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