The one song Angus Young and Slash would play forever: “It’s just a cool thing”
Angus Young and Slash were never strangers to a great riff.
Some of the best songs in rock and roll history have been based around those handfuls of notes that make the guitar sound badass, and every single riff to come from both of them has been indebted to the kind of bluesy foundation that rock guitar was based on. But even if Slash was a bit more flashy at times, he knew that there was a magic to what Angus did as well whenever he worked on some of his brother’s famous licks.
Because when you listen to a band like AC/DC, it’s not like they were trying to reinvent the wheel or anything. For them, the concept of rock and roll was something that Elvis Presley pioneered, and since he wrote the rulebook, there was never a point in them trying to improve upon it. The Beatles may have tried to go in a different direction, but Young wasn’t in for that kind of band.
He wanted the chance to keep things interesting every single time he made a new record, but he would have traded a thousand more experiments to have Bon Scott back with him. Scott was the cheerleader of the band and a natural force on the microphone, so when they had to bury their musical brother, the only thing that Young wanted to do was channel all of that grief into their music.
So, in essence, Back in Black is actually one of the sweetest gestures that the band have ever made. Nothing about their music was about being wholesome in any way, but after losing one of their best friends, having an entire album dedicated to his memory was the only way they could think of to do justice to the person who changed their lives. And if they were going to do this as a tribute to their bandmate, they were going to need to come up with the goods, and the title track practically does everything right.
Which is really saying something, considering that Malcolm wanted to ditch the song. Angus felt that the song was a surefire hit, and even with only a few chords, the guitar hero couldn’t get enough of playing the song, saying, “I like ‘Back in Black’. I just like it because it’s a song you just hit that first chord ‘bump, dadan, dadan’, you know. You play a little cool lick (after that), it’s just a cool thing. (When I’m playing) I go: ‘Geez, this is a joy. I can stand up and try to look cool.”
If that was the reaction that it got out of a seasoned veteran of the genre, you can imagine what it felt like for a budding guitarist like Slash that was hearing the album for the first time, saying, “’Back In Black’ came out, and it was like a battle cry for rock and roll and heavy metal at that time. It was a killer record from start to finish – every song was good. The single ‘Back In Black’ was as good a single as a rock and roll single gets.”
And despite Guns N’ Roses going in a more hard-edged direction than anyone else in Los Angeles at the time, you can definitely hear the influence from AC/DC in how Slash plays. A lot of their best songs were all about down and dirty chords just like AC/DC did, and if you were to turn the gain down a little bit and put Brian Johnson over the riff to ‘Welcome to the Jungle’, it wouldn’t sound all that out of place.
That’s not anywhere near what Malcolm was thinking when he wrote the riff, but sometimes the greatest songs don’t require the most skilled performances or anything. AC/DC are one of the most meat-and-potatoes rock and roll bands that have ever been, but when you listen to their songs in the right context, they are enough to make any kid fall in love with rock and roll for life.
