The producer AC/DC never wanted to work with again: “He’s not a rock and roller, that’s for sure”
A band like AC/DC doesn’t really need a lot of bells and whistles to sound great. Whereas a group like Queen tried to put everything and the kitchen sink into the mix to make every track sound pristine, it didn’t matter to the Young Brothers as long as the song had a certain swing to it and every guitar had a lot of swagger behind it. There is a right and a wrong way to work with the Australian rockers, and Malcolm Young felt that Rick Rubin didn’t really gel with them on the record Ballbreaker.
Compared to the last 20 years they had spent at the top of the charts, though, AC/DC had sculpted the formula for doing no wrong on every track. There were occasional tunes that didn’t work on albums like Fly on the Wall, but even a decade after working on their masterpiece Back in Black, The Razor’s Edge gave them a second wind with ‘Thunderstruck’ taking over the world and ‘Moneytalks’ giving them one more radio single.
After coming back down to Earth, Ballbreaker felt like the next best thing for them. They had already put together an album that was as cut and dry as possible, so why not use Rubin to help them get back in touch with their natural sound?
It’s not like Rubin didn’t know what he was doing. Being a lifelong AC/DC fan, he had all the knowledge of what made the band work and even implemented the same parameters when working with acts like The Cult and Red Hot Chili Peppers, but he was never really cut out for it as far as Malcolm was concerned.
Because at their best, AC/DC could sound huge no matter how many microphones are on them, so Malcolm was perplexed seeing Rubin worry about mechanics, telling Guitar World, “When we worked with Rick, there was something not quite right there. He’s not a real rock and roller, that’s for sure. All he worried about was the snare drum. We would never go back to him. We thought he was a phoney, to be honest! But George and Harry are real rock and rollers. They don’t care if an album doesn’t sell. They just want to record good music.”
While it might not be fair to question his credentials, it’s easy to see where Malcolm is coming from. Listening back to Ballbreaker, more than a few songs sound just a little bit off compared to their earlier sound, and when listening to the lead single, ‘Hard as A Rock,’ Brian Johnson’s vocals aren’t as biting as most fans were used to hearing on ‘For Those About to Rock’.
Then again, it was probably a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Rubin had a habit of working with the biggest names in heavy music, but when going through his catalogue, the artists he was working with around the same time, like Tom Petty, didn’t necessarily have the same kind of punch that most people wanted to hear.
Still, AC/DC was never going to be kept down for very long, and by the time they got bluesier on Stiff Upper Lip, they even started to put that more mellow take on rock music and pull it off correctly. Rubin was capable of doing a lot of different projects during his time, but when working with a group as grizzled as AC/DC, you need to feel the music in your bones before even stepping in front of the mixing board.
