The two last great rock ‘n’ roll songs, according to Angus Young
By the earnest Angus Young’s own admission, AC/DC make rock ‘n’ roll music for teenagers.
He also jokes that they’ve made the same album on an endless loop since they started. And he proudly proclaims that the problem with modern rock ‘n’ roll is that so few bands have followed suit.
His view, in short, is that if you’re serving vital soul food, then why change the recipe? With that in mind, he’s happily opined that things peaked with Chuck Berry in terms of influence, and that certain bands have merely subverted the duck-walking rocker’s magical recipe a little too far. After all, the reason the genre first appealed to the masses was because of its simplicity.
So, to the eternally young Angus, genres like prog are perversely pretentious, like the pointless trend of putting the cheese on the outside of the toastie. Perturbed by these greasy-fingered concoctions that get stadiums swaying rather than pogoing their 9 to 5 cares away, he draws the line for classic rock at a certain period in the 1960s.
“I’ll tell you when it stopped getting’ good,” he told Classic Rock in 1977. “[It was] when the Rolling Stones put out ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ and ‘Street Fightin’ Man’. Past that, there’s nuthin’. Led Zeppelin and all that have just been poor imitators of The Who and bands like that.”
Back in what Young would call the glory days, imitation was a celebrated boon. The simple triad of pop is what made it rock. There was a raucous frenzy of fellow bands throwing out adjacent three-chord anthems, and an upswell of eudomonia followed. Then bands tried to hide their immigration. They wanted to be known as ‘geniuses’ rather than ‘rockstars’, and the rot set in.
“That’s when I reckon it stopped,” he said. “The rest I wouldn’t even call progressive.” In truth, there’s no doubting that Led Zeppelin were, indeed, linked directly to the blues, but this arc was cunningly hidden behind a sense of orchestral overture.
While to many, that might have sounded like a vital addition to the canon of modern music, Young figured it was tantamount to the bizarre new bastardisation of bands writing perfectly good pop songs and then blasting a dissonant saxophone over the top of the mix in an obvious bid to be ‘different’. Who is that for, Young would argue? Has anyone ever said, ‘Ooh, the complexity of that rock song really got me moving’?
The musical core of ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ and ‘Street Fightin’ Man’ is strictly linked to the blues, and Young figured that the songs were all the better for it. The individualism came from the personality of the Stones on those songs, but thereafter he figures that they lost their way in search for, ironically, soulless originality.
“The Rolling Stones get up and play soul music these days, and this is supposed to be rock ‘n’ roll. Leave that to the people who do it best,” he later complained. Adding a little further down the line, “We try to keep it exciting all the time.”
For the school uniform sporting Aussie, that stopped being the case for most other yawning bands in around 1968, when the counterculture went looking for something ‘more’ whatever the hell that is.
