The singer Angus Young crowned as the greatest: “He had the voice of gods”
Being the lead singer for a band like AC/DC didn’t necessarily mean having the best vocal range for Angus Young.
He was more than happy to have the right attitude behind the microphone whenever he played his riffs, and whether that was Bon Scott or Brian Johnson, both frontmen understood the sleazy sound of the band from the moment they started jamming with them. But just because both of them sounded like they swallowed a mouthful of razor blades didn’t mean that Young still had his standards when it came to singing tunes like ‘Back in Black’.
Because when you think about it, half of AC/DC’s catalogue is deceptively tricky to sing. Their music might be made to be sung at the top of every set of lungs in a stadium, but if you listen to Johnson’s high notes on ‘Hells Bells’, he seems to be going for the same kind of notes that Robert Plant was hitting, only with a little bit more muscle behind his delivery. He didn’t always sound the greatest when he hit them, but he was going to move the Earth if it meant getting the sound he wanted.
Which strangely isn’t all that dissimilar than what Angus sounds like whenever he plugs in his guitar. Neither Scott nor Johnson was looking to sound like Sinatra whenever they performed, but when listening to the kind of distortion that they put on their voice, it’s actually fairly close to the way that Angus and Malcolm’s guitars sound. It might have been their way to be heard over their amplifiers, but there was also something trailing back to the glory days of rock and roll in there as well.
Granted, neither vocalist was going to be Elvis Presley crooning their way through their set. They were the exact opposite band to make a heartwrenching ballad, but it makes sense for them to make tunes that went back to Little Richard. He was the original wild man, and Angus envisioned having that kind of voice behind all of their tunes when they first started jamming down under.
Richard had already paved the way for every rock and roll singer that came after him, but Angus felt that what he did was almost otherworldly, saying, “I always remembered Little Richard, one of his little raps before the song, he’s going, ‘My music is the healing music. It makes the deaf hear, the deaf and dumb rise up and hear and talk.’ And he had the voice of gods you know. He had some great raps between songs. So he had all this great stuff and, for me, Little Richard, I loved the energy and still to this day if I want to hear rock and roll and that energy and songs that pack a punch it’s Little Richard.”
While AC/DC may have been teetering on the edge of punk rock before the genre was invented, Richard has a greater case for being the originator of the genre. What he was doing was practically taboo in middle America, but as soon as he threw on that glittery makeup and started screaming at the top of his lungs, kids started to hear the kind of freedom that teenage music had been missing for years.
And listening to what AC/DC have been doing for decades, Angus is practically carrying on the same kind of energy that Richard had in his prime. Johnson holds his own these days being the cheerleader of the group in many respects, but whereas Richard put his leg up on the piano and worked the audience at every opportunity, Angus isn’t leaving the stage until he’s exerted every bit of energy that he can out of his body and guitar.
Because when you think about it, rock and roll was never about phoning it in whenever the house lights came on. People can spend their entire lives choreographing everything until it sounds perfect, but whether you’re talking about Richard, Angus, or even Iggy Pop, rock and roll was always populated by legends that were willing to bleed for their art whenever they got an instrument in their hands.
