Anthony Bozza - Why AC/DC Matters

In the Beginning

What it Means to be Young

Gonna be a Rock N Roll Singer

Back Line Boogie

Death Before Compromise

You Got the Lust

We Salute You

WHY AC/DC MATTERS TO ME is much less important than why AC/DC matters to you. If I could, Id like to know why each one of you picked up this book in the first place. Im not just speaking to you fans, who know why youre reading these words. Im speaking to the rest of you: the randomly curious who have opened the cover, or those of you who know someone who loves AC/DC but dont understand why they do. Youre all the same to me: all of you have opened this book in search of an answer. You want to know what it is that makes AC/DC special. You want to know what it is about them that moves peopleand how they do it so well.

Even if its just for this passing moment, consider yourself hooked by what I call the greatest living rock band. To get a glimpse of AC/DC is to know them, because even a photograph of them onstage, in their element, communicates their authenticity better than a list of their achievements ever could. Statistics may explain their net worth and commercial viability, but only the experience of their live showeven secondhandgives those statistics meaning.

Established in 1973, this Australian rock band has become the second-bestselling popular music act of all time. AC/DC has sold 200 million albums worldwide, including 71 million in the United States alone. Back in Black (1980) is the fifth-bestselling album in U.S. history at 22 million copies sold. That album hit number one in the UK and number four in the U.S., where it remained in the top ten for 131 weeks. The bands coheadline concert with the Rolling Stones in Toronto in 2003 holds the record for the largest paid music event in North American history, boasting attendance of half a million people. In 2005 and 2006, AC/ DC landed on Australias list of the top ten highest-earning entertainers of the year, despite the fact that they hadnt released an album since 2000 or toured since 2003. In 2008, thirty-five years after AC/DC first took to the stage, their sixteenth studio album, Black Ice , debuted at number one in twenty-nine countries around the world, despite the fact that it was only available in Wal-Mart and Sams Club stores or via the bands Web site. In an era that has seen CD sales morph from a clear indication of an artists popularity to a relic of an antiquated time, AC/DCs back catalog has continued to sell as well as it always didor better: in 2007, in the United States alone, the band sold more than 1.3 million CDs, despite not having released a new album in six years. Since 1991, when SoundScan began tracking CD sales in the States, AC/DC has sold more than 26 million albums, outselling the Rolling Stones, the Who, Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Led Zeppelin. Today theyre second only to the Beatles.

From the start, AC/DC was ridiculed by the music press. In 1976, Rolling Stone reviewer Billy Altman (whose writing in that magazine and elsewhere seems to indicate that he prefers covering music he doesnt like) had this to say about High Voltage , the bands first U.S. release: Those concerned with the future of hard rock may take solace in knowing that with the release of the first U.S. album by these Australian gross-out champions, the genre has unquestionably hit its all-time low. Things can only get better (at least I hope so)AC/ DC has nothing to say musically. Altmans disdain was essentially mirrored by the majority of mainstream critics until 2008, when Black Ice was praised across the board as a masterpiece of consistency. For the first time in twenty years, a band whod been derided for doing just one thing was championed for doing just that. What had been called a lack of imagination for two decades was suddenly being lauded as uncompromising integrity.

Like the pioneers who transformed Australia from a prison colony to a nation, all but one of the essential members of AC/DC were born elsewhere. They were, however, raised there and imbued with the idiosyncratic cultural confluence that makes that island unusual. As it has done for Australian culture from the start, the continents isolation has allowed for European and American traditions to be distilled, altered, and regurgitated into uniquely original permutations. AC/DC is no different: they processed rock and roll from a singular perspective and devoted themselves to it with the rough-and-tumble attitude of a pack of outsiders looking in. Their nonnegotiable distance from the core sculpted their dedication to and appreciation for jazz, blues, and rock as they evolved, on the other side of the world, into a group that has paid the greatest modern tribute to the raw roots of American rock and roll. They incorporated the influences of Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Muddy Waters, and Bo Diddley with those of second-generation carriers of the torch like Alvin Lee, Jimi Hendrix, John Mayall, Eric Clapton, and the Who, and brought it all together in a sound and attitude all their own. Theirs is a wild-eyed cry of unruly youths from a country founded by convicts. They mastered the basics and amplified tradition until the music overloaded, then sealed it with a simple invocation: If you want bloodyouve got it.

My first brush with AC/DC is no more important than any of yours, but I feel the need to talk about it before I say anything more. I first encountered the band when I was about ten years old. My friend up the street and I were perfectly happy tossing around Star Wars action figures, recreating shoot-outs with Sand People on Tattooineuntil we discovered the wondrous world inside his older brothers bedroom. When we were sure that hed gone out, wed push open his door to peer into his sanctuary. We were never bold enough to enter, but staring in from the doorway, I was both terrified and intrigued by what I saw. There was a Pink Floyd poster ( The Wall ) featuring that iconic, silently screaming face; a Led Zeppelin poster featuring the wizardly rune symbols from the cover of Led Zeppelin IV and their fallen angel Swan Song logo. But front and center, in an unforgettable velvet black-light rendition, was the portrait of AC/DC that graces the cover of Highway to Hell . The purple light wasnt even on, but that image held me like a tractor beam, both intimidating and inviting. Young as I was, I knew it was naughty and wrong. It was a picture of the bad kids Id heard about. Today that shot still oozes everything AC/DC stands for, the image at once charming, dangerous, rebellious, misbehaved, and tongue-in-cheek. At that point in my young life, Anguss horns and tail scared me, but for the first time, I wanted to be scared.

Music has always been important to me, and from the time I was about five I started paying attention to who wrote the songs I heard on the radio. I started reading credits and liner notes as soon as I was old enough to work my parents record player, and as a teen I devoured all the writing about music I could find. I grew up in an interesting time of transition, when key aspects of society as it is today were just taking holdfrom technology and the way people communicate to how and what pop culture we consume. In that period of the late 80s the old-guard music magazines lost their footing, only to convince themselves, with grunge in the 90s, that theyd regained it and were still able harbingers of musical taste and cultural momentsbefore ungraciously face-planting from their own shortsightedness when the industry and the times changed in the 00s. Today, for better or for worse, the most honest music reviews can be found by taking the median temperature of online forums and sifting for the truth.