For many bands, the sudden and horrific death of their lead singer at the peak of their popularity would be a career-ender. AC/DC took a few weeks to regroup and then recorded one of the biggest albums of all time.
Back in Black is claimed in equal measure by the jocks, the stoners, the nerds, the delinquents, and the teachers. Nashville studios used it to test their acoustics. The title track boasts nothing less than one of the most gloriously elemental riffs ever devised—the perfection of the form, the ne plus ultra of jock jams, destined to be clumsily chunked out for eternity by teens testing fuzz pedals in God’s own Guitar Center. It might not necessarily be AC/DC’s best—if their career can even be measured in units of particular albums rather than one long, loud, continuous mid-tempo guitar riff spanning five decades. But it is their most album—most accessible, most successful, most enduring, most emblematic, and, given its genesis, most unlikely.
In 1979, AC/DC had made the leap from workingman Australian hard-rock band, opening arena tours for the likes of Cheap Trick and UFO, to bona fide headliners in their own right. Highway to Hell—their seventh album in five years—had gone platinum in the U.S., thanks in large part to producer Robert John “Mutt” Lange, whose kitchen-sink ethos would define the sound of rock radio for the next decade. (Previous AC/DC albums had been produced by the legendary Australian songwriting duo of Harry Vanda and George Young, the latter of whom happened to also be the older brother of AC/DC guitarists Malcolm and Angus Young.) The success of the album cemented the image of the band as libidinous but harmless dirtbags, perfecting carnal anthems tuneful enough to attract normies seeking an edge and heavy enough to keep the metal faithful in line. Angus was as much mascot as musical director, a perpetual motion machine decked out in a schoolboy uniform, but ultimately less threatening than an actual teenager.
Though not necessarily the band’s focal point, their lead singer was 33-year-old Bon Scott, a hard-partying, Scottish-born, impossible-voiced dynamo for whom the word impish was invented. He died alone in the passenger seat of a car on a freezing February night in London in 1980 following a night of drinking, having asphyxiated on his own vomit; authorities ruled it “death by misadventure.” The Young brothers retreated doing the only thing they knew how—coming up with shitloads of guitar riffs—then kicked off a search for Scott’s replacement in earnest almost immediately.
Among the candidates to join the band were Australian rock mainstays like Jimmy Barnes and John Swan, as well as Stevie Wright, who’d been in George Young and Vanda’s band the Easybeats in the ’60s. It was Mutt Lange who recommended Brian Johnson, lead singer of British glam band Geordie and owner of a cat-in-heat vocal register that was unlike anyone’s other than, as luck would have it, Bon Scott’s.
Johnson was 32 and living with his parents in Newcastle, in northern England, and running his own shop repairing the vinyl roofs of classic cars when he got the call to meet the band. “In the rehearsal room sat the boys of AC/DC, looking quite bored—they’d been auditioning singers for a month,” Johnson wrote in his 2009 memoir Rockers and Rollers. “When I walked in, I introduced myself and Malcolm said, ‘Ah, you’re the Newcastle lad,’ and promptly gave me a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale. He said, ‘Well, what do you wanna sing.’ I told him ‘Nutbush City Limits’ by Tina Turner.” The next afternoon, Johnson got a call asking him to return, and that was that. AC/DC decamped to record their eighth album in the Bahamas, again with Lange, and were finished seven weeks later. By July, the album was out, nearly a year to the date after Highway to Hell, and about five months after Scott’s death. This would prove to be the most acrobatic mid-career personnel change in pop history.
Although sketches of some songs had begun with Scott, Johnson was given free rein to write his own lyrics. Nothing strayed from the band’s tried and true formula of meditations on rocking and/or rolling. The first new song they did together would prove to be their biggest: “You Shook Me All Night Long” was a Top 40 hit, something that had eluded Scott-era AC/DC. While Back in Black is largely an extension of the things that worked on Highway to Hell, “You Shook Me All Night Long” was as close as the band could come to an outlier, yet never felt like pandering. It was a pure, melodic sing-along, and possibly the best to ever compare a vigorous sexual encounter to a car, a meal, and a boxing match all in three and a half minutes. The single’s success may have been thanks to beginner’s luck and inspired songwriting, or possibly an assist from beyond the grave.
“I remember sitting in my room writing that and I had this blank sheet of paper and this title and I was thinking, ‘Oh, what have I started?’” Johnson said in 2000. “I don’t give a fuck if people believe me or not, but something washed through me and went, it’s alright son, it’s alright. This kind of calm. I’d like to think it was Bon, but I can’t because I’m too cynical and I don’t want people getting carried away.”
But that was as far as Johnson would color outside AC/DC’s pre-drawn lines. He did not try and will the band into some sort of new direction or bend them to his taste. The degree to which the transition felt seamless was a triumph of branding as much as human resources: The idea of AC/DC prevails over any one song or album, but Back in Black happens to be the moment when that idea found its purest form and its widest purchase. If someone says “AC/DC,” you will think of the logo before you think of anything else, and Johnson’s fast acceptance and immersion, without any appearance of ghoulishness or greed, was the ultimate validation. His omnipresent tweed newsboy cap quickly became as central to the band’s iconography as Angus’ schoolboy getup. His voice may have lacked Scott’s nuance and character—a belt sander with one less speed—but there is no way of knowing how many people who embraced Back in Black in 1980 didn’t even realize there was a new singer. It definitely wasn’t zero.
Back in Black doesn’t ignore Scott’s passing but isn’t maudlin or cautionary— you can’t spell death by misadventure without adventure. “Hells Bells” opens the album with the clanging of the one-ton iron bell the band had custom-made to bring on tour, but that is as mournful as things get. Johnson howls, “You’re only young but you’re gonna die,” more as permission than warning before genially big-upping Satan and coming down squarely on the side of tempting fate in the name of a good time, of celebrating the abyss rather than stepping away from it.
Five tracks later, “Back in Black” is similarly defiant—“Forget the hearse ’cause I never die”—but that is pretty much it for discussion of mortality beyond the tacit assumption that the bereaved want to fuck, too. “Have a Drink on Me,” a gleeful ode to getting absolutely hammered, might be an odd choice for a band whose previous singer just drank himself to death, but Back in Black was not meant to be a reckoning, it was meant to be a reaffirmation.
Helping matters was the fact that AC/DC were funny, almost always intentionally. “Givin’ the Dog a Bone” is half an entendre short of a double entendre but thanks to its big, fat chorus of layered background vocals, you laugh even if you think you know better. AC/DC seemed to invite absurdity: The T-shirts sent to be sold at the North American tour’s first stop in Edmonton were all misprinted as “BACK AND BLACK.” They didn’t walk the fine line between stupid and clever, they drew it.
A year later, the one-ton “Hell’s Bells” bell was replaced by the “For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)” cannon, keeping the streak of acquiring heavy antique iron totemic metaphors alive. Lange returned for a third and final time and 1981’s For Those About to Rock hit No. 1, something that Back in Black did not do. Their 1976 album Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, which had not been released in the U.S., was, finally, in the wake of Back in Black’s success, giving Bon Scott a proper posthumous bow at the considerable risk of confusing new fans. A band that was on the brink of oblivion instead became the paragon of consistency and longevity for another four decades.
There is no such thing as a bad AC/DC song. You can certainly not like an AC/DC song, which would then mean you probably don’t like any AC/DC songs, which is fine. But none of them really fail at what they intend to do and they all intend to do more or less the same thing. Some turns of phrase are less dunderheaded than others, some riffs make their point more indelibly than others. They didn’t really have an experimental phase unless you count the bagpipes in “It’s a Long Way to the Top,” but that wasn’t really an experiment because it totally worked. There were no ballads, no curveballs, no symphonies, no DJ remixes, no synths or pianos, no unplugged sessions, no cute covers, no BIG HAIR. Their greatest hit features the line, “You told me to come but I was already there” and may have been co-written by a ghost. They were the Ramones chopped and screwed, and similarly frozen in amber, eternally wearing their teenage uniforms.
Beyond the tens of millions of copies sold, it is easy to overlook the legacy of something like Back in Black. The album didn’t signify any sort of change or cultural marker; it instead proved the power of stasis, of doing something well, then doing it again but louder and with more money. In a sense, the success of Back in Black helped predict the current reboot moment: Give the people what they want, but more. The music does not feel of any time or place; it means now what it meant then. The record’s ultimate legacy comes less from the artists it influenced or even the songs that remain staples of whatever is left of commercial rock radio than in its confirmation that evolution can be an overrated quality. And, as ever, AC/DC were their own best messengers for this simple idea, laid bare in the final moments of their most famous work: “Rock’n’roll ain't no riddle, man.”
