“That was real good for us”: the band Angus Young said gave AC/DC their first shot
Getting to the top of the rock and roll world often comes from knowing the right people. As much as some artists spend their entire careers playing pubs worldwide and hardly get noticed, it’s always important to network with the right people to ensure that everyone is pushing you up the musical ladder at every turn. But, really, it was always going to be hard to ignore a band like AC/DC if you tried.
From the minute they came to American shores, everyone was talking about the wild band from Australia that grabbed everyone by the throat. There are many moments that could have stuck out on any first gig that they had, but Angus Young was always the one people couldn’t take their eyes off of, often running up and down the stage with the same kind of energy you’d expect out of a feral dog.
And while Bon Scott looked tame by comparison, the simplicity of their music actually made it easier for people to fall in love with them. There was nothing flashy going on in songs like ‘TNT’ or ‘Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap’, but as long as it had a unique sense of groove, anyone could have found something to love when they started listening to them in the middle of a packed stadium.
Before they were known on that grand a scale, though, the band were becoming known as one of the wildest bar bands the world had ever seen. It was barebones rock and roll, but they always managed to pack quite the spectacle whenever they got onstage, and it was enough to catch the eye of bands like Kiss when the Aussies started making the rounds in the US for the first time.
“We were having a lot of trouble getting on tours because our band was real good.”
Angus Young
If nothing else, Gene Simmons was always a businessman, and he knew that a band of that calibre would have been perfect to open up for Kiss. Even if they didn’t have the same kind of larger-than-life style that the shock rockers had with their made-up faces, there was something about their drive that made them impossible to resist whenever they started jamming away onstage.
Later in their career, Young would end up crediting Simmons and Kiss for helping them reach heights they didn’t think were possible, saying, “We were having a lot of trouble getting on tours because our band was real good. The headliners would say, ‘Get rid of them!’ Kiss asked for us, they weren’t afraid. Gene came and saw us play at the Whisky in LA. I remember that he got us on some of their bigger dates, so that was real good for us.”
And while there’s no debating that Kiss put on a great live show, AC/DC have a slightly more engaging stage presence, the more you think about it. Simmons would have been like any other rockstar had he not had the makeup on and built the mystique of him spitting blood and breathing fire, and since AC/DC were able to keep an audience engaged with none of the gimmicks, they were clearly working with something much stronger.
Even to this day, the band have continued not to rely on gimmicks, only throwing up a few graphics and only bringing out different props like the bell for ‘Hells Bells’ when performing live. The allure of using theatrics may be fun in the moment, but there isn’t one member of AC/DC thinking that they should be doing anything except letting the music do the talking.
