Rocks In The Attic #142: AC/DC - ‘Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap’ (1976)

For me, and I’m talking about the international version of the Dirty Deeds album, this is where AC/DC really start sounding like AC/DC. The High Voltage album (again, to take the international release as gospel) sounds like a band searching for their sound, and I guess a few of the songs included here don’t really fit with the AC/DC template - or at least not as much as other songs on the album.

A lot of people don’t like it, but I really like the cover to this album. Designed by Hipgnosis, it’s essentially a stock photo of an American motel, with a range of random everyday people superimposed in the foreground. Those people, for no reason explained anywhere on the cover - or even in the title of the album - have their eyes blanked out with black bars. To make it even stranger, there is a Doberman amongst the crowd, and he doesn’t have a black bar across his eyes. Go figure.

The real gem of this album is Ride On - a slow blues, and for me a career highlight which they never came close to matching. I’d compare it to Since I’ve Been Loving You (from Led Zeppelin III) in that in both cases, the respective bands have endlessly tried to replicate these songs on subsequent releases without reaching those peaks again.

Hit: Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap

Hidden Gem: Ride On

Rocks In The Attic #97: AC/DC - ‘High Voltage’ (1976)

My love for AC/DC was founded on the international versions of their early albums, with this being a collection of songs from their first two Australian releases. Now that I live at this end of the world, I keep meaning to hunt down their Aussie originals.

After I bought their 1992 Live album and decided to get the rest of their back catalogue, my OCD collector’s attitude urged me onto buying their albums in order, so naturally I started with this, their (international) debut.

On first listen, I remember thinking that compared to the crunch and bombast of Live, that it sounded pretty weak. Each successive album gets closer to that raw live sound, but here it almost sounds like a different band - like a poorly produced bad covers band playing AC/DC material through cheap instruments. It does have a certain charm though.

To give you an idea of how formative this album was for me, The Jack was the first song I learnt to play on the guitar. I didn’t start with something by Aerosmith - who I’d been listening to for a few years by then - I started with a Blues in E, by AC/DC. To this day, I can’t listen to the song without picking up my guitar and ripping through the solo.

As far as album covers go, the front cover of this is a classic - with a nice drawing of Angus clutching his SG, and an early version of the band’s logo evident in the top left corner - but the back cover is slightly disconcerting. Alongside publicity photos of each band member are fictional letters from the likes of worried parents and school teachers, concerned about the band’s latest exploits with their teenage daughters. At the time, I’m sure this made them sound edgy and dangerous, but in the 21^st century with a touch of added hindsight it makes the band sound like a group or marauding paedophiles, parading through Australian suburbs just as the school bells ring out. To further add fuel to this fire, Bon Scott namechecks Gary Glitter in the banal lyrics to Little Lover; and of course the album cover features the band’s lead guitarist dressed as a schoolboy. Oh dear.

Hit: T.N.T.

Hidden Gem: Live Wire

Rocks In The Attic #86: The Wildhearts - ‘Earth Vs. The Wildhearts’ (1993)

Aside from older bands - Aerosmith and AC/DC specifically - The Wildhearts were probably my favourite contemporary band when I first started listening to music. I really don’t remember why but I bought the Suckerpunch CD single - still one of my all-time favourite singles mainly due to the strength of its B-sides - and I was hooked.

I could never understand - as you never do when you’re young and you don’t really understand the music business - why The Wildhearts weren’t more popular than they were. In the mid-nineties, they were the darlings of the British rock press, and their singles were sold in enough quantities to usually make the Top 10, securing them a spot on Top Of The Pops. Fans didn’t just like The Wildhearts - they loved The Wildhearts. Once at Rio’s in Bradford, I was let into the club for free by the bouncer, simply because I was wearing a Wildhearts T-shirt.

When touring this album, their set at 1994’s Reading Festival was memorable when their bass player - Danny McCormack - dislocated his knee doing a star jump during the first song Caffeine Bomb. Instead of stopping, he was propped up onto a flight case, and played the rest of the set (in blinding pain). I think it’s things like that which really made them real. Can you imagine Jack White doing that? Or the Kings Of Leon?

Their other big draw is that their B-sides were just as good - if not better - as the material they would put on their albums. So fans were rewarded by decent songs every time they released something, whether it was a full album or a single (or even a fan-club only album like the very limited original version of Fishing For Luckies, which I still have on CD and always look up in Record Collector to see how much it’s worth these days).

In that decade, out of all the bands I liked, I must have seen this band play live the most. I rushed out and bought tickets to their tours, even when they didn’t have an album out to support. Unlike most bands, they used to tour continually, and their gigs were always well attended by fans in black smiley-bones T-shirts with the ironic catchphrase ‘Demand The Right To Be Unique’ scrawled across the back in white lettering. I can’t remember how many times I saw them, but it must have been something like 6 or 7 times within the space of 3 or 4 years.

I even had a pen-pal (a pen-pal!) around this time - who I met (I don’t know where) through our mutual love for the band. Unfortunately for her, living in the USA, she didn’t get to see them play live too often - if at all - so I used to report back to her every time I saw the band play, and we would share bootleg tapes of their shows. Ultimately I think we lost touch when the internet replaced such archaic forms of communication.

When I went to University, and my musical tastes broadened, I fell out of touch with what the band were doing. I still bought their stuff, but 1997’s industrial-sounding Endless, Nameless turned me off them completely. I saw them live again in the early 2000s, and thankfully they had gone back to their early days, wearing leather jackets on stage and playing material from their early years.

Just listening to this album brings back so many memories - probably just because I went to see them play live so often. I remember driving to Warrington to see them play once - at Parr Hall - and we pulled over to ask a couple of locals who looked like rockers for directions. They said they didn’t know where the venue was, so we eventually found it ourselves, and ended up standing in the queue behind the guys we had just asked for directions (seems that Warringtonians either aren’t too friendly, or they’re not great at giving directions). Another time, I saw them support AC/DC in Manchester - one of my all-time favourite gig line-ups - and I was amongst a very small group of people (there were maybe 5 or 6 of us) moshing to them amongst the older AC/DC fans.

This album is dedicated to Bowie guitarist Mick Ronson, who died not long after it was recorded. He plays a guitar solo on the great My Baby Is A Headf*ck - his final recorded appearance.

Hit: TV Tan

Hidden Gem: Everlone

Rocks In The Attic #76: Otis Redding - ‘Live In Europe’ (1967)

In terms of music gifted to me, this has to be up there with the best of them. A birthday present from my good friend Moo, this is one of the gems of my record collection - a March 1967 recording of Otis Redding, backed by Booker T. & The M.G.’s, in Paris. The record was released in December of that same year, exactly five months before his death, making this the last Otis Redding release while he was still alive.

I think the reason I like this album so much is that it’s two of my favourite Stax artists - Otis and Booker T. & The M.G.’s - all for the price of one. It’s like that time I went to see AC/DC and The Wildhearts were the support band.

Hit: Try A Little Tenderness

Hidden Gem: Day Tripper

Rocks In The Attic #56: AC/C - ‘If You Want Blood - You’ve Got It’ (1978)

56 blogs in, and I’ve not even covered an album by the mighty ‘DC. Shocking!

I remember when I first started listening to rock music - well, not even rock music, it was Aerosmith and nothing but Aerosmith at this point - my Dad brought home a stack of LPs that he’d borrowed from a friend for me to listen to. Amongst this pile was several AC/DC albums - all from their classic 1970s period.

This was the first time I had been subjected to AC/DC, and even before listening to them, I was in awe of the covers; and the one I remember being blown away the most by was this one - their first live album, recorded during the Powerage world tour. On the front cover, an out of focus shot of Angus Young impaling himself in the gut with his Gibson SG, with Bon Scott leering over his shoulder, holding onto his microphone. On the reverse, a similarly blurry shot of a now lifeless Young, lying face down with the headstock of his guitar poking through the back of his bloodied white school shirt. You can talk about classic album covers all day long, but this one is a real peach. In terms of a cover describing a band’s sound, this one really gets it down perfectly.

As well as introducing me to AC/DC, this album also gave me a love of the song Riff Raff. Underrated and underplayed by the band, this is a real gem and used perfectly here as their show-opener. You know that guitar sound that comes out of the speakers after the first line of vocals in the song? That’s Young bending an entire open-D cord. Beautiful. I’ve broken many guitar strings doing this very trick.

It’s odd that AC/DC have never really been able to capture their live sound in the studio. They sound as good as anybody in the studio - especially from Powerage onwards - but recorded live they sound like a completely different band. That’s probably the reason they’ve never released a greatest hits record - their live records are their greatest hits.

Hit: Let There Be Rock

Hidden Gem: Riff Raff

Rocks In The Attic #43: Chuck Berry - ‘Chuck Berry’s Greatest Hits’ (1966)

Be careful around Chuck Berry. If he ever comes into the recording studio where you work, to do a song with Keith Richards maybe, don’t ever, EVER, touch his amp.

You can’t say a bad thing about Chuck Berry really. Well, aside from the fact that he’s a convicted armed robber. But hey, nobody’s perfect. In terms of his influence on music though, for me there’s one key lead guitarist that Berry influenced and that’s Angus Young. So no Chuck Berry, no AC/DC. And I can’t imagine a world like that.

Hit: Johnny B Goode

Hidden Gem: Sweet Little Sixteen