The classic rock song Slash thinks is a cut above anything else: “As good as rock gets”
When the ‘Big Book of Rock’ is eventually created, there’s a good chance that Slash will be one of the cover photos.
There have been many icons that have come and gone in rock music, but outside of Mick Jagger’s famous tongue logo with The Stones, nothing has ever been more synonymous with rock and roll than Slash clad in a top hat with curly hair draped over his face. No artist gets there without doing their homework, and even the Guns N’ Roses titan thought that every good rock band is taking notes from AC/DC on Back in Black.
For all of the great music that Slash has made, though, there’s one common thread between him and Angus Young: the blues. All good rock and roll is built on those bluesy guitar lines, and it’s hard not to think of a riff like ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ existing without Young coming up with ‘Highway to Hell’ first.
Although the Australian rockers seemed like they would go on and on with Bon Scott at the helm, there was no way that anyone could have found a way to replace him after his mysterious death in 1980. Once Brian Johnson stepped up to the plate, the band knew that there was still some life left in them.
If they were going to make another record, they would have to deliver the goods in honour of their fallen bandmate. While the Young brothers had been working on music up until Scott’s passing, songs like ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’ and ‘Hells Bells’ were both a celebration of the kind of music that the band loved as well as a touching way to commemorate their fallen bandmate.
For Slash, overcoming something like that Slash was what rock and roll was built on, saying, “All of a sudden, Back in Black came out, and it was like the battle cry for hard rock and heavy metal at the time. It was a killer record from start to finish. Every song was good. The single ‘Back in Black’ is about as good a single as a rock and roll single gets. To this day, one of my favourite guitar solos of all time is in ‘Hells Bells’. That was a pivotal rock record for me”.
If Slash was going to be playing that particular style of rock and roll, he wasn’t just going to stick to brash open chords. By the time he had hooked up with drummer Steven Adler and formed Guns N’ Roses with Axl Rose, his approach seemed like an amalgamation of every rock band that came before him, finding a weird middle ground between Angus Young, Joe Perry and BB King with his lead lines.
One thing that he didn’t lose in that transformation was AC/DC’s signature brand of sleaze. Although not everything that Guns N’ Roses sang was about childhood smut, the grizzly tone of Slash’s guitar gave it the edge that it needed, even turning the beautiful ballad ‘November Rain’ into one of the most ominous songs in history with its ‘Layla’-esque outro towards the end.
Rose would even get the chance to pay his respects in person, serving as the singer for AC/DC for a while when Johnson needed time off. AC/DC may play a much simpler version of rock and roll than most, but when you perform it that well, usually that’s all you need to win people over.
But is it the band’s favourite AC/DC song?
Angus Young is probably the band’s ultimate mouthpiece and he definitely lked the track, naming it among a range of others as his favourite. “I would say ‘Bad Boy Boogie’,” said Young, “[It] has got a flavour because it’s got a little bit of a twist in it. It sounds easy but Malcolm had a little twist that I don’t think many could do […] How clever was he to do that? I still play it just for the fact that he just changed that little note around.”
One of the hits that Young feels particularly close to is ‘Thunderstruck’, a staple for AC/DC, and also one of the most difficult songs to play in the band’s catalogue (according to Young). “[I have] to sit down for an hour and make sure I’ve got my fingers warmed up to take on the track,” he said, “It’s got an unrelenting intricacy. I have to be confident whenever I play it.”
inally, Young also confessed that one of his favourite AC/DC tracks was a song that the band are probably most famous for, ‘Back In Black’. An ode to the late Bon Scott, Young thinks it’s one of the best songs the band has ever put together, and he loves that it’s one of the big hits the band are most recognised for. “I love playing ‘Back In Black’,” he said, “Instantly, if you hear The Stones, you hear ‘Satisfaction’, and I said, ‘Well, we got one better, we got one’.”
