Powerage (1978)

Powerage (1978)

AC/DC’s fifth studio album was their first to be released in all territories at almost the same time, and with the same cover art. As with every prior album, though, there were differences in the tracklisting. The European LP included a song, “Cold Hearted Man,” that disappeared from later versions, and “Rock ‘N’ Roll Damnation,” which wasn’t finished when the first masters were sent to the plant, was omitted from some pressings. These versions of the album also used early, rawer mixes of the songs (for example, the bluesy coda of “Down Payment Blues” was omitted), but eventually they were all replaced with the version everyone else in the world is familiar with.

This would be the last AC/DC studio album to be produced by the team of Harry Vanda and George Young, who’d handled all their records to date, until 1988’s Blow Up Your Video. It’s also the first to feature Cliff Williams on bass, though there’s some controversy about that. Original bassist Mark Evans claims he played on a few tracks, which were recorded during the Let There Be Rock sessions, but the book The Youngs: The Brothers Who Built AC/DC claims that George Young is the bassist on the entire album.

Here’s the thing about Powerage: It’s only got two certified AC/DC classics on it, “Riff Raff” and “Sin City,” but a) those two tracks are so brain-punchingly awesome they make the record a must-own anyway, and b) pretty much all the other songs on it are every bit as stomping and furious, they’re just not as well-known. “Riff Raff” probably should have opened the album. It begins with a fanfare-like unaccompanied guitar riff from Angus, eventually bolstered by a rumbling as the rest of the band comes in, and then the same riff basically doubles in speed, Phil Rudd starts jackhammering, and we are fucking off. The song rips along at basically a punk-rock tempo, and Bon Scott is on another one of his tirades about being a sneering badass … oh, wait, no he’s not. The lyrics on this song are kinda weird, actually; he seems to be telling us that life’s a bitch, so you might as well laugh and have some fun. Indeed, AC/DC seem to be “maturing” quite a bit, lyrically speaking, throughout Powerage. A lot of the songs are about actual relationships, rather than sexual conquests, and the dark tales of criminality are entirely gone.

Powerage is one of AC/DC’s “dark horse” albums, one of the ones that a lot of diehard fans (including Keith Richards, btw) will cite as their favorite, as people who only know the big hits pull a face and say, “Really? I don’t think I’ve ever heard that one …” But once you become a serious fan, it’ll grow and grow in your estimation, as it has in mine, until one day you realize that this was the album on which they got almost everything right.