“Not just riffs”: The ingredients to every great AC/DC song, according to Angus Young
There’s no way of bottling up what makes a band great. The greatest strength of any group of people is always the way they work off each other, and if that happens to align with the way that everyone else wants to hear, that’s practically an added bonus when they graduate from typical bar band gigs to stadiums. But in the case of AC/DC, Angus Young had a bit of an idea of what the typical formula for great rock and roll should be.
Then again, Young has had more than his fair share of time studying what makes a great rock and roll tune. The entire premise behind many of AC/DC’s greatest tracks was based around him and Malcolm listening to the greatest songs in their record collections, and once they found out that they didn’t really need to stretch their abilities all that often, they found the mathematical formula for perfection.
If you go back and listen to a song like Back in Black, it’s not like they were trying to be one of the most in-depth artists of all time. They knew that the meat and potatoes of rock and roll was always what people wanted to hear, and there’s never a place to really strike out when you have the same kind of hooks that they did on that album like ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’.
Even though the band have had their simplistic side when putting together their riffs, that should never be mistaken for incompetence. Phil Rudd could have easily played a more complicated drum fill on tunes like ‘Highway to Hell’, but if he tried to show off any kind of wild drum fills like John Bonham, history would look a lot different if one of their signature tunes had never taken off like it should have.
But after having that signature rhythm behind it, the core behind any AC/DC track is about having a good time. No one goes to one of their concerts to sit their with their arms folded in the back of the room, and listening to any of their records, that kind of feral energy is palpable from the moment that the first song starts, whether it’s one of Angus’s licks or Brian Johnson screaming his head off.
And while coaxing by on great riffs is one thing, Angus always went back to the song as the true motivating factor for them to keep going, saying, “It’s got to have a good rhythm. It’s gotta rock. That’s the first requirement. I also like the songs to be, for my own preference, uptempo. If the song’s slower, perhaps a bit moody, it has to have something extra. And we like it to be a song — not just a collection of riffs. I think it has to flow and be very natural. Most songs these days seem like excuses to put a riff around.”
Considering what a lot of bands have done since then, though, it’s a lot harder to confuse the two out in the wild. Whereas some metal acts as of late have used their songs as scale exercises that happen to have a bit more of a form behind them, that can’t replace the kind of loose energy of Angus playing a tune and maybe not getting every single chorus completely in tune.
Because if you’re looking at AC/DC, there’s always been a human feel behind every single one of their licks. And while many people have tried to emulate Angus’s tone, there’s no substituting the real swagger behind songs like ‘Whole Lotta Rosie’. That only comes from someone who has that attitude in their heart.
