Is AC/DC’s Who Made Who a soundtrack, greatest hits album, or both?

I don’t care about Maximum Overdrive. And, considering that it made about seven million bucks on a nine million dollar budget, I’d guess most folks feel similarly. I like Stephen King well enough, but he should stick to writing books instead of directing movies. But what I do care about is Who Made Who, the soundtrack accompaniment to King’s Trucks adaptation. At a dinner last week, my partner’s mom got to talking about the interests that parents pass down to their kids. I did a quick scan of my own references, the ones left in me by a father who’s an eldest son by tragedy: a vocabulary that’s fifty percent Tommy Boy quotes, Mecum car auction marathons, a baseball team that hasn’t won a World Series in seventy-seven years, AC/DC albums. The last one is the best. Most kids my age were collecting Bionicle and Star Wars lightsabers because Revenge of the Sith was in theaters. I had those things too, but I treasured my AC/DC CD collection with my life. 

Who Made Who isn’t a soundtrack to me, though I imagine the “lookin’ for a truck” line in “Ride On” did wonders for Maximum Overdrive. Aside from that Bon Scott-sung track, the LP is practically a quasi-greatest hits record for AC/DC’s first Brian Johnson phase. At seven years old I had no concept of compilation albums. It seemed normal to have “You Shook Me All Night Long” and “Hells Bells” on Back in Black and Who Made Who. I’m a Bon Scott lifer now and was even then, as my knowledge of AC/DC’s catalog chronically dissipates post-1980, save for Stiff Upper Lip, which I knew well because Dad had it on a scratched cassette in his blue Dodge pickup. I didn’t own For Those About to Rock (We Salute You), Fly on the Wall, and Flick of the Switch on CD but Who Made Who introduced me to the relevant parts of them. 

By 2005, Maximum Overdrive’s cultural currency was cable syndication. Who Made Who seemed better off without it. I knew of Stephen King vaguely as a name in the credits of Stand By Me, which would sometimes play on one of the three color TV channels my grandmother had. The It miniseries scared me sideways, and it’s not like my folks were going to bring Cujo or The Shining into the house after that. They were buying me Back in Black. I get King’s choice to fill his directorial debut with AC/DC, considering the band was selling fifty million albums in an era dominated by synth-pop and hair metal. But only six million people bought Who Made Who, and even fewer people watched Maximum Overdrive. Charts and box offices didn’t always reward innocuous art. 

But twenty years ago, Who Made Who dominated the airplay of my childhood, even though it was the fifth most important AC/DC album in my collection, at best—filing in behind, in order, Highway to Hell, Let There Be Rock, all the Bon Scott records I carried around like a Bible. Now? Oh, it’s probably even further down the list, as I spend a lot of time with If You Want Blood You’ve Got It and Powerage. But Who Made Who had three of my favorite AC/DC songs on it: the title song, “Ride On,” and “You Shook Me All Night Long.” Sometimes at my grandparents’ house I’d watch VH1 all day long, but Mamaw would make me turn off the TV when the “You Shook Me All Night Long” music video came on. 

I don’t have to look at the Who Made Who cover to remember its front image: Angus Young, wearing his usual schoolboy duds and a colorful, spiral cap, standing between colosseum pillars with his aged cherry Gibson SG in hand. He’s bathed in blue beneath the yellow banner of his band’s squealer font. The back cover was even cooler to me, because it had pictures of all the players. Brian Johnson had his denim vest and newsie cap on. Malcolm strummed his Gretsch Jet Firebird. Cliff Williams’ moppy hair fell all over his face. Simon Wright looked like he was drumming inside a spaceship or an echo chamber. And then there was Angus in the middle: mouth open, hair going every which way, necktie starting to loosen. Behind them all was a texture of blue that reminded me of a cloud—decidedly not very rock and roll, far more in tune with the truck-stop sci-fi style of Maximum Overdrive. 

Who Made Who is fascinating forty years later because nobody evangelized it. The album didn’t play on the radio like Purple Rain. It didn’t put rap music in my DNA like Wild Style, nor did it spin my head around like Head’s “Porpoise Song.” It had none of the venom that made Repo Man’s L.A. hardcore blasts seem dangerous. Even This Is Spinal Tap, a movie that made fun of all the bands AC/DC was jockeying for position with, obliterated Who Made Who with unserious yet immortal rock and roll irony. AC/DC is proof that you can only make a living by copying yourself for so long. 

But I have to commend Who Made Who, because the record that came after—Blow Up Your Video—is one of AC/DC’s worst albums: all filler, no killer, except for the pretty good “Heatseeker.” “Who Made Who” was one of three new songs written exclusively for Maximum Overdrive, along with instrumentals “D.T.” and “Chase the Ace.” In high school, none of us had streaming subscriptions, so we downloaded whatever MP3 app was available and ripped songs from YouTube. I remember my neighbor David getting obsessed with “Who Made Who” and playing it over and over at lunch. Out of all the AC/DC songs, I thought. But now I get it, because “Who Made Who” is a total scorcher despite Mutt Lange’s airless production. You can feel the tremors of AC/DC before their menace flattened in the Eighties. The interplay between Angus Young and his brother Malcolm seems so alive there, in some of the most interesting arpeggios in an AC/DC song since “What’s Next to the Moon.” I don’t think the band has made a better song than “Who Made Who” since. 

AC/DC still hasn’t gotten a proper “greatest hits” treatment, not officially at least. No The Essential AC/DC or some label-backed cash-grab after a studio album catastrophe—à la Best of the Beach Boys hitting shelves after Pet Sounds flopped. My dad had the Bonfire collection, which featured more live recordings than studio grails, and I liked the story it told about Bon Scott. There’s also Backtracks from 2009, which is just a box set of rarities and a coffee table book. If you really care about getting a portrait of the band itself, the Iron Man 2 soundtrack is the closest you’re going to get. The obvious parts are there—“Let There Be Rock,” “Highway to Hell,” “Thunderstruck,” “Back in Black”—but the music supervisors weren’t afraid to go deeper into AC/DC’s catalog, putting non-mainstream songs on both sides of the record: “Guns for Hire” from Flick of the Switch, “Evil Walks” from For Those About to Rock, “Cold Hearted Man” from the EU pressing of Powerage, “War Machine” from Black Ice. 

When Iron Man 2 came out, I’d moved on from my first love affair with AC/DC. By then, Steven had already started taunting me about them, saying their songs were “all the same chord.” By brute force, that music became novelty music. But when Dad and I saw Iron Man 2 in theaters, we both smiled every time Angus Young’s guitar squealed in a scene. Suddenly I could recite every lyric, and we and fifty other father-son maniacs hummed the dance of the living dead and put up our rock horns as we spilled out of the Regal exit door. Dad had traded the Dodge pickup in for a Chevy SUV by then, and, after losing his cassette tape deck, he stored all of our CDs in the backseat. I thumbed through the jewel cases and saw a blanched electric blue insert poking out, only now the plastic covering it had started to split. Still, I begged Dad to put it on, and he did, and we sang our hearts out until the satellites sent us a picture.

Matt Mitchell is the editor of Paste. They live in Los Angeles.

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