Nerd Movie Reviews

AC/DC: proto-metal

AC/DC was one of the premier rock bands of the 1970s and remains one of the most well-known acts in all of classic rock. Even people who don’t like the relatively mild and light classic rock sound can still get into AC/DC. Priori to AC/DC, a lot of the so-called hard rock outfits, such as Steppenwolf, were tame by today’s standards. If you don’t believe me, turn on Born To Be Wild by Steppenwolf sometime. Yeah, it’s fun, it’s catchy, its certainly sounds a little wild… But it’s not hard. It doesn’t aggressively grab your head the way you expect it to. Hard rock just wasn’t there yet when Steppenwolf made their music.

Now throw on Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap by AC/DC. Not only does it aggressively grab your head, it’ll stomp on your face, too, and possibly yank your ear a little. Bon Scott’s raspy voice and persistent vocal fry, his borderline deranged delivery, along with Angus Young’s Gibson SG screaming through a set of Marshall stacks, makes it clear what you’re listening to.

That’s what AC/DC was. It wouldn’t be until Black Sabbath found their metal voice on Master of Reality when the metal genre would truly take off, but the big stumbling brontosaurus that was Toni Iommi’s guitar work could not have existed without acts like AC/DC. AC/DC’s big contribution was their fearlessness in experimenting with extremity. There was no such thing as too loud, no such thing as too raucous or obnoxious or vulgar. This is the band that recorded the song Big Balls, after all. Incidentally, Big Balls was the first song I learned to play all the way through on guitar.

Things would get harder after that, of course. The metal genre, with its insatiable hunger for boundary-breaking, would proceed from the primitive heavy metal of Black Sabbath through thrash, death, and black metal, before finally burning out in post-black and blackgaze. And hard rock would follow its own course into hair metal and then grunge. But AC/DC was one of the first bands to realize that you can make almost any chord sound cool just by cranking the gain high enough on that big tube stack.

There is a reason why AC/DC is immortal. That first impression never dies. The mark they made on rock and roll, along with some of the immortal rockers such as Highway To Hell and Thunderstruck, have made them permanently contemporary. The original band members are old men now, but that doesn’t stop today’s youth from going around in AC/DC rock t shirts.