With Highway To Hell, AC/DC raced ahead of the rest by making a record that finally helped them break America... but such success came with a huge cost.
For Malcolm Young, AC/DC’s rhythm guitarist, it was always about the riff. And with one in particular, as soon as he came up with it in the early days of 1979, he knew in his bones it was something special. As he put it, with the kind of bluntness and vulgarity that had always defined the band’s work: “It stuck out like a dog’s balls.”
This riff was perfect in its simplicity: the way it moved, in staccato bursts, reminiscent of Free’s All Right Now. And from it came arguably the most important song of AC/DC’s whole career. Its title started out as a joke, when lead guitarist Angus Young, Malcolm’s kid brother, described the band’s gruelling 1978 tour as “a fucking highway to hell”. And in the words, belted out by singer Bon Scott, was a signature statement of devil-may-care rock’n’roll attitude.
Highway To Hell was the title track of AC/DC’s first million-selling album. In the UK it was the band’s first Top 10 hit outside of their native Australia. Most significantly, as Angus Young said: “That was the album that broke us in America.”
All of this did not come easily. In the making of the Highway To Hell album, the band were under intense pressure from Atlantic Records in America to come up with a hit record. This led Malcolm and Angus to make one of the toughest decisions of their lives: dispensing with the services of their elder brother, George Young, who had produced all of AC/DC’s earlier albums with Harry Vanda, a former member, like George, of Australian group The Easybeats. There were even whispers around Atlantic that Bon Scott should be fired from the band, his hard-drinking lifestyle making him too much of a loose cannon and his voice deemed too raw and idiosyncratic for mainstream tastes.
In the end, Bon proved the doubters wrong, delivering the performance of a lifetime on Highway To Hell, pushed on by Mutt Lange, the brilliant young producer who replaced George and Harry. What Lange got out of the band was exactly what Atlantic had demanded – a straight-up, no-bullshit hard rock record that was true to AC/DC’s roots, but with a cleaner edge.
But while Highway To Hell was the hit record that elevated AC/DC to major stardom, it was also the last hurrah for Bon Scott. On February 19, 1980, less than a month after the Highway To Hell tour ended, the singer was found dead in London following a night of heavy drinking. The exact circumstances of Bon Scott's death would be the subject of conjecture for almost 40 years.
There was always a toughness about AC/DC, in the music they played – the sound of Chuck Berry and Little Richard and the Rolling Stones jacked up to maximum volume and intensity – and in the way they carried themselves. It came from years of graft, sweating it out in the pubs and clubs of Australia, where bottles were thrown if a crowd could smell blood. No matter that the members of AC/DC were all short-arses, that Angus was teetotal and wore a schoolboy uniform on stage, and that bassist Cliff Williams, the band’s sole Englishman, was quiet and easy going.
Malcolm Mitchell Young (6 January 1953 – 18 November 2017) was an Australian musician who was the rhythm guitarist, backing vocalist and a founding member of the hard rock band AC/DC. Except for a brief absence in 1988, he was a member of AC/DC from its inception in 1973 until retiring in 2014 for health reasons. As a member of AC/DC, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2003. Rolling Stone named Young as the 38th best guitarist of all time along with his younger brother and fellow AC/DC member Angus Young.
Though Angus was the more visible of the brothers, Malcolm was described as the driving force and the leader of the band. In 2014, Young stated that despite his retirement from the band, AC/DC was determined to continue making music with his blessing.
Young left AC/DC in mid-2014 to receive treatment for dementia.
In September 2014, the band's management announced that he would be retiring permanently. He died from the effects of dementia on 18 November 2017.😢
Angus Young was born on March 31, 1955 in Glasgow, Scotland. At school, Angus was an unenthusiastic student. His only real academic interest was art which allowed him some freedom of expression. He gave up school at 15 and went to work for a soft porn magazine called Ribald as a printer. But his ambitions laid elsewhere anyway, and for a year prior to leaving school Angus had been practising guitar almost constantly, jamming around with friends and playing at school dances. In the beginning, Angus messed around with brother Malcolm Young's guitars for years before his mother finally bought him his own, a cheap little acoustic. By the time he was eleven Angus had flirted with a tutorial course, but he prefered to learn by himself and most of his musical education was pure trial and error. While his older brother Malcolm Young was hatching plans for his new band, Angus was well on his way toward establishing a distinctive stage persona. His seemingly out-of-control onstage body language has always come naturally. Such trademark Angus moves as his patented duckwalk could be handy attention-getting devices when playing for drunken, rowdy barroom crowds. Many of these gestures grew out of accidents.
One night Tantrum, the pre-AC/DC band Angus was playing with, was going down really badly. Angus walked across the stage and tripped over the guitar lead, so he kept running across the floor. He made it look like a death scene, screaming all hell from the guitar. It was the only clap they got that night. Angus told his brother about it. Malcolm Young asked him to join the band he was putting together.
Okay East Valley the long awaited Heaven & Hell show is almost here! Make sure to get there early to get a good seat because this show is going to be packed!
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Happy 47th anniversary to If You Want Blood ( You've Got It) Released October 13th 1978 (Album Review)
By 1978, AC/DC had packed their relatively short, half-decade career with five albums and hundreds of concerts. For their strenuous efforts, they deservedly attained a considerable amount of success around the world. But they still hadn't cracked the platinum-sales mark in the U.S.
That career benchmark was just around the corner, with the following year's Highway to Hell. But before taking that next step, the band decided the time was ripe to celebrate its first few years with a live album, the classic If You Want Blood You've Got It.
Since the dawn of the '70s, and especially after the mammoth success of 1976's Frampton Comes Alive!, live albums had become a convenient, and expected, stopgap between studio records. But they could also generate some serious revenue and break careers wide open. (See Cheap Trick's At Budokan.)
They also brought the unparalleled excitement of a concert experience to thousands of fans who couldn't make it to a show – whether the reason was geographical, financial or simply because they were too young.
Still, successfully transposing the high-energy and high-decibel thrills of a living, breathing performance to wax was no easy task. But AC/DC managed to elevate the live album to new heights with If You Want Blood You've Got It on Oct. 13, 1978.
AC/DC released the Powerage album to great reviews earlier in the year, and then hit the road across Europe and North America, culminating in a home-away-from-home appearance at the Apollo Theatre in Glasgow – the birthplace of the band's Angus and Malcolm Young prior to their family's migration to Australia.
That connection may or may not have impacted the end results. In any the case, AC/DC delivered an all-time blistering set, powered by such band staples as "Hell Ain't a Bad Place to Be," "Problem Child," "High Voltage" and "Whole Lotta Rosie." What's more, extended versions of "Bad Boy Boogie" and "Let There Be Rock" revealed the electrifying lengths to which Angus could take his six-string improvisations on any given night, while "The Jack" gave fans an entirely different set of explicit (and often hilarious) lyrics.
These incredible songs and the band's breathtaking power combined to produce a stone-cold classic in If You Want Blood You've Got It. The LP ranks consistently high in best-live-album polls, and for good reason: Other concert records may boast more songs, more Top 40 hits or even more crowd-pleasing gimmicks. Very few can challenge the sheer excitement and reckless abandon captured on AC/DC's terrific concert document.
The Hilariously Bad First Concerts of Rock's Biggest Ba
Bon Scott sporting his Bazza McKenzie shirt.
Free show this Thursday night!
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