“It had everything”: The song that levelled up Brian Johnson
Before being selected as the replacement for the late Bon Scott in AC/DC, Brian Johnson was far from being a household name, let alone a notable figure in the hard rock landscape.
It was something of a stroke of fortune that Scott himself had previously stumbled upon Johnson prior to his death, and that he’d highlighted how brilliant he was as the frontman with Geordie, a similarly-minded rock group based in the North East of England. Without this seal of approval having come from the late frontman, AC/DC would either have had to settle for another, lesser vocalist to take the reins or would have disbanded altogether.
Geordie only ever entered the top 10 in the UK once with ‘All Because of You’ in 1973, and were barely even heard of in other parts of the world. They only ever charted a total of four times on home soil, which is nothing when compared to the worldwide dominance of the Australian rock titans that he ended up joining, so how come they wanted to recruit a comparative nobody to be part of the band?
Scott had seen something in Johnson when AC/DC crossed paths with Geordie on a tour of the UK, and proclaimed to the rest of the band that he was perhaps the greatest vocalist in the world, which the other members took on board and recalled when they were tasked with finding the right person to fill his shoes.
But prior to this, he’d been a member of several other short-lived groups, with the Jasper Hart Band being one example, and the group that would eventually transform into Geordie. Even less successful than Geordie were, Johnson cites his experience of being in the band as having been a necessary learning curve that prompted him to try to improve on his artistry.
The Jasper Hart Band had no real identity of their own, and largely played covers to audiences at local working men’s clubs, but the significance of one early game-changing song in the hard rock canon gave Johnson the impetus to start moving in a certain direction.
Speaking to broadcaster Ken Bruce during a 2022 interview for the BBC Radio 2 show, Tracks of My Years, Johnson noted how Steppenwolf’s ‘Born to Be Wild’ was the song that ultimately prompted him to start taking his own artistic endeavours more seriously, and made him recognise that he needed to re-evaluate everything he’d done up until that point.
“We saw clips of these guys from the West Coast, and we wanted to be like that,” Johnson admitted. “We just kept playing that song, it must have been four or five years before someone said, ‘I think we have enough of that.’ But I think it was very important, because it was punchy, it was rocky, it had everything for a young musician and band. You could also dance to it.”
‘Born to Be Wild’ probably flicked a switch for many other bands and artists from the same period, and while he may have grown tired of it, it was ultimately what drove him to create a legacy of his own. Without it, Johnson probably wouldn’t have even managed to escape the local circuit in Newcastle, let alone join AC/DC, and there wouldn’t have been such a thing as Back in Black. Imagine that.
