The “boring” artist Angus Young said needed a band
Nothing that Angus Young ever played was about trying to relate to someone on a personal level.
Rock and roll was never meant to go that deep all the time, and when things got too heavy, the AC/DC guitarist was always going to be there to pump out the riffs that everyone wanted to hear. And when he saw someone who was crawling a little bit too far up their own ass, it didn’t take the Australian schoolboy long to tell them to get over themselves and kick out the jams.
Because if there was one rule that Angus always came back to, it was that the swagger of the song matters more than any solo. He could have easily spent his entire life playing the same Clapton-style blues solos that he could, but if he didn’t have his brother Malcolm leading the charge behind him, it probably wasn’t worth doing. There always needed to be that camaraderie, and there were more than a few times where Angus saw bands that were a bit too in love with their own playing.
He was no fan of progressive music, and even when listening to his fellow hard rockers, he wasn’t exactly enamoured with Deep Purple the same way everyone else was. Because as far as he could tell, rock and roll always came from the feeling that you have in your gut when you hear open power chords, and it’s hard to think of any band that understood that better than The Who.
Pete Townshend had spent his entire career trying to make an artistic statement, but the answer to all of his problems came in the form of volume. The Marshall stack may not have been as prevalent back in the day, but when everyone first heard tunes like ‘My Generation’, it was like the age of punk had officially started. The whole thing was designed to sound a little bit crass, but Angus did have limits on where The Who could go.
They were certainly a fantastic rock outfit, but bringing Townshend out to sing was always going to be a bit of a gamble. The guitarist has an impressive shout on him that acts as a good compliment to Roger Daltrey, but compared to the band’s mainline work, Angus couldn’t stomach listening to any of Townshend’s solo works.
It was clearly not supposed to be made for The Who, but Angus felt that those solo records were a waste of time, saying, “I look at it as a band. I think Pete Townshend is rotten without Roger Daltrey and The Who. He’s quite boring actually. To me it’s not the same. I mean there are solo people who just do that sort of thing. I like it as a band, as a unit. You should hear me on my own. It’s horrendous.”
Despite Townshend having a few fairly decent solo records under his belt, it’s not hard to see why Angus feels that way. ‘Let My Love Open the Door’ might be a great song, but given the amount of production behind it, it feels like a more sanitised version of what The Who would have worked on, which only got worse when the group started to scrub themselves clean a little more in the 1980s.
There’s nothing wrong with bands that try to shift their sound every now and again, but what Townshend does on his own was about more than making a few pretty boring songs. It only served to prove Angus’s point that even if you have the greatest team at your disposal, people are never going to forget how the classic band lineup made them feel.
