Rick Rubin picks his favourite AC/DC album: ‘The best rock band of all time’
Few people in the music industry are in Rick Rubin‘s enviable position.
The bearded, shoeless producer has worked with a dizzying line-up of prolific artists, and genre seems to have no consequence to him. While he’s most famous for producing hip-hop albums, the Def Jam Records co-founder has had an equal hand in heavier productions, notably for the likes of Metallica and AC/DC.
Rubin’s fondness for rock was brewing long before he started working with the Beastie Boys and Run-DMC. He recalled old classmates gravitating towards rock’s more blues-infused variants, but he was drawn to the aggressive snarl of AC/DC. While bands like Led Zeppelin were still a hit with him – Rubin famously built some of his first drum samples out of ‘When The Levee Breaks’ – something about AC/DC’s sound and philosophy struck him.
He’s always been a producer who keeps things simple and goes off feel. And AC/DC are dramatically similar, with Angus Young once saying, “I’m sick to death of people saying we’ve made 11 albums that sound exactly the same. In fact, we’ve made 12 albums that sound exactly the same!” That makes it notoriously difficult to pick a favourite record, too, but Rubin hasn’t let that stop him.
While they’re often dismissed as dad rock, the attitude they brought to their music was decidedly rock and roll in the purest sense, and they didn’t need to meander on 22-minute odysseys to prove it. For that reason, Rubin told Gibson their 1979 effort, Highway to Hell, was: “A timeless and natural-sounding rock album”. Rubin was picking up on the influence of Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange, whose production forced the band to work in an entirely new way.
With Lange at the helm, AC/DC, who had never spent more than three weeks on an album, worked around the clock for three months as their tracks were fine-tuned. The 15-hour days were a slog, but the band appreciated the dedication he brought out of them. Malcolm Young told Mojo the producer liked their simplicity, and they, in turn, liked that he didn’t want to reinvent the wheel when it came to their trademark sound.
“We were all minimalist,” he said. “We felt it was the best way to be […] He knew we were all dedicated so he sort of got it. But he made sure the tracks were solid, and he could hear if a snare just went off.” Rubin, who has earned similar admiration from the artists he produced for, often revisited Highway To Hell when it came to making his future hits.
AC/DC understood the value of simplicity, and Rubin said he applies it as a standard bearer to every record he works on. “I try to create albums that sound as powerful as Highway to Hell,” he explained. “Whether it’s working with The Cult or the Red Hot Chili Peppers, I apply the same basic formula: Keep it sparse.”
Rubin eventually got the chance to work with them on 1995’s Ballbreaker and took to the Talk is Jericho podcast to say that while they were “the best rock band in the world, of all time”, it wasn’t without its issues. With such an intrinsic knowledge of their sound at its best, it was a struggle to recreate perfection. That said, Rubin said it was “another dream-come-true scenario” in his storied production career.
He even paid them the highest compliment of all, stating, “My favourite group post-Beatles was AC/DC, and I think they’re the best rock band in the world, of all time. They’re a perfect band.” And perhaps what makes them that way is that they’d likely take all this praise with a simple shrug. That’s how it should be in rock ‘n’ roll.
