Bon Scott on the biggest mistake Kiss ever made: “The worst song ever recorded”
By the mid-1970s, AC/DC had started to crack the code of what sleazy rock and roll was all about. Led Zeppelin certainly had their highlights, and Aerosmith had started to spiral after the album Draw the Line, but the Young Brothers seemed to be the ones flying the flag for playing straight-ahead rock and roll with no real window dressing around it. What you saw was what you got, but by the standards of Bon Scott, rock was going into dangerous territory when Kiss went disco during ‘I Was Made For Lovin’ You’.
Then again, Kiss never seemed to fit squarely into the hallowed halls of rock history as everyone else did. They were responsible for turning stages into a spectacle and are still among the greatest attractions that the genre ever spit out, but their over-the-top lifestyle made them look like cartoon characters rather than musicians.
Even they would tell you that they weren’t great musicians, but they at least knew their strengths when making albums like Love Gun and Rock and Roll Over. The minute that disco reared its head, though, many rock fans lost their innocence hearing Paul Stanley deliver the kind of tune that wouldn’t sound out of place being performed by Donna Summer.
But if we were to chastise every group that decided to flirt with disco in the 1970s, we’d be here all night. Rod Stewart had a truly horrifying foray into Saturday Night Fever territory, and even The Rolling Stones sported dance textures on ‘Miss You’, and yet none of them sounded more shallow than Stanley getting to the top of his register to hit those high notes the Bee Gees would be proud of.
For all the trends in rock music, AC/DC never fit into that camp. They were always the ones who wanted to push the envelope whenever they played, and that usually meant turning the amps up even louder or adding a little bit of blues to their sound rather than just throwing a ballad out into the wild.
Despite their history of going out on tour with Kiss, Scott couldn’t even pretend to say that the shock rockers were moving in the right direction with disco, saying, “What happened to them? Did they lose a bet? I personally think they should be brought up on charges for that song. It is probably the worst song ever recorded.”
While musical lawsuits didn’t come into play, the group did take a little bit of a dip attempting to stay relevant. No matter how many times they tried to put themselves back on top, projects like Unmasked seemed like generic power pop by their standards, and “Music From the Elder” became the radical experiment that not even they could defend after a few years.
By the time they actually got back on track with Creatures of the Night, Scott wouldn’t be around to see it, having passed away in 1980 and replaced by Brian Johnson for their career comeback, Back in Black. Scott was still far from the biggest Kiss fan at the time of his death, but that just speaks to the kind of artist he was. He liked his rock and roll, and no amount of disco fever was going to get in the way of it.
