“Every take after seemed shallow”: When AC/DC couldn’t recreate ‘High Voltage’
Some of the best songs of all time can be created out of the happiest accidents in the studio. Even if someone tries their best to make lightning strike whenever they are in the vocal booth or on the studio floor, the true keepers tend to be the ones that capture a moment in time where everyone is on the same page. And while AC/DC have lived off of capturing those moments whenever they got onstage, Angus Young knew that there are some classics that only come around once.
But a lot of those seconds of brilliance don’t come from how well a certain riff is played. A lot of what AC/DC is used to revolves around the most simple rock and roll licks ever made, but while it might be easy to get under your fingers when starting out on guitar, having that internal sense of groove is something that could take ages to master properly.
And even if someone spends their entire career studying Malcolm Young’s right hand during his live tenure, there was always some musical sixth sense when he was playing with Angus. Despite being known as the free-spirited kid of the group, Angus could always feed off his brother half the time, either coming up with the right riff to complement his playing or laying down the kind of solo that Chuck Berry would have been proud of.
Listening to a lot of their early recordings, though, it’s easy to see them figuring out what works and what doesn’t for them. The band’s first few singles, like ‘It’s A Long Way To The Top’ and ‘TNT’, may have been rudimentary by comparison, but they also marked the moment where rock and roll went from being bluesy to something far more aggressive.
While a lot of those sessions may have been centred on breaking in Bon Scott as a frontman, Angus could tell when things were getting stagnant as well. There is such a thing as beating a song to death, and even though ‘High Voltage’ might not have been one of the most polished recordings of their career, the guitarist knew that they had taken those riffs as far as they could go.
Despite playing it over and over again for hours, Angus said that nothing compared to the first track they laid down, saying, “‘High Voltage’ was one of those tracks. It was the first take we’d done, and every take after that just seemed shallow in comparison. So that was a first-timer, guitar solo and everything. And it was great for me because then [producer] George [Young] would go, ‘All right, you’re done!’”
It’s not like the band were claiming to be the most accurate in the world, either. A lot of what they were playing still revolved around the basic blues structures, but when listening to every one of them in context, this is actually one of the loosest tunes they ever played, which would be whipped into shape when Mutt Lange was brought in to layer walls of guitars for records like For Those About to Rock.
However, whereas Lange would have preferred to lock everything in a grid until it sounded absolutely perfect, that was never how the Young brothers thought. They could have played one of the sloppiest tunes that they ever committed to tape, but as long as it had the right mojo, that was all that mattered.
