The strange tale of how Rick Rubin almost derailed AC/DC: “I’m sick of this”
Genre has always been a stupid concept. A point reminded to me every single time someone asks me, “what type of music do you listen to?”
If I’m feeling cutthroat about it, my answer is simply “good music” for that encompasses all the genres I enjoy listening to. Because that is simply the prerequisite I follow, when deciding whether or not I like something. An ethos, somewhat informed by the work of Rick Rubin.
There was something about the Gandalf-esque presentation of Rubin that made me musically intrigued from the very moment I saw him. I almost pictured him standing there with a giant drumstick, pounding it to the ground and yelling “you shall not pass” to bad music, as he protected the gates of artistic authenticity. I didn’t have to know what project he was working on, I just instinctively knew I would like it.
Because wether be it with The Beastie Boys, Red Hot Chili Peppers or any of the myriad artists across varying genres, the music he has produced has always adhered to the ethos I set out earlier, devoid of genre limitations and more in tune with genuine expression.
It’s what allowed him to produce a Run DMC track one minute, and an AC/DC the next, which despite his obvious hip-hop leanings, felt like the biggest pinch me moment for him. “He said he’d been an AC/DC fan since he was a kid in New York,” Malcolm Young said, recalling the band’s first meeting with the famed producer.
But it was perhaps his own fandom of the band that made the creative process slightly difficult for Rubin who didn’t approach the production with his usual laid back ease, instead he painstakingly deliberated over minute details of the record that ultimately drove the band insane.
After ten weeks and over 50 hours of recordings that to this day remain unheard, Rubin couldn’t achieve what he considered would be the perfect drum sound for the band’s 1995 album Ballbreaker. It bled into Rubin’s scheduling which then resulted in his time being split between AC/DC and Red Hot Chili Peppers who were recording One Hot Minute.
Much to the dismay of his musical heroes, Rubin would turn up to the studio in the evening, only to be continually frustrated by the recording and eventually find himself pushing the band back another day.
“He would come in at night and say: ‘Hmm, we’ll try that song a different way tomorrow,’” recalled Brian Johnson. “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.’”
Listening back to the record, it does to Rubin’s credit sound quintessentially AC/DC. Bonafide riffs sit behind a roaring Johnson vocal, but isn’t that what AC/DC were good at doing themselves? The entire point of enlisting the Malibu wizard into the studio is to untap something different, something genre bending altogether and on Ballbreaker, we never really got that. Maybe it’s true after all, that some heroes are best left unmet.
