AC/DC's high voltage dirty deeds revisited

 AC/DC’s HIGH VOLTAGE DIRTY DEEDS  REVISITED

 

 

I’ve never been an AC/DC fan and have owned only two albums, High Voltage (1975) and Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap (1976), their first and second releases, conveniently sold as a “two-fer” pack and, to be honest, I bought them only because they were dirt cheap.  It was somewhere between 1977 and 1981 and I knew of AC/DC from the odd radio play but was never particularly motivated to buy any of their contemporary releases and even these two albums, fond of them as I am, couldn’t make a difference.

 

I’ve just relistened to the two records for the first time in probably thirty years and was pleasantly surprised to find how well they stood up and how much I enjoyed hearing them again. 

 

At this time the band was obviously still deeply in thrall to blues based hard rock of the earlier generation of heavy bands and Bon Scott was still the lead singer. His sly, suggestive tone informs songs of high school smutty innuendo like “The Jack,” “Can I Sit Next to You Girl” and “Little Lover” on High Voltage, and “Love at First Feel,” “Big Balls” and “Squealer” on Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap. The lyrics are so typical of hard rock, written by young men with excess testosterone and a somewhat immature and misogynist view of women, but Scott almost plays it for laughs, cartoonish even and this deflects some of the unacceptable nature.

 

I think AC/DC loss a huge asset when he died. Brian Johnson is an excellent hard rock vocalist but he hardly has the sly subtlety Scott brought to the party and that mitigated the clichéd hard rock  ethos. The band continued trading in sexual innuendo but where Scott sounded almost witty, Johnson sounds clumsily, awkwardly earnest.

 

On the other hand,  the songs about being in a hard rock band, such as “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Want to Rock and Roll),” Rock ‘n Roll Singer,”  “High Voltage,”  “Rocker,”  “There’s Gonna Be Some Rocking Tonight” and “Ain’t No Fun (Waiting Around to be a Millionaire, ” not to mention “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” are quite good, sometimes self-deprecating and with Scott  still sounding as if he’s letting us in on a joke,  and there is little bombast, just old fashioned, no thrills, hugely entertaining,  hard rock. Malcolm Young is a monster on rhythm guitar, Angus Young’s blues-based leads soar and the rhythm section thrives on the solid, blues-based riffs. 

 

AC/DC went on to bigger and better things after these two albums,  including the next couple of records with Scott,  and have become a hard rock institution and an international treasure, I guess,  but I don’t think they were as much fun anymore. There are different pressures on a band when they realise the can have a career in their chose field and however skilled and proficient they  become, the early unselfconscious  innocence, so to speak, can never be regained.