The one band Rick Rubin said was out of everyone’s league
The job that Rick Rubin has on every album he has worked on is one of the most beautiful contradictions in modern music.
Here is someone that doesn’t know the first thing about how to play any instrument, but even if he can only play the most rudimentary things on guitar, that didn’t matter so long as he could guide the best of the best to where they needed to go. It didn’t always work out the way it was supposed to, but Rubin knew that he had a foolproof plan if he had his favourites to lean on behind the scenes.
For someone that has been around as long as Rubin has, those pillars of perfection have changed more than a few times. No one would have ever imagined that the same guy that masterminded albums for Slayer and Run-DMC would suddenly be able to get magic out of Johnny Cash and Tom Petty, but the beauty of his production style has more to do with the simplicity than anything else.
Since he doesn’t have any musical notation to go on, Rubin came back to what the fans always wanted to hear. He approached every one of his albums as if he was listening from a fan’s perspective, and if something didn’t speak to him, he needed to let the artist know before they start falling too far down that rabbit hole. It takes guts to tell legends that they’ve got nothing, but Rubin wasn’t about to tiptoe around the issues, either.
Especially in rock and roll, there was a certain metric of what makes any great song work. Most of the time it comes back to the guitar riff or some snarling vocalist leading the way through, but Rubin needs more than that on every record. Any great song is about hearing the band working as one entity, and he felt that the best example of everyone working in unison like that was hearing AC/DC.
Although the Young brothers didn’t always have the best relationship working with someone like Rubin, the producer dreamed of being a part of one of their projects. The twin-guitar attack that they had was one of the most classic sounds in all of rock and roll, and when combined with the voice of either Bon Scott or Brian Johnson, Rubin felt that there was hardly any way for them to fail half the time.
Because compared to every other rock and roll band, there was no point in anyone trying to match what AC/DC did, saying, “Like Zeppelin, they were rooted in American R&B, but AC/DC took it to a minimal extreme that had never been heard before. Of course, I didn’t know that back then. I only knew that they sounded better than any other band. A great band like Metallica could play an AC/DC song note for note, and they still wouldn’t capture the tension and release that drive the music.”
Which probably explains why Malcolm Young had a little bit of a bone to pick with Led Zeppelin back in the day. Both of them were pulling from the same R&B roots every time they played, but whereas Robert Plant was one to belt to the heavens while Jimmy Page stretched out the song for all it was worth, AC/DC always abided by the creed of playing a great riff, soaking it up for a good few minutes, and getting out of there before the audience even knew what hit them.
It’s pretty simplistic by most people’s standards, but the fact that they have managed to keep that groove going even without Malcolm at the helm today is one of the most consistent feats of badassery in the rock and roll world. They may be using open chords half the time and can make classics with the first shapes everyone learns when starting out, but once you try to play it right, you start to realise how intricate it all is.
