Working with Rick Rubin made AC/DC “sick” of the process
Australian clod rockers AC/DC had cracked a hard stompin’ formula and clung on to it for dear life across their over 50 years of duck walking, schoolboy guitar attack.
Chiefly, to boil down rock riffs to their most primal, marrow essentiality, and gunked in oodles of cartoonish lyrical innuendo and Aussie ‘ard bloke testosterone capers. And boy did it pay off. Landing on the charts in the mid-1970s, the Young brothers’ unfussy strut rock swaggered through the decade with a string of records that anticipated the new wave of British heavy metal eagerly awaiting around the corner.
After the death of original singer Bon Scott, a seamless switch to second classic frontman Brian Johnson yielded 1980’s Back in Black, a monster record shifting over 50 million reported sales and still standing as the biggest-selling albums of all time’s silver medal, behind Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
While the records that followed didn’t set critics alight, their status as hard rock royalty barely took a hit, soldiering through the 1980s while the metal world undertook seismic shifts underneath them. As the 1990s arrived, AC/DC conjured another canonical hit with The Razors Edge’s ‘Thunderstruck’, a lightning bolt of a single that set the band up as elder statesmen of a once again ever-evolving rock world for another decade.
AC/DC benefited from close and fruitful relationships with their producers. When starting out as teens back in 1973, the shepherding of elder brother George Young and studio partner Harry Vanda, both in the 1960s pop group The Easybeats and writing songs for other artists with the Vanda & Young credit, saw the duo oversee their early work, right up until 1978’s Powerage. For the next three records, Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange stepped into the producer’s chair, responsible for helping realise their much-loved numbers from ‘Highway to Hell’, ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’, and ‘For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)’.
Before long, AC/DC would cross paths with Zen studio guru Rick Rubin. Hailing from the New York punk scene and helping push hip hop to mainstream with his Def Jam Records label, Rubin held a deeply unprejudiced attitude to music in all its myriad flavours, as much a metalhead as he was rap freak. With the likes of Slayer, Danzig, and Wolfsbane under his production belt, Rubin eagerly sought to realise a years-long dream to add his Svengali touch to an AC/DC record.
He’d get a taste, producing 1993’s ‘Big Gun’ for the Last Action Hero soundtrack—a severely underrated Arnold Schwarzenegger action fantasy-satire—before embarking on a studio album proper for 1995’s Ballbreaker. Rubin and the band hit it off initially, AC/DC appreciating the lack of pressure for obvious singles, but soon the joyous urgency and ephemerality they’d enjoyed on previous album sessions soon became bogged down with scheduling conflicts and studio perfectionism.
Reportedly, ten weeks were spent trying to master a drum sound, wasting 50 hours of recording time. As well as shifting operations away from New York’s Power Station to Los Angeles’ Ocean Way Studios, a scheduling conflict on Rubin’s part for Red Hot Chili Peppers’ One Hot Minute resulted in a distracted producer and copious takes on single songs soon tested AC/DC’s will to live. “He would come in at night and say: ‘Hmm, we’ll try that song a different way tomorrow,’” Johnson recalled. “By the time we finished, we’d played the song so many different times you’d be sitting there going: ‘Jesus, I’m sick of this bloody thing.’”
Still, Ballbreaker was another chart clobberer, riding high on both the UK and US album charts, and striking the top spot on the UK Rock & Metal Albums, and Rubin’s stature would only continue to grow, later working with metal luminaries Slipknot, Audioslave, and Metallica to acclaim.
