There's no sense of death about Powerage, despite it being the second to last album that included Bon Scott, who choked to death on his own vomit a scant two years later. Heard against that, even now, thirty years later, Powerage is a seething, living mass of energy, an album that lays its belief system down in its first track, and then continues to hammer the point home from every angle available to the band. Only nine songs long, just a shade under forty minutes, and yet there's more humanity pumping through it then a library of what is now called "hard rock." Nowadays, this sort of music gets viewed archaically, as if what AC/DC were doing in 1978--bluesy sounding chords jacked to breakneck speed alongside a snarling vocalist unafraid to scream and coo "Two faced woman with yer two faced lies, I hope your two faced living made you satisfied--tell me baby I was your only one? While you've been running around town with every mother's son?"--is now somehow embarrassing or slight compared against today's oh-so-poetic lyricists. Bullshit. Bon Scott might have been straightforward in his delivery of songs about women and how they'll tear you down and leave you broken, but that's because he was telling the truth, his truth, the way he saw it. Scott wasn't a guy pretending to be anything other than exactly what he was: a crazy ass son of a bitch who liked three things, in this order: rocking, drinking, and loving. Note: that's loving, not just the ole in-and-out. There isn't a song on here that isn't, in some form or fashion, about heartbreak and loss--either Scott is grabbing ahold of his work to prove she made the mistake in "Rock and Roll Damnation", or he's decrying the shithole apartment that might have made "her" leave in "Down Payment Blues", or he's just begging for "A Bullet To Bite On" to get through another night of loneliness. He might be editing out why, exactly, all these girls don't stick around, he might be failing to mention his frightening alcoholism or a tendency towards placing the band first: but he's not pretending. This dude was torn apart by love, he just didn't happen to be a bleached blond heartthrob with a high register. Unlike Sting, who went down the same road and jumped right to threats of suicide, Scott's every other turn of phrase embraces a willingness to turn the other cheek, to forgive and forget, to try, to give it love one more fucking chance--Powerage isn't "hard rock" or whatever the fuck that means, if anything, it's blues metal, it's music about navigating the pain of heartbreak, angry scowls about being poor and getting chased by the goddman rent man, the fucking tax snakes, that asshole of a sheriff--it's just pure, unadulterated music for the working schlub. It's so goddamn honest that it's almost emotional pornography, a version of Pulp's This Is Hardcore for the guy who works at Jiffy Lube instead of the fop with the skinny jeans.
In other words: it's AC/DC. They were kind of a big deal, and in some corners, they remain one still. Powerage just happens to be one of the albums were they show how they earned the title.
-Tucker Stone, 2009
Oh, yes! Man, I love this record, but it always seems to be the one AC/DC album that hardly anyone knows. There's a lyric from "Gone Shootin'" that I always think of - "I stirred my coffee with the same spoon" - now that is a heck of a way to write a song about your junkie girlfriend. AC/DC have a reputation for being obvious to the point of stupid, but it's hard to argue that about Powerage. "But what's next to the moon?" - what a lyric! Not to mention, some of Angus' best guitar solos. Ah, now I just want to go listen to it again...
Anyhow thanks, I'm really enjoying all these articles. Neat idea to check out 1978, it's a great music year - will you do another year when you're done? 1979, or another less obvious music year - 1989, 1973, 1996?
Posted by: Thoapsl | 2009.05.10 at 06:02
Thanks man. We really enjoy doing these projects, and, yeah, we've got another year lined up down the road--and it just happens to be one of the ones you mention.
As for AC/DC, this is the second archival music project we've done where we've encountered an incredible AC/DC album that gets little critical respect--the other being 1983's Flick of the Switch. The general thinking is that AC/DC lives or dies on their hits, and neither Powerage or Flick of the Switch really have any, but both albums are great, and deserve way more credit than they get.
Posted by: Marty | 2009.05.10 at 11:47