“We were slogging it out”: The song Angus Young called the soundtrack to AC/DC
It wasn’t really that complicated to nail down the kind of musical direction Angus Young was going for with AC/DC.
The rock and roll world seemed to have a very set structure to him, and even if the band did have a recycling list of the same style of songs, who the hell cared when that song was one of the best rock and roll songs ever conceived? It was totally fine for them to keep making songs that sounded like ‘Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap’, but it turned out that a few tunes managed to hit the nail on the head for their career a lot better than anything else ever could.
Because if you’ve never heard rock and roll before, AC/DC is a pretty good indicator of what to expect from the genre. Brian Johnson and Bon Scott might take a bit of getting used to some of their classics, but the more you listen to them wail, the more you start to appreciate what it’s all about. This was about creating the musical version of absolute reckless abandon, and Young was practically the king of that whenever he came out in his schoolboy uniform.
In his prime, Young was a ball of energy everywhere he went, and while his brother Malcolm was more than happy to churn out one riff after another, Angus was always bringing a lot more fire to the equation. ‘Let There Be Rock’ didn’t necessarily need three separate guitar solos by any stretch, but when you have someone who could give Tasmanian Devil from Looney Tunes a run for his money, why the hell would you not want to show him off at least a little bit when ‘Thunderstruck’ plays?
But even if people have a fondness for the modern version of AC/DC, there’s no disputing that Bon Scott was the spirit of the band. Even as indispensable as the brothers were to the band, Scott was the one who was bringing the good time everywhere he went when he first started, whether it was breaking out the bagpipes or singing about life as a rock and roll singer. Not many people captured the spirit of playing in a rock and roll band like Scott, and ‘Highway to Hell’ was his magnum opus.
The album itself is one of the best records they ever made, but it’s strange that one of their signature songs would be so slow by comparison. ‘Beating Around the Bush’ on the same album absolutely kicks this song’s ass up and down the block in terms of raw musicianship, but there’s a certain swagger to the way that Scott sings the title track that no one can really duplicate. And for Young, every line that he was singing was coming from a genuine place for all of them.
No one else could really manage to capture life on the road other than musicians, and Young felt that ‘Highway to Hell’ was the theme that carried them through every year on the road, saying, “Highway to Hell was a big statement at the time. It was the last album we’d done with Bon, and we were slogging it out, we were touring so much, it didn’t stop.
“You’d be in America and then you’re on a plane to Europe to do two weeks there and then you’re back here and then fly back to Europe and do a couple of summer shows, crisscrossing the globe. ‘Highway to Hell’ probably sums up what you would call our career up till then: it was a highway to hell!”
And while there are rumours to this day as to where the real, supposed highway Scott was talking about is, none of them is really true. The song’s a love letter to the open road that everyone knows all too well in the music industry, and even if there is one specific stretch of asphalt that says it all, it’s much more interesting for people to create that fictionalised highway in their own mind.
It’s a shame that Scott’s time driving on that stretch of road was criminally short, but he wasn’t one to shed any tears over his life being cut short. He was happy to have become one of the greatest frontmen that the world had ever seen, and every time the song shows up in movies or is played by the band onstage, the spirit that he brought is still out in full force with every single chord strike.
