“Timeless”: the most defining rock record Rick Rubin has ever heard
There’s never truly a point in a music obsessive’s life where they cease to find new artists to indulge in, but it’s often the bands that people discover during their teenage years that hold the most special place in their heart and continue to act as a source of inspiration.
It’s during this part of your life where you’re at your most impressionable, especially when it comes to the cultural delights that you’re engaging with. Quite often, you’ll find yourself gravitating towards something that your friends and peers are equally obsessed with, too. While sometimes this can be a case of latching onto the zeitgeist, in other situations, people will find themselves moving towards something that acts as a means of rebelling against the status quo.
Finding material that speaks to you also doesn’t have to be a case of following the crowd, either. If what appeals to the masses isn’t quite doing it for you, then there’s going to be an urge to insert yourself into a different scene, no matter how socially isolating it might feel at the time when you’re trying to forge your own identity. In these instances, feeling a sense of conviction about your taste will eventually lead you to being united with the right people.
For producer and music industry impresario Rick Rubin, who was born in 1963, the music that he discovered in the late 1970s would ultimately be what paved the way for his musical identity to be established. While attending junior high school in New York, he claims that many of his peers during this time were enthralled by the sound of British hard rock titans Led Zeppelin, yet he became more transfixed on their Australian counterparts, AC/DC.
It was their 1978 performance on The Midnight Special, the band’s US television debut, that caught the attention of the teenage Rubin. Although he wasn’t quite aware of why their music and performance were so spellbinding to him at the time, he claims to have instantly recognised that they were the superior act to Led Zeppelin in his opinion, allowing this infatuation to blossom.
Rubin now acknowledges that the band’s roots in rock and roll and their own personal obsession with the work of artists like Chuck Berry were what drove their minimalist take on hard rock. Unlike Led Zeppelin, who were much more progressive and experimental, AC/DC focused purely on the basics, and by paying little attention to embellishing their sound, they were able to be more direct.
It’s for these reasons that Rubin hails the band’s 1979 album, Highway to Hell, as being not just the most impactful album from their catalogue, but the absolute epitome of what a rock record should sound like, even inspiring many of his own productions in the years since its release. “When I’m producing a rock band, I try to create albums that sound as powerful as Highway to Hell,” he told Rolling Stone in 2010. “Whether it’s the Cult or the Red Hot Chili Peppers, I apply the same basic formula: Keep it sparse.”
“Make the guitar parts more rhythmic. It sounds simple, but what AC/DC did is almost impossible to duplicate.”
Rick Rubin
Rubin continued by reinforcing his belief that they were absolutely unsurpassable. “I’ll go on record as saying they’re the greatest rock and roll band of all time,” he opined. “They didn’t write emotional lyrics. They didn’t play emotional songs. The emotion is all in that groove, and that groove is timeless.”
While many bands have certainly attempted to emulate AC/DC in the years since, and while Rubin himself has constantly been chasing the feel of an album like Highway to Hell in his own work, he couldn’t be more spot on in his assertion that, despite their simplistic approach, nobody has ever come close to replicating what made them so special.
