The greatest AC/DC album, according to Lars Ulrich
Angus Young once joked that AC/DC have perpetually made music for teenagers. That’s a manifesto that Lars Ulrich can get on board with.
Whether you’re 15 or 65, the visceral energy of the Australian rockers offers up vital reverie that can make you forget the woes of the world. So, when the little rascals are turned up to 11, that’s perhaps when they’re at their best. Thus, Ulrich picks out their heaviest album as their very best.
“This is AC/DC’s heaviest record, AC/DC’s densest record, AC/DC’s most energetic record,” he said of Let There Be Rock from 1977, citing it as one of the 15 greatest metal and hard rock albums of all time. It arrived when the band were “very close to being all over”, their manager Michael Browning once said, and it saw them battle back against that fate in defiant style.
Emboldened by that ‘now or never’ mentality, the group delved deeper into their modus operandi for their fourth record and came up with a slew of classic tracks. “Four or five of the songs are just staple AC/DC live,” the Metallica drummer told Rolling Stone, “Between ‘Let There Be Rock’, ‘Bad Boy Boogie’, ‘Whole Lotta Rosie’, and ‘Hell Ain’t a Bad Place to Be’.”
“I don’t even want to try to comprehend how many times these songs have been played live,” he mused. Well, he needn’t wonder, they’ve all been played live as follows: ‘Let There Be Rock’ (1600), ‘Bad Boy Boogie’ (775), ‘Whole Lotta Rosie’ (1715), and ‘Hell Ain’t a Bad Place to Be’ (648).
So, a fair few thundering times, indeed.
Those figures showcase how the record really established what the band were all about – something that they have proudly never wavered from ever since. As Ulrich explains, “Obviously, this is before AC/DC hooked up with [producer] Mutt Lange on the Highway to Hell album and started crafting to perfection the idea of the three-to-four-minute rock song as a radio hit.”
Angus Young has always joked that such a mindset has always been their mainstay ever since, and it is telling that it was born from this record when they were right on the brink. Ulrich agrees with Keith Richards that the beauty of AC/DC is not just in their self-assuredness, but also the fact that this is exacted by their compositional constitution, too.
According to Ulrich, this is perfectly on display here. He says that Let There Be Rock showcased a “perfect balance of two guitars: just endless guitar solos and the riffs and Angus and Malcolm playing. A lot of the songs would start with one guy playing a riff, the other guy playing open chords. Then, after 16 bars or 32 bars or whatever, both guitars would lock in on the same riff.”
This is where the songs show their power and break free from what could be classed as blues-driven into something that helped to establish the bold tenets of ‘hard rock’. Alas, it wasn’t just two guitars. “Bon [Scott] would come in with these cheeky, great, almost cartoon-like lyrics about women and bad behaviour and illicit experiences,” he says.
Further embodied by the do-or-die ‘as live’ production, Ulrich says, “It’s one of those albums where it sounds like you’re sitting in the studio with them. At the beginning of the songs, you can hear the amplifiers buzzing, and there’s, like, count-ins and you can hear the talking in the studio, and all that kind of stuff. This is raw, blues-based hard rock at its absolute peak.”
And that peak just so happened to save the band, pushing them on to such soaring heights that they could survey the hell below that they sang of. Little wonder even Angus Young calls it their definitive album, too.
