Angus Young picks out the best AC/DC album for guitarists: “I had a great deal of fun on that”
No one was exactly going to a band like AC/DC for the greatest easy-listening experiences that they’ve ever heard. The core ethos behind the band was to have the kind of loud and boisterous rock and roll band that no one had ever touched before, and even when Angus and Malcolm Young were calmer than usual, they could always make their guitars snarl when they wanted to. Although every album was about fitting what suited the song, Angus knew the importance of letting his guitar scream in exactly the right way.
While looking at all of AC/DC’s greatest songs, it’s clear that they always focused on giving their audience the most ferocious guitar sound possible. There would be the odd blues song where the guitars would take a back seat to the vocals, but when listening to what’s going on in the background of those tunes tends to feature some of the most understated playing of the band’s career.
No one would ever call anything that Angus did subtle, but some of the core traits of the band are so good that it’s easy to miss them. Listening back to a record like ‘Shoot to Thrill’, Malcolm is punishing the hell out of his strings for those few minutes, to the point where a pick could have easily disintegrated in his hands if he wasn’t too careful. Then again, was rock and roll ever supposed to be user-friendly all the time?
Despite there being debates on which singer best suited Angus and Malcolm’s licks, there was a lot more room for them to jam when they had Bon Scott behind the microphone. He may have been a larger-than-life presence whenever he got onstage, but Scott was always looking to take a back seat if Angus wanted to fly off the handle, and listening to a song like ‘Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap’, any vocal riff Scott put in the middle of that guitar break would have been considered a musical crime.
“Throughout that album, there are many guitar solos and many breaks.”
angus young
That was only the band getting their feet wet, though, and when they reached Let There Be Rock, they had entered the peak years of the Scott era. The title track already had a smorgasbord of fantastic guitar lines from Angus, but even when listening to the more straight-ahead single material like ‘Whole Lotta Rosie’, the band were always pushing the audience a little bit further, to the point where the mix sounded like it was sizzling.
While Angus came a long way from those days, he remembered that time as the best starting point for any guitar player, saying, “The album on which we got to do the most guitar stuff was probably Let There Be Rock. Throughout that album, there are many guitar solos and many breaks. I really like some of them very much. Every day, [we] would come in with something different. I had a great deal of fun on that whole album.”
Angus and Malcolm may have had the final say in what ended up on one of their albums, but listening to this record is a crash course in what rock and roll is supposed to be. They had their fangs out a lot more on Powerage, but this was the band’s excuse to jam in the same way that a band like Led Zeppelin did, throwing caution to the wind half the time and letting songs stretch out so that Angus could play to his heart’s content.
Besides being one of the greatest albums in their discography, Angus’s job on Let There Be Rock feels like the creative golden ticket for any guitar player. Most people have to play down their playing for the sake of the recording, but this was one of the few times when guitarists could do whatever they wanted.
