Your house could be repossessed in the morning, your wife could leave you at lunch, and your car could be impounded in the afternoon, but as long as you’re at an AC/DC gig in the evening, your cares will be few and far between.
By their own admission, they make music for teenagers, or those briefly pretending to be living those halcyon days once more, and they’ve made the same album endlessly. But that hasn’t stopped the Aussie rockers being a smokeshow of searing entertainment.
That sounds like the most basic principle of modern music, but it took the innovative Chuck Berry to present this proposition to the masses. You see, when Berry was a boy, music’s purpose was far different. It certainly wasn’t fun and thrills fit for 15 and 50 year olds in a 100,000-seater stadium.
Classical music had a more reverent disposition, and the blues had a serious message of its own. In fact, its purpose was perfectly presented by Lightnin’ Hopkins in the story he told as an introduction to ‘Mr Charlie’ where the punchline to a stuttering boy’s issue proclaiming his problem is presented as thus: “Look here boy, if you can’t talk it, then sing it.”
Early blues songs were coded decries of the woes that plantation workers faced. But as greater liberation came to the fore, a more empowered sense of expression emerged along with it. So, Chuck Berry began to blend together various genres in a blitzkrieg of showmanship designed to truly entertain above all else.
So, in Angus Young’s eyes, this made him the first true rock ‘n’ roll star. Speaking to Charlotte Roche in 2000, the AC/DC guitarist described Berry as the star who gave the world more “gifts” than any other. “He brought together blues, country music, folk music, and blended it all into this, you know, and a bit of jazz,” he calculated. “Put it all together in what we call rock ‘n’ roll.”
Young saw him, in essence, as the head of the family tree from which the ‘Highway to Hell’ rockers later burst into bloom. “He started from that little well and a lot of people have drunk from. You had The Beatles, The Beach Boys in America, The Stones and it continued on,” he supposed.
That’s a hell of a lot of people to have inspired. These days, it might seem almost arbitrary that Young traces things back to Berry given that you could just as easily pinpoint one of the many other rock ‘n’ roll prognitors, but he supposes that they weren’t quite as fully formed. “I think he is probably the one that inspired the most, even Presley and people like Little Richard,” he said, explaining how even his peers pinched from his singular style.
The way in which he achieved this was through covering all bases. “Besides being a talented songwriter, he is a great lyricist, a great player and a great entertainer,” Young said. “So he had a lot of elements, all put into one man. It’s a pure talent, I think, and an inspiration.”
Presley might have had amazing pipes and plenty of swagger, but he wasn’t quite known for his writing. Little Richard might have brought fierce edge and something fresh to the table, but did he have the wide appeal of refinement? Berry was the whole package, blending everything into a force from which others could choose their strands, AC/DC pretty much choosing the whole mire.
We sometimes take that blending for granted in retrospect, but you only have to look at film, where frequently genre sticks firmly in its lane, to understand just how revolutionary Berry was. In the process, he made a show of it, and that’s a strand that certainly struck Young as a blazing trail to follow. Soon, he’d be doing the duckwalk in homage to his hero, but at only 157cm tall, stooping proved a little easier on Young’s knees.
