The 1950s singer Angus Young said had the voice of a god: “The healing music”
No singer in AC/DC needed to get by having the most earth-shattering voice of all time.
Even though Bon Scott and Brian Johnson are both fantastic at what they do, it’s hard to think of them in the same league as the Whitney Houstons and the Mariah Careys of the world. That was never how they thought about their own approach to music, but Angus Young felt that some of the greatest singers who ever lived only needed some attitude to get them over the line whenever they performed.
After all, most of AC/DC’s tunes weren’t about sounding soft and happy all the time. They were looking to blow the living daylights out of every single person who heard their music, and that meant having someone who could balance the same amount of intensity and sleaze whenever they performed. Because, as far as they were concerned, that was what rock and roll was supposed to be.
Nothing about the genre was meant to be polished by any metric, and when you listen to the way that the guitars interact, it was all about going back to the old blues format that people like Chuck Berry had started with back in the day. In their minds, some of the greatest rock and roll made came out long before Elvis Presley lit up the stage for the first time, and even if they cut off all of their influences right there, they would have more than they ever needed when they heard what Little Richard could do.
Playing the piano wasn’t necessarily looked at as the coolest thing in the world when rock and roll first began, but Richard was looking to give the audience a show every single time he played. Sure, Presley could shake his hips and make the entire crowd go crazy, but Richard was practically trying to hit the audience over the head with his voice whenever he sang. He was trying to shred his larynx on every song, and that’s the kind of approach that Angus was after.
He knew that any singer that the band had needed to have that kind of intensity, but there was no way that anyone could have ever knocked what Richard brought to the table in his eyes, saying, “I always remembered Little Richard, one of his little raps before the song. He’s going, ‘My music is the healing music. It makes the deaf hear, the deaf and dumb rise up and hear and talk.’ And he had the voice of gods, you know. He had some great raps between songs.”
Granted, it’s not like AC/DC were the only band that had some grand revelation when they heard Richard’s music. Everyone from The Beatles to The Rolling Stones took their fair share from what Richard was doing, but when you listen to what the proto-punk bands were doing in the early 1970s, they were clearly the next step. The Stooges and the MC5 took what Richard did and amplified it to the nth degree, and the Australian legends wanted in on the fun, too, when they heard what Scott could sing.
There’s hardly anyone on Earth who could match Scott’s brand of sleazy rock and roll, but if you listen to what Johnson would be doing for them later, he was practically a reincarnation of what Richard could do. He wasn’t afraid to belt to the rafters, and if anyone has ever tried to cover one of their tunes, they usually start to realise how difficult it is when they get to tunes like ‘Hells Bells’ and ‘Shoot to Thrill.’
It’s not an easy gig preserving one’s voice for that kind of singing, but Richard never thought about it in those terms, either. He was doing what came naturally to him, and every single one of AC/DC’s greatest songs was about trying to get the same kind of visceral reaction out of the audience that he did when he first came onto the scene with ‘Long Tall Sally’.
