The song AC/DC wrote for Stephen King
AC/DC’s recent tour sold out worldwide in minutes. When you look at a band like that, who have been making music for so long and still have a captivated audience, it’s hard to believe they ever went through musical lulls, but that’s precisely what happened to the band in the 1980s. So, what got them out of it? A new spark of imagination? A riff that came to Angus Young in a dream? No. Their saviour actually came in the form of a coked-up Stephen King.
“The problem with that film is that I was coked out of my mind all through its production, and I really didn’t know what I was doing,” said King, reflecting on the making of his movie Maximum Overdrive. It is a flick about killer trucks that isn’t as good as Christine and people trapped in a petrol station but isn’t as good as The Mist. The movie is a clear by-product of a creative brain rattled by cocaine, as it is so disjointed that it surpassed the realm of being bad and now sits proudly as an infamous cult classic.
King made a lot of questionable decisions when making Maximum Overdrive. He said the machine’s uprising was due to a meteorite, as the opening title card reads, “On June 19th, 1987, at 9:47 AM EST, the Earth passed into the extraordinarily diffuse tail of Rhea-M, a rogue comet.” The movie ends with King declaring the machine rebellion was actually the cause of an alien invasion as the closing shot reads, “Two days after, a large UFO was destroyed in space by a Russian ‘weather satellite’, which happened to be equipped with a laser cannon and class IV nuclear missiles.”
King also opted for using actual blades in a lawnmower, which wasn’t necessary given there was never a shot of the blades, a decision that ended up causing an accident that blinded one of the crew members. He decided to include a shot of a remote-controlled car killing a dog, a Walkman killing a woman, and a truck communicating in Morse code. These were all bad decisions; in fact, it could be argued that the only good call King made throughout the entire production period was asking his favourite band in the world to do the soundtrack.
Whilst the movie was a figurative and literal car crash, having AC/DC provide the soundtrack for the film brought the band out of their creative hole. They didn’t like reselling old music, so instead of releasing a soundtrack album, they compiled a compilation that featured some new songs, one of which was the now-hit ‘Who Made Who’.
In an interview with the band, King asked singer Brian Johnson and guitarist Angus Young about the process of making music for a movie. “It was an interesting thing,” said Johnson. “It was the first time I’ve been involved in anything like that. The lads said it was a bit like movie making because they had to be watching the clips.”
“It certainly was different for us to work with film,” agreed Angus. Regardless of what they thought of the process, the project came at the perfect time for the band, as the new song and subsequent album put them firmly back on the map. It’s not often bands can thank a lousy movie for giving them a leg up in their career, but that’s precisely what happened in the case of AC/DC and working with Stephen King on Maximum Overdrive—an absolute car crash of a film that ironically put them back on the right path.
