The rock genre Bon Scott thought had nothing to say: “It don’t mean nothing”
Rock and roll was never meant to be confined to just one style. The entire reason why the genre got off the ground in the first place was because of rebellion, and once Chuck Berry and Little Richard gave everyone the freedom to think outside the box, everyone started to individualise their sound to suit whatever they fancied at the moment. Although AC/DC was more than happy to play everything by the book when they made records, Bon Scott thought that the emergence of punk didn’t really have that much to say.
Because while the Australian rockers debuted in the early 1970s, chances are they would have fit right in had they first broke a decade earlier. There was a lot of music that came and went after the ‘Summer of Love’ ended, but the Young brothers were far more concerned with playing the most brash music possible, this side of Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis.
But while Berry and Richard kept everything incredibly sparse on the lyrical front, Scott was the kind of frontman who wore his rock and roll influences on his sleeve. From the moment that he got started on ‘It’s A Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock and Roll)’, no one was prouder to represent the rock and roll lifestyle, whether that meant drinking a bottle of whiskey within the span of a night or getting into as much trouble as he could after he got offstage.
Just as AC/DC were entering the big time, another kind of danger was creeping up on both sides of the Atlantic. With Ramones bursting onto the scene in America, followed quickly by Sex Pistols, punk rock was finally ready to take over the world, complete with fans putting safety pins through their noses and talking about the disenfranchised aspects of society.
Even though Johnny Rotten was everything that punk seemed to represent, Scott didn’t see it as anything particularly special. This was just an edgier version of what AC/DC had done in the clubs, and chances are that he would gladly wipe the floor with any mohawk-clad kid in a leather jacket who tried to give him shit.
When asked about the genre during its inception, Scott thought that while they were screaming as loud as they could, none of the original punks had anything worthwhile in their music, saying, “I see us as music, I see punk rock as nothing. Those guys… they’re making a statement. It don’t mean nothing, but they’re making a statement.”
And looking at where AC/DC went past 1977, it looked like they were going to outdo punks at their own game on Highway to Hell. No matter how many times acts like The Damned or The Dead Boys tried to put together something snotty, there are legions of punk acts that are still more than happy to play through tracks like ‘Beating Around the Bush’ just because of how nasty the guitar line was.
Most of the early punks were into the idea of destruction as a form of express, but that was never where Scott was coming from. Rock and roll did benefit from a little bit of mayhem, but it was always better to give the audience a show rather than whine onstage.
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