The Going Price is Going to Hell: A Love Letter to AC/DC

After my parents put an addition onto the family home in 2001, they bought this much-too-big entertainment center for the living room. It had more cabinets than I had years on this earth, and they filled them up with photo albums, sports memorabilia, VHS tapes and snow globes. CDs were at their peak popularity, and Dad had a whole mess of them. When I got bored, I’d comb through the discs, passing through a Cheech & Chong record, my mom’s Garth Brooks collection and various mixes that family friends would burn for my dad, like both Traveling Wilburys LPs and the American Graffiti soundtrack.

But if you dug through those titles long enough, you’d come across a splendid array of AC/DC albums—High Voltage, Powerage, AC/DC Live—next to an unwatched copy of From Justin to Kelly and a wall of Tae Bo tapes. Dad even had the Bonfire box set, but I was never allowed to fiddle with it. Too precious, even though I never saw him use it himself. So, I’d sneak High Voltage into my bedroom on summer days while Dad was at work, playing it over and over on my 5-disc changer stereo. After hearing the first few notes of “It’s a Long Way to the Top” for the first time, while poring over the polaroids and affectionate fan letters printed on the back cover, I was thrust into the folklorish escapades of AC/DC’s hotel-motel, broken-boned strain of rock ‘n’ roll.

Soon, I was begging my mom to buy me a copy of Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap during a Walmart trip, back when Walmart still had a CD section worth poring over. I was mystified by the men and women on the cover with their eyes censored—so much so that I would draw portraits of myself with black boxes over my eyes, too. It was the fall of 2004, when I was juggling a growing, profound love for AC/DC with a short-lived obsession with Jesse McCartney’s Beautiful Soul. The latter would hit its peak a year later, when McCartney guest-starred on an episode of The Suite Life of Zack & Cody.

But the crude, circuit-breaking riffs of Angus Young, the heart-monitor strums of his brother Malcolm’s rhythm axe, the panging, skull-rattling beats of Phil Rudd’s drum kit and Bon Scott’s shredded, deep-throated wail outlived every other band that entered my orbit for at least six, maybe seven years. I carried a portable CD player everywhere like it was a wallet full of cash; the screenplay of my favorite movie, School of Rock, arrived as if it was written out of the ashes of Angus’s red-hot intro lick on “It’s a Long Way to the Top”; I worshipped a discography of devil horns, tight denim with cock outlines, schoolboy garb and one album’s booklet insert, which had a picture of a giant blow-up doll with massive knockers straddling a hell-bound locomotive tucked nicely into the back of it. It all felt so dangerous. It all felt so wonderfully mine.

I used to sit in this baby-sized rocking chair in my bedroom and read every inch of the liner notes of Ballbreaker. I was irreversibly spooked by the song “Boogie Man.” Really, most of what AC/DC put out after Back in Black scared the bejesus out of me back then. For Those About to Rock (We Salute You) didn’t charm me in the same way Let There Be Rock did, just as the machine-gun, poisonous rapture of “This Means War” didn’t quite snap me into splendor like the sensual havoc of “You Shook Me All Night Long” did. Robert Christgau called the latter a “drum-hooked fucksong.” Seven-year-old me didn’t think that exactly, but seven-year-old me thought the song was a font of some barbaric, sex-pot paradise worth singing along to.

I had a poster in my room that featured every AC/DC album from High Voltage and Ballbreaker on it. It even had the If You Want Blood live album and the Who Made Who soundtrack for Stephen King’s Maximum Overdrive. The ‘74 Jailbreak EP was there, too. It was taped to my wall for years, and I can remember how the nighttime glow of my fish tank would shine on the Highway to Hell cover especially. I’d stay up late, studying every speck of that album cover while my dad’s snoring vibrated the walls, drawing myself like Angus—horns poking through a ballcap, pursed blowjob lips, navy blue velvet blazer, hand curled around a devil’s tail and all. I wanted so badly to be Angus Young and his milk-drinking, duck-walking, cigarette-smoking boyishness.

I imagine a lot of this comes from me being an only child. Just like how I’d simulate high-stakes basketball games by myself in the driveway, my fantasies of becoming a scrawny, suit-clad shredder felt like a dream I could only reach alone. My mom had a bunch of unused blank CDs in the cabinet of her computer desk, and I’d hawk them and draw my own album covers for them, coming up with completely fake tracklists for my band, Power Chord of the Shock Wrock (stylized as PCO/TSW with a lightning bolt down the middle, like AC/DC). Some of the only memories I still have of those days are 1) drawing myself like McCartney on the Beautiful Soul cover on American Idol finale night when Carrie Underwood bested Bo Bice and 2) showing my dad one of my “records” and then playing an impromptu rendition of “The Backdoor,” a song whose title I certainly ripped from Drake Bell’s “The Backhouse.” One day in first grade, I recruited a couple of friends during breakfast to play in PCO/TSW. We banged sticks against rocks on the playground and sang total nonsense. They quit by the end of the day, demoting me to the rock ‘n’ roll orphan I had come into this world as.

Loving AC/DC when I was so young was like taking a gateway drug into a world no one else my age had access to. It was my dad’s doing completely, as he let me listen to grown, raunchy men sing about balls, drinking, rock ‘n’ roll and sex in every shape, color and motion. I didn’t ride in his blue Dodge pickup very often but, when I did, I’d beg him to put Stiff Upper Lip in the tape deck. Such gestures became a prelude to getting permission to watch Revenge of the Nerds for the first time at age eight, to having the entire Friday the 13th and Halloween franchises memorized by age 10. And, by the time I was in third grade, I’d seen enough cinematic bush to satiate a lifetime of desire. Christmas 2004 was especially major, as a picture of me wearing AC/DC pajama pants and an AC/DC headband entered the pantheon of holiday mementos.

But a year later, Christmas 2005 yielded the most important addition to my repertoire yet: a cherry-red Fender Squire. I wanted that model specifically, after having seen Bell’s red Fender in an episode of Drake & Josh that I watched over and over on my blue VideoNow player. There’s a picture of me, in my grandparents’ backroom that now belongs to my parents, wearing an AC/DC shirt and posing with the guitar, excited to blow Mamaw and Papaw’s eardrums out with the tiny amplifier that came with the axe. I took guitar lessons for a while. Every other Wednesday, Mom would drive me to Daybreak Music in Cortland, Ohio for practice. I kept up with it until I was just spinning tires. My dad taught me the only riff I knew—Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water,” naturally—and I couldn’t quite retain any of what I was being taught.

It became clear quite fast that learning musical instruments wasn’t a part of my destiny—a truth I’d learn over and over again. I joined the school band in 5th grade, wanting to rip on the saxophone, and lasted a month before calling it quits. Even in high school, both of my best friends were aces at the six-string. One of them tried teaching me a few simple riffs. I could barely do more than strum weak melodies. As it became more and more clear that I’d never make it as a musician, I became more and more detached from my affection for AC/DC. I wasn’t much of a singer, either. If I couldn’t be Angus Young, I didn’t want to be anything at all.

Because, though Bon Scott was the voice and the crotch of AC/DC—having joined the Young brothers after they ditched their glam rock image and OG vocalist Dave Evans quit—Angus was the band’s heart, soul and blood. I adored his stage antics, coming out in a full schoolboy suit and then, as the setlist crawled toward a conclusion, stripping his wardrobe down piece by piece until he ricocheted around the stage in velvet short-shorts and nothing else. He played a Gibson SG, a guitar with a body sharp like the devil horns synonymous with the band’s enduring image. The first one he ever bought, in 1970, eventually got wood rot from all of the sweat that leaked into it from his stage performances. On the cover of High Voltage, his SG looks like it’s made of cardboard and nearly cut in-half; on the cover of Powerage, Angus’s hands are replaced with electric wires of every color—a fitting metaphor of his convulsing fingers, which would throw tantrums up and down the neck of that SG, alternating between playing fretted notes and trifling an open string. He used to wear an Ohio State University shirt during the High Voltage days, and I could never figure out how he’d come into possession of such a Midwestern artifact all the way over in Sydney.

By the time I was a pre-teen, I became obsessed with Ed Hardy after discovering his fashion brand during one of the many afternoons I spent surfing the internet while my mom graded papers after school. Down the rabbit hole I went, discovering Don Ed’s art portfolio. I thought that, if music-making was no longer in the cards for me, perhaps I could be a tattoo artist. Long before I found my love for writing, I was a drawer. That was my identity, and my parents saw it fit to get me a recently-published book with all of Don Ed Hardy’s sailor tattoos and paintings in it. The thread continued to lengthen, as my already-present fixation on devil horns made sense in the company of Hardy’s work. I was drawn to his Surf or Die painting from 2004, in particular.

I quickly started drawing pin-up girls and triptychs of Lucifer in various positions. I’d draw eagles and ship anchors and anything Americana I could think of. Like Hardy, I’d block out the Devil’s cudgel cock with a black circle, much like how those faces on the Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap cover were censored with black rectangles. Once, Papaw’s sister came to visit from Grafton, West Virginia and caught me drawing a Navy girl with cartoonishly big breasts. She was an artist herself, with a focus on landscapes that were good but very paint-by-number. She was also freakishly religious, the kind of woman who, because she’d been living alone since the 1980s, went to church three times a week. Thus, she snitched on me to my folks about my demonic musings, and I got a tongue-lashing from Mamaw and Papaw, even though I’d already logged many hours at their dining table creating such pieces. My aunt painted her childhood home and a portrait of me, both of which were hung proudly on my grandparents’ patio wall. They never hung up any of my drawings, certainly nothing from my sketchbooks full of beautiful military women. My drawing career sputtered after that.

But I do remember when I fell out of love with AC/DC, as I was on the precipice of making a Facebook account not too long after discovering the limitlessness of a still-newish YouTube.com. I was discovering rap music for the first time, heard Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” on the radio and found out what the Top 40 was and, above all, got my first girlfriend because she sent one of those chain-mail, emoticon-filled text messages and I thought she was flirting with me. LeBron James had just left the Cleveland Cavaliers on live television that summer, too. I had much more on my mind than some rock band. On top of all that, my mom told me a story about how, when she was a teenager, she saved up enough money to buy a vinyl copy of High Voltage and took it to school to show all of her friends. At some point during the day, somebody broke into her locker and swiped the LP. She never got it back and, decades and decades later, you could tell she was still pretty beat up about it. It was a mess, and AC/DC got left behind.

In the almost 15 years since then, I’ve labored through far too many phases of a still-developing music taste: I had a Drake era that included a Walmart-exclusive censored edition of Take Care. YouTube suggested videos turned me on to Nirvana 20 years too late. My best friend Steven and I became the biggest Bob Dylan disciples in all of Trumbull County, doing Sporcle quizzes in computer class that required us to type out every one of his studio albums by name. (He and I also had our own version of “guys naming random athletes,” where we would write random songs down and have to guess the bands that made them.) I’d sleep outside on a trampoline with my neighbor and we’d listen to a good mix of Roy Orbison, Chief Keef and post-Yield Pearl Jam. I became a Front Bottoms zealot while trying to win back an ex-girlfriend.

And for my 9th grade music class, I gave an oral report on the Temptations but found enough energy to keep a horse in the “AC/DC versus Guns N’ Roses” scrap Steven and I frequently tumbled into with each other. And that’s because AC/DC lingered. Dad would listen to them on his iPod Nano at such a loud volume you could hear it spilling out of the foam ear pads of his headphones. So often I would be in another room and hear that “Shoot to Thrill” riff puncture through the biosphere. Their music was inescapable, even in my staunchest non-AC/DC fan days. But you never really fall out of love with your first love, do you? When I played a mean air-guitar and lip-synced the “big licks, skin flicks, tricky dick’s are my chemistry” line from “Shake a Leg” with my whole chest at age eight, I was writing myself into a last will and testament of rock ‘n’ roll’s one great evermore.

When I turned 16 and decided I wanted to start building a record collection, my dad, who had given his own collection to my uncle years and years earlier, asked for his wax back so he could gift it all to me. My uncle, who didn’t even have a turntable anymore, obliged and returned a stack of Pink Floyd, Zeppelin, Rush, Krokus and Neil Young LPs. “Where are my AC/DC albums?” he asked me as he combed through the lot, as if I had any sort of answer—as the collection my uncle chose to send back came in a garbage bag anyways. But, when my cousin moved into our grandmother’s house a few years later, he brought with him one crate of vinyl—a crate that contained the copy of Highway to Hell that my own father so deliriously wanted brought back to him. And, as punishment, my cousin let the record sit idly on the upstairs turntable for so long that it was covered in dust and scratches by the time I nicked it from his room.

I write so often about the perils of being cyclical. I yearn to not fall into the emotional traps set for me by generational imperfections so much that I forget how nice it can be to let beautiful, careless things return to you. In my relatively short life so far, I have quit so many things: drawing, sports, guitar lessons, acting, friendships, classes, jobs, romances. I watched my grandparents do the same, monotonous routine in the same house for the first decade of my life and then watched my parents carry the same, boring torch in the 10 years that came after. I didn’t want to end up like any of them, so I stuck around for no one and no thing, hoping a nomadic sense of living and a chronic flakiness would be more rewarding than just standing still.

But I’m beginning to understand that it is good to let things linger in your heart for a long time. “It’s a Long Way to the Top” ping-pongs off my organs just as it did 20 years ago. I get chills when Angus’s first riff comes screaming into view on “Let There Be Rock.” The off-kilter poppiness of “Moneytalks” still sounds like the wrong band wrote it. “I’ve got big balls, they’re such big balls, and they’re dirty big balls” is just as effective on my 26-year-old brain as it was on my six-year-old brain. I can remember every 35mm picture in every album insert, all of which were cross-stitched with lyrics and oral histories into a tapestry of remembrance. AC/DC rarely sang about anything other than sex, drugs, crime and the hedonism that enabled those aforementioned pleasures. But, if you were young and you needed a crash-course on the onus of hard-nosed, tight-denim, TNT-rigged rock ‘n’ roll, AC/DC was your tabula rasa, your bible, your sacred scrolls and your Swiss Army knife.

Malcolm died in 2017 after receiving a dementia diagnosis three years earlier, when he officially retired from AC/DC—but he’d been suffering from memory loss issues as far back as 2008, when the band was making Black Ice. Just 364 days earlier, my own grandmother died from dementia complications herself after a battle with the disease that had lasted just as long as Malcolm’s, in the same house where that Highway to Hell LP slowly became unplayable. It’s always odd to me, how things that shouldn’t feel connected to each other inevitably do. I hadn’t kept up with AC/DC much at that point, having skipped over their then-most recent record, Rock or Bust. But even when you aren’t “keeping up” with a band of their caliber, they are omnipresent. Football games, movie soundtracks, graphic T-shirt sections at department stores—they’re always there, waiting for you, filling in the gaps of your life you assumed stayed vacant.

When I was younger, far more cynical and felt like AC/DC’s music had fallen “beneath me,” I likely told you that the band should have ended when Bon died in February 1980. There are days when I still think that, I’m sure—an opinion that bubbles to the surface most passionately when I’m forced to sit through the annoying, oversaturated “Thunderstruck” (or any of the Brian Johnson-era songs that made it onto the Iron Man 2 soundtrack album in 2010). I liked Brian, for the most part. I mean, so few bands have ever lost their voice and re-discovered it just as quickly and sounded just as great. Brian’s singing fit perfectly with Angus and Malcolm’s vision. If Bon’s voice was this cut-up, piercing howl crawling up the basement steps of his bad-boy soul, then Brian’s voice was what a hairy chest personified sounded like—lubed up with a potent cocktail of whiskey, cartons of cigarettes and an unadulterated, “mature,” demigod aura.

While Bon was alive, AC/DC composed themselves like a band of apostates turning rock ‘n’ roll inside out—rebelling hard against the trends of soft, glam and prog rock, embracing a bluesy, Southern style that combed the beaches of heavy metal’s beginnings. And, for a 20-year-old Angus and 22-year-old Malcolm—a couple of Aussies born in Glasgow—they handled their blues well on High Voltage. After Brian joined the band, AC/DC ditched their radical roots and became far too comfortable in their own niche, which began losing steam once hair metal took off in the early 1980s. Back in Black was, truly, the ultimate bridge between AC/DC’s two lives. They became a stadium band because of Brian. That gusto he arrived with, it fastened into the Young brothers’ anthemic metamorphosis without much burden.

I don’t think Bon was ever going to get the band to the same heights Brian did. Highway to Hell, as perfect a record as it is, still oozes the pagoda spirit of a gnarly, dark-tinted dive bar. Everything AC/DC made after 1980 came with the efficacy of digestible arena marketability. But I do contend that, even beneath the flaccid boogies of an album like Stiff Upper Lip, the band’s if-it-ain’t-broke mentality outmuscles their own nostalgia for the once-peculiar riff-verse-solo-chorus-verse-riff formula they milked to hell from 1990 on. And, while I remain a staunch Bon-head who returns to Powerage and Let There Be Rock far more often than Fly on the Wall or Blow Up Your Video, embracing AC/DC’s music again in adulthood required me to come to terms with the truth that, had Brian Johnson not taken Bon Scott’s place 44 years ago, I wouldn’t have been an AC/DC fan to begin with. On Back in Black, Brian’s voice helped shoulder the band into a kind of mainstream popularity you never lose your grip on. AC/DC is still touring in 2024. Angus Young, still as skinny as a toothpick at 69 and now sporting a snow-white head of receding hair, duck walks across stages all over the world like he’s stuck in 1978.

And because I drive a car that’s so old you can’t charge your phone and play music through an aux cord at the same time, I was recently forced to endure a long car ride with nothing but FM radio to plug the silence. After surfing through too many country channels and pop channels that play a weird mixture of ‘80s bangers and contemporary “hits” I admittedly can’t recognize from the sound alone, I found a classic rock station and, after playing a Alice in Chains song—which I’ve gathered must be something stations are legally required to play once an hour—the disc-jockey pumped “You Shook Me All Night Long” into my cabin.

I had forgotten just how delicious “You Shook Me All Night Long” was, how that chorus wraps its fishnet legs around your neck as tight as it does. It sounds like a toaster falling into a bubble bath—a 33-year-old guy from Dunston singing about seduction and a lover “ma[king] a meal outta me and com[ing] back for more.” The song title is the chorus, and it’s repeated over and over while Malcolm’s metronome strums loop beneath it. Angus flips the switch into a serpentine solo that quakes and shakes and aches. With a flash and a lick, I was seven years old again, drawing a picture of myself holding a guitar and sporting red horns through a schoolboy hat that brandished an “M” on it. I was horizontal in my childhood bedroom once more, kicking my feet in the air while yanking a tracklist out of thin air. I felt, at long last, devilish again.

For all of the reasons AC/DC’s most vocal critics lean on the “every song is the same three chords” defense (which isn’t entirely false, as much of their catalog is fueled by the A, E, G and B power chords and the D major chord), their hard rock sound was novel once upon a time. They weren’t always the “lumbering dinosaurs” that the world painted them into once punk took off and, after joining intercontinental groups like Blue Öyster Cult, KISS, Thin Lizzy and Scorpions on the UK charts, AC/DC tapped into a brief but crucial gap between Zeppelin and the Sex Pistols. With fashionable genres like pop and disco flooding the markets, AC/DC’s sound was far from “same old same old.” Their consistency was king, and having developed a resolute stranglehold on their unwavering sound from the jump helped make them the best rock band of their kind and, perhaps, the best rock band of their generation.

Because anybody who’s picked up a guitar since 1975 and began picking at a nasty, ascendant riff has the Young brothers to thank. AC/DC were lifelong foils to new wave and pop music, destroying the blueprint once the old guard fell out of the spotlight. And that initial five album run, from High Voltage through Highway to Hell, remains one of the greatest introductions to a band in rock history—followed by the 26x Platinum Back in Black, which sold over 50 million copies and is not only the second-best selling album of all time but the best-selling album to never reach #1 on the Billboard 200. AC/DC resisted the commercial temptation of ballads (only releasing one, the excellent “Ride On,” in a 50-year career) and wrapped alleyway-dark lyrics around bellyache-inducing, skin-splitting guitar solos. It was music that, to my ears, sounded like the heavens unzipping on us.

I eventually gave up on Power Chord of the Shock Wrock, though my mom finds my “concert posters” and album covers in bins of priceless family keepsakes from time to time. When I finally had an adult job, some semblance of an income and lived three hours away in a different city, I scoured the world wide web for a copy of High Voltage that might’ve been pressed around the time she claims hers was stolen. I did find one eventually, and I surprised her with it on a random weekend trip home. To this day, that copy of High Voltage rests in a frame in the same backroom where that picture of me holding my brand-new Fender Squire was taken years ago. Plugging that amp into the wood-paneled wall and shredding incongruous, haphazard notes at my unamused grandparents feels like it happened in a different lifetime, and in many ways it did.

But I’ve come to believe that, in every parallel universe, I am an AC/DC fan. The degree of my commitment may vary from continuum to continuum, of course, but I can’t imagine a life where I ascribe to anything but the proclamation Bon Scott laid out for me in 1975: “I’m gonna be a rock ‘n’ roll star. I hear it pays well.” Seven-year-old me, who slept with that Fender Squire held tightly in their arms for a week after opening it up on Christmas morning, didn’t care if the income was fame or fortune. Loving some silly little rock band for the rest of my life was the only currency I cared about. Today, I think I might go out and buy a new sketchbook. Hell, maybe I’ll try getting the old band back together while I’m at it.

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Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.