‘Highway to Hell’: the classic rock record Rick Rubin declared to be truly timeless
It’s often for the best to move on from the first band and the artists you truly fall in love with.
Of course, a part of you never will. I don’t think there’s a music fan on this planet that could listen to the first artist that they truly felt understood them and not at least have that warm feeling of nostalgia wash over them. In some cases, though, like that of Rick Rubin, the first band that you ever fall for will stay one of your favourites in perpetuity.
There’s something very fitting about the fact that Rick Rubin, of all people, still holds his first favourite band up as one of the very best to do it. After all, on the surface, Rubin seems like the kind of guy to flit from band to band and artist to artist like a musical magpie. This is a man who started out as a punk rocker, then moved to hip-hop, then thrash metal, then country music and has spent his career going from those genres to everything in between.
Rick Rubin is a man who believes in genre division as much as he believes in shaving, and one would assume that whatever he loved in the past should stay in the past. The most exciting thing is what comes next. Yet, that’s also not true. For all the exciting discoveries he’s made, for every LL Cool J who literally sent Rubin his demo and was brought to stardom by him, Rubin is a man who is continuously looking back as well.
After all, Rubin was the guy who looked at a washed-up Johnny Cash in the early 1990s and felt this was a guy who still had hits in him. Not just country hits either, but full-on, career-defining hits with a Nine Inch Nails cover to boot. What’s more, he was 100% right. So, what band kick-started a love of music in a young Rick Rubin? What band does he still swear by to this day? None other than AC/DC.
Rubin wrote about his love of the Australian hard rock heroes in a profile for Rolling Stone. Talking about them in a way that doesn’t just mark them out as a great rock ‘n’ roll band, but a Rosetta Stone for everything Rubin has tried to do in his music career. After all, while Rubin has worked in radically different genres, there are a few ways you can directly compare the records he’s produced. Even if they’re as seemingly disparate as the Beastie Boys’ License To Ill, Slayer’s Reign in Blood or Adele’s 21.
Rubin is someone who believes music should be direct, focused and to-the-point. Simultaneously stripped back and loud as hell, no moment out of place or unnecessary. Tell me, what other band embodies that kind of attitude like AC/DC? In the article, Rubin says, “Like Zeppelin, they were rooted in American R&B, but AC/DC took it to a minimal extreme that had never been heard before.” He goes on to talk about the record that has since shaped his production style, their masterpiece, Highway To Hell.
Explaining, “Highway to Hell is probably the most natural-sounding rock record I’ve ever heard. There’s so little adornment. Nothing gets in the way of the push-and-pull between the guitarists Angus and Malcolm Young, bassist Cliff Williams and drummer Phil Rudd. For me, it’s the embodiment of rock & roll. When I’m producing a rock band, I try to create albums that sound as powerful as Highway to Hell.”
It’s a testament to just how well he learned from the best that today, producers in rock, hip-hop and everything in between try to create albums that sound as powerful as anything Rick Rubin has made. A sign, if one was needed, that you can learn from anything, even bands you got into decades ago.
