Back in Cack
Did you know that AC/DC have never written a song called ‘Lap It Up’? A few minutes ago, I was writing about how the crowd at their Melbourne show lapped it up, the whole AC/DC thing, and I thought that surely there was a ‘Lap It Up’ on record somewhere. Some album track somewhere in the Akka Dakka canon. No, said Google, and when Google speaks, you listen. Anyway, I’m just saying. Bit surprised. Let’s move on.
Here they were anyway, home at last. The tickets were free, so I was more curious than expectant. I quite like AC/DC’s seventies stuff. When I was a teenager, songs like ‘Let There Be Rock’ were a perfect fit for a drunken Green Ginger Wine-fuelled lurch around someone’s parents’ garage, capped off by a fulsome spew on some outside foliage in the dark. (I once puked on the roses of the mother of one of my friends and she chased me around the back of the house, brandishing a metal barbecue fork. I hid under a bed, eventually offering to wipe the petals when she’d been talked down and had dropped the weapon.)
The riff to ‘Let There Be Rock’ is a great big bowl of stupid, as most classic riffs are (and about five percent of all the best riffs in history belong to AC/DC), but the song works particularly well because of the teasing anticipation, the breaks in the song when the throbbing bass is punctuated by Bon Scott’s sermonising of the elements: ‘Let there be sound … there was sound … etc … gitarzzz … let there be ROCK!’ And BAM! Older Young and younger Young go fully sick on the Gretsch and the Gibson.
A masterpiece, that number, but I’ve never owned an AC/DC album, so I have a diffident attitude to their stuff. (I did once borrow Highway To Hell and forgot to give it back. Sorry, David.)
AC/DC could have only evolved in Australia. The Youngs were born overseas – most of the best Oz bands of the sixties and seventies were full of immigrants; most famously, The Easybeats – but they were hard, those boys from Scotland.
Musical aggression taken to something close to physical intimidation is an Aussie tradition. In the early seventies, Billy Thorpe grew his hair and became the first bogan hero. Chain took their cues from the passions of blues legends like John Mayall and Long John Baldry, but Chain’s stuff is far more coruscating and primal. ‘Black and Blue’ was a number one hit in Australia. It’s a dirty, crude mess of ploddy blues. No other country in the world would let a beast like that top the charts. It was primordial. Lobby Loyde and cohorts were in that mix, as were Angry Anderson’s Buster Brown, and there’s a kind of ironic take on the whole tough guy thing in The Birthday Party’s stuff. Then you have a lot of bands like the Beasts Of Bourbon, who might be ironic but it’s hard to say to what degree.
AC/DC germinated during this seventies Oz blues-rock surge, but they looked better, were younger, cheekier and had a grasp of pop music as it was being played by the likes of Slade and The Sweet in England. Bands comprising ex-skins and brickies’ labourers, who were spotted by record company execs while playing Chuck Berry covers at their local pubs, then signed up, squeezed into glam jackets and satin flares, and pushed out the door into popland, tottering to the top on five-inch platform boots. The embryonic AC/DC were watching closely.
Have a look at ‘Can I Sit Next To You Girl’, featuring their original singer, Dave Evans. No Bon Scott or Phil Rudd involved yet, but some of the band’s signature sound is already in place. The song is a naff twelve-bar blues but it rocks; it bloke-rocks and it glam-rocks. The chorus is less of an enquiry than a rhetorical demand delivered after the girl has already been sat next to. There’s some comical satin pants action, and Malcolm Young looks like a fifteenth century court jester. But it’s uncontrived, powerful, and the little guitarist in the school uniform looks fantastic.
With colour TV and Countdown, Sherbet and Skyhooks (both excellent bands) and others, like Hush (who were shit but looked good because of their Asian pretty-boy guitarists), were gifted some astronomical star-making assistance, but AC/DC preferred to stink up their Countdown slots with deliberately crass and crude performances. They were out to upset parents, and succeeded, especially with mine. The cross-dressed, pigtailed, mascaraed, school-dress-wearing Bon Scott, leering at the camera in their first Countdown appearance, looks like a genuine menace to the moral standards of the community. He lights a cigarette, for fuck’s sake!
That all went well, the bad boy thing, so AC/DC, intelligently, fucked off to Europe. They arrived in the UK just as punk broke, but the music scene was still dominated by tedious beardy prog, lazy prats like Supertramp and disgraceful novelty hits. There was one area of rock, however, that punk, prog, Elton John, or all the chart-targeted glitter and glam pop, etc, would never affect: heavy metal … which had only just begun thinking of itself as a genre. Cream and Led Zep begat Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, who begat UFO and Uriah Heep, and then Blue Oyster Cult, and very quickly the whole thing headed off into Dungeons & Dragons territory. AC/DC’s timing was perfect. Their stuff was 100 percent proof hard rock. An unpretentious no-questions-asked smack in the mouth. And, remarkably, nobody had ever tried that before. Five minutes after they’d got off the plane, the band were huge. They were metal’s Sex Pistols. The rest is history.
So here I was, more than thirty-five years later. At my first AC/DC show. To celebrate AC/DC’s homecoming. There were a few warning signs on the way in. My friend got hit by a ciggy butt flicked from the second level of the Etihad Stadium concourse. Impolite, sir. One guy near Gate 5 had already succumbed to the effects of too much beer coupled with too much gravity. He’d conspicuously hit the deck, and the cops were deciding whether to throw him out, or put him on a stretcher and then throw him out.
This crowd, this jungle of redneck menace, these ugly, ugly yobs. Where did they come from? You see a lot of good ol’ boys about the place when you breach the limits of any city, but I just wasn’t expecting this. Not to this extent. Where were the metal fans in their patched denim jackets? A bit of that would have added colour; class, even. I can declare quite truthfully that of every man in the place I had the longest hair, and although Malcolm Young and Phil Rudd and Cliff Williams have hair longer than mine (they’re in the band, those guys), I was attracting (familiar) looks of hostility from big bastard legoheads.
And the drunk guy I mentioned would have got wankered, in part, at least, I’m sure, because all the bars at the stadium were open. And there were no ID checks. (There were some kids behind us, maybe twelve years old, who I considered paying to go for a trek and get us some vodkas.) This open-bar policy seemed to my mind a catastrophic invitation for trouble but, in fact, it sort of strengthened the argument, made quite forcefully at the SLAM March, that music doesn’t make people go all fisticuffs. Or was I just lucky? (There were scraps and intimidations in Adelaide, I believe. How could there not be?)
It wasn’t until about the fifty-minute mark of the AC/DC circus that I realised – fully, that is; I’d known it, but hadn’t spent much time thinking about it, ever – that the monomania of rockin’ and fuckin’, the admixture for AC/DC’s dickcentric-rock riffage and mindset, could be so wearying.
There’s no shade, sway, swing, or mood, just a little veer now and then down a faint tributary away from the highway to hell but, even then, the view’s pretty much the same.
For me, by the hour mark, it was mostly a noisy, unvarying sonic anaesthetic. AC/DC are a band who dwell in a steady-state universe. Their immutability cannot be challenged by any group on earth. But is that a good thing? It’d be a fine topic for a high school debate. (The subtext of this column, after all, is that I have no idea about anything.)
As song after song was cranked out, there was revealed an absence just as insistent as the presence of Malcolm Young’s giant bedrock guitar. The absence? The void? It was emotion, of course, of any sort. I had entered a love-stunted, blank phallic universe, unthinking, macho and delivering a lesson in the objectification of women, especially ones with big norgs.
Misogyny? That’s an argument a little more difficult to prove. They don’t harbour the resentments, jealousies and violent tendencies of early blues, don’t have the cocksure threatening sneer of some of Led Zep’s stuff, for example. AC/DC don’t really want to teach you a lesson. They just want to see what you got. And the bigger the norgs, the better.
Boneheaded but occasionally funny innuendo has always been an art form in the hands of AC/DC. Or was until Bon died. Lesser idiots like Warrant and Poison have had a crack, but our boys are the Jedi Knights of blow job and rooting euphemism. It’s hard work squeezing that lemon these days, mind you. Tits? What more can be said? Are you ready to rock? Only so many times you can ask that one. Balls? They’re big, we get the message.
I got the feeling, too, that having taken this leviathan of a show all over the world, the band weren’t that into it. Probably because they looked too much like they were into it. Every second was choreographed as precisely as any spectacular games ceremony. This is your mark. Don’t miss the cue.
‘TNT’ was great. ‘Dirty Deeds’ was good. ‘Whole Lotta Rosie’, with a giant inflatable lingerie-clad Rosie rising from the rear of the stage, was probably excellent, but I was too distracted wondering how you can make a balloon woman forty-feet tall tap her feet to the song.
I’ve never been sucked in by the deification of Bon Scott but he was a star, and not too much of the stuff the band has recorded after he died has been as cheeky or playful. Johnson was the best replacement, but he was never going to be as lewd and dangerous as Bon. Nowhere near as smart, either. But, for god’s sake, Bon Scott was still just a singer in a band. Art exhibitions of letters to his wife? Really? Seriously? A statue? I didn’t know he played footy.
Brian Johnson’s been in the band for thirty years, yet I still think of him as ‘the new guy’. I still think of Ron Wood as the new guy in the Stones, even though I was twelve when he joined. Your brain gets music-fused very early.
In a way, it was Angus who kinda bothered me most. Too much Angusing. His solo in ‘Let There Be Rock’, my song, was interminable. Up and down the catwalk. Up on top of the stage steam-train prop. Up on a hydraulic platform doing his Morteined-fly-on-its-back thing. Up and back again.
He Angused me out, did Angus. But he’s such a compelling figure, a kind of musical idiot savant. There’s not much analytical brain there. His head mostly comprises a giant musical tumour and an enormous sense of fun.
Watch or read an interview with Angus, and you’re spending time with a not-too-articulate chain-smoking man child who has no interest in the outside world, not because he’s rich and selfish or mollycoddled – he’s very down to earth, in a ‘good onya’ way – but he just likes playing in a rock’n’roll band, and isn’t that enough? He’s a sort of anti-Bono. Not only does he not want to be a spokesperson/activist/prat/loudmouth, he can barely be bothered talking about anything, including AC/DC. He’s been rocking for thirty-five years, married for thirty (which is amazing for a rock relationship), and he’s still having a hoot.
From what we know of Angus and Malcolm, writing an AC/DC song with keyboards in mind, or strings, harmonies or jingle bells, would be absurd. They are the most cheerful, unerring guitar ideologues of them all. And they’ve had a three-decade teenage hard-on, so the lyrics aren’t much of a stretch.
Almost every hard rock band has at least one heartfelt, or even pseudo-heartfelt, power ballad. Thin Lizzy were the masters; a perfect blend of power, versatility and heart: balls-out rockers like ‘The Boys Are Back In Town’, and songs like ‘Still In Love With You’, which are genuinely beautiful. AC/DC’s audience aren’t too refined and the band’s closest shave with love’s dangers is probably ‘She’s Got The Jack.’
‘She’s Got The Jack’ is a fairly ugly slow song (the only slow one) about a girl with the clap. (I don’t know which genital disease they might specifically be referring to.) They played it in Melbourne and, as it lumbered along, a bunch of girls, each aloft and astride the shoulders of a guy, were selected one by one by AC/DC TV and projected onto the giant screens either side of the stage. Each one in turn hoisted her top, with most going the full-tit reveal. So … if you put the subject matter and the roaming camera together … does that mean she’s got the jack, that girl now fifty-feet tall onscreen? And that one there, she’s got it, I presume; and look at her, she looks like a bit of a slapper. I bet she’s got the jack!
Look, I’m taking it all a bit seriously, but somebody has to. I didn’t object to the objectification of enthusiastically semi-naked rock chicks on any kind of moral basis; if a woman wants to show 50, 000, or fifty million, people her baps, that’s up to her. She’s welcome to show them to me, although I certainly wouldn’t request it. What I objected to was the cynicism. And also the sense that had the women thought about it, had they considered that their tits might end up on YouTube, and had they not felt obliged in some way by the arrowing camera, a few might have thought twice. Mind you, most were the sort, I’d guess, who think ‘Sexism’ is a three-speed vibrator from Club X in Thomastown.
I admit, too, that my sudden dispiritedness when I realised the sort of people I’d be in the midst of was an unfair tarnish on the band. In my mind, I was saying to the group, ‘Look what you’ve done, you bastards! I might have had a nice evening if you didn’t encourage these primitives. I bet it’s not like this in Barcelona.’
It’s easy to over-analyse a dumb concert like this. Easy for me, at least. Maybe I’m the only one who has overthink problems with this issue. I don’t care. I don’t buy this. I didn’t buy the show really and, happily, I didn’t buy the ticket.
I didn’t feel fucked over, or ripped off, but I did have a vague sensation that someone had jizzed on my face.
Michael Witheford is a Melbourne-based writer and hack bass player, whose new band, The TV Set, debuts at the Marquis of Lorne in Fitzroy on Sunday 8th August from 6pm-8pm. He blogs sporadically at ‘Thought Crimes’.
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