“The man made it something”: The rock star Brian Johnson compared to the ‘Bible’
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” the Bible begins right at the start of it all, which makes sense, but AC/DC’s Brian Johnson only worships music, so how does all that relate to him?
In the 1980s, a wave of satanic panic took over the US, and conservatives all across the country decided that in a post-Vietnam War phase, while the threat from Russia was beginning to get a bit boring in the ongoing nothingness of the Cold War, they needed something new to worry about.
The target became rock music, and the pearl-clutching hypothesis was that bands like AC/DC were actually secret soldiers of the devil sent here to condemn children to hell. The rest of the rock scene was being accused of it too, as parents overanalysed lyrics for secret meanings, but given that AC/DC were quite literally and outright singing “I’m on a highway to hell”, it didn’t help their case.
As heavier rock and metal were growing in popularity, AC/DC encapsulated that classic devilish image with their album artwork, giving them horns, engulfing them in flames or just generally being dark, spooky, or, in the eyes of some scandalised mother, promoting all kinds of demon worship.
It was in 1980 that Brian Johnson was brought into the band following the death of Bon Scott, and the atheist singer from Newcastle perfectly fit into their ranks. Between them, their belief was somewhat cliché: they only had one god, and it was the music. So through that belief, Johnson began wondering about the musical Bible; if God began at the beginning, where would their version have to start? To him, it was simple.
“Elvis has to be the handsomest man on the planet. He invented (Rock and Roll), you (must) have him on there. It’s like reading the Bible and not having ‘Genesis’,” Johnson said once. To him, any discussion of rock music that doesn’t begin with Elvis Presley is lacking in foundation, adding, “it’s a void”.
Just like God conjuring light and animals and everything else, Johnson said of Elvis, “This man made it something just by his presence”. The musical equivalent of God’s magic wand had to be Elvis’ hips as the AC/DC singer didn’t hold back, talking about the singer with complete awe as he stated, “How does he do that? I mean, his voice is pure”.
Specifically, in Johnson’s Bible, it begins with Elvis performing his 1957 hit in the film it was named after, coming out of a cell as an all-singing, all-dancing explosion of new culture. “‘Jailhouse Rock’ for me, the first time I heard this, his voice was almost like a guitar. You didn’t even know what he was talking about,” he said as this track was something brand new and something world-changing.
“But boy, it sounded good. It was just the hero for a long, long time,” he added, as in his eyes, that moment and that man were the beginning of the world he lived in, and the religion he preached.
