of mourning AC/DC got their shit together, recruited a new lead singer and began recording their next album. Ostensibly a tribute to Bon Scott, “Back in Black” is anything but funereal. It’s more like a swift kick in the Grim Reaper’s balls. These are all songs about drinking and fucking and… well, that’s pretty much it.
Angus Young and his brother Malcolm, lead and rhythm guitars respectively, are masters of the hard rock riff, with Cliff Williams on bass and Phil Rudd on drums providing a relentless backbone for every tune. And wailing like a banshee above it all is new singer Brian Johnson, sounding like he’s gargling broken glass and nails as he spits out classy lyrics like “Let me put my love into you, babe/Let me put my love on the line/ Let me put my love into you, babe /Let me cut your cake with my knife.”
The sound is crisp and clean, while still raw and dirty, courtesy of hot producer du jour Robert John “Mutt” Lange. I’ve never really been a fan of Mutt’s work on anything else, but here he gets the job done right. From the beginning (right up until their most recent album in 2014) AC/DC have tread a not-so-fine line between being a serious hard rock band and a caricature of one. In concert, with Angus’s English schoolboy uniform stage attire and assorted props and pyrotechnics, they clearly lean towards the cartoony.
But who cares? They do one thing and they do it well. And “Back in Black” is the pinnacle of their art. I almost docked it a quarter of a point for the sexist, low-brow lyrics on a few songs that may not have aged well. But fuck that, it’s a great album!
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