84. AC/DC, "Back in Black"

 


When you read the title and saw the cover, admit it, did the opening riff of "Back in Black" start playing in your head?  Did you get a "DENH ... DEH-NEH-NEH ... DEH-NEH-NEH" right away?  I sure did, and of course, because this is the second best-selling album in the world (right behind Thriller, of course), and the fourth best-selling album in the US.  50 million copies worldwide, 25 million US, and it still stinks like Schlitz and cheap weed and B.O. and still rocks the fuck out.  It's Friday, it's 5 o'clock somewhere, go ahead and put this on.

You probably know the now-iconic and tragic tale of AC/DC's first singer, Bon Scott, dying of alcohol poisoning in the back of a parked car in London and the band almost throwing in the towel but instead recruiting Brian Johnson, who had already been in a band called Geordie and before that in the wonderfully-named Gobi Desert Canoe Club.  New singer in tow, the reformulated band decamped to Compass Point studios in the Bahamas and recorded this absolute slab of hard rock goodness.  This was AC/DC's seventh album, believe it or not.

There are two main elements here vying for your attention: Angus Young's absolutely mind-crunching guitar, and Johnson's scream-wail.  Say what you will about both, but Young wrote for this album some of rock's most all-time indelible riffs, and Johnson reaches notes normally audible only to infants, dogs, and the undead.  Not only is the title track an all-time air guitar classic; this album also has "Hells Bells" and "You Shook Me All Night Long" and "Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution," one of the best absolutely idiotic songs of all time.

What are the songs about?  Does it really matter?  Not really.  The point of the album is to get loud as fuck and have some fun and just rock the fuck out.  Nevertheless, I wonder if the rest of the band raised even one eyebrow when Johnson strolled into the studio with the lyrics for "Have a Drink On Me," barely three or four months after Scott drank himself to death:

I'm dizzy, drunk and fighting
On tequila, white lightnin'
Yes, my glass is gettin' shorter
On whiskey, ice and water
Yeah, so come on, have a good time
And get blinded out of your mind
So, don't worry about tomorrow
Take it today
Forget about the check, we'll get hell to pay

Well, I guess it worked out better for the rest of the boys than it did for Bon.  But wow, that is some world-class lack of self-awareness.  

Still, those lyrics are unusual for the album, most of which concerns single-entendre sexual boasts.  Here's a fairly typical example, from "Givin' the Dog a Bone":

Oh, she's no Mona Lisa
No, she's no Playboy star
But she'd send you to Heaven
Then explode you to Mars
Oh, she's using her head again (using her head again)
She's using her head (using her head again)
Ah, she's using her head again (using her head)

It's funny.  Funny-disturbing, but funny that you could straight-up write shit like this in the 70's and get away with it.  But the lyrics are almost incidental.  The music here is the point, and it's a supercharged bolt of energy straight into the skull of a 16-year-old stoner who just got a fake ID and some dirtbag friends.  This is music that's designed to be listened to on a car stereo parked up by the bluffs while the empty Olympia cans and Marlboro Red butts pile up.  I hadn't heard any of these songs outside of the bar jukebox context in years and years and years and listening to them gave me a weird nostalgia for a past I never had.  

Is this album in my personal Top 500? Playing against type here, but fuck yeah.

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