AC/DC-Back In Black (1980)

 


Artist: AC/DC

Title: Back In Black

Label: Atlantic

Format: CD

Catalog Number: 16018-2

Year of Release: 1980

Country and Year of Edition: US 80's repress BMG Music Club

Sell Price: $4.74

Sell Date: 9/10/26

Condition: VG+/VG+

Discogs Last Sold: 9/10/26 VG+/VG+ $5.00

Low: $0.99

Median: $3.77

Average: $3.94

High: $10.00

Current low price: $2.00

Curren Number on Sale at Discogs: 13

Have/Want: 155/327

Where Sold: San Diego, CA

Time It Took To Sell: 3 years

Where and When Bought: Facebook marketplace

Gwiz-gau Letter Grade: A+

Sad To See It Go: No

"Have you heard "Hell's Bells?"  It was a question posed to me circa Christmas 1980.  I somehow had not even though I knew the top 40 hits "Back In Black" and "You Shook Me All Night Long."  We'll the neighbor George that was a little older than me got the record for Christmas and brought it over to my friend John's house to play it.  Soon all would change.  I would hear "Hell's Bells" and the rest.  Sometime in the next few months I found a used copy of the album for $3.99 and by the time I trudged through a snowstorm to get the just released For Those About To Rock, Back In Black was old, familiar and deeply ingrained as if I had known "Hell's Bells" the entire 11 years of my existance.

Back In Black is so deeply ingrained in the world of Rock music, it is hard to imagine a time that it wasn't.  It was a time Bon Scott was alive and Brian Johnson toiled for Geordie.  Bon Scott's alcohol misadventure in February 1980 changed all that.  Things moved fast and this tribute to Bon came out in July of 1980.  Worldwide it has sold 50 million copies, something that couldn't even have been conceived of at the beginning of the year.

There is no filler on this album, only classics.  I remember one night at Marz Bar where "Giving The Dog A Bone" came up on the jukebox and the a male-female call and response sing-along came seemingly out of thin air.  Back In Black is so universal in appeal that even the hardest of rock could eek out two hits in the lower regions of American Top 40, but AOR Rock Radio is where this music did it's damage as the soundtrack to White America and really anybody that liked commercial Rock Music as decades went by.  Because they were Australian, they didn't have the baggage that Americans or even the Brits did to reach that total universality in the post-Beatles/Stones/Zep dominant Rock universe, despite their seemingly uncompromising approach.   Angus & Brian are doing a stadium run for the first time in a while and watching the more recent clip of "Shoot To Thrill" reveals something else but hot damn watch that video of "Hell's Bells" where you see a live band a the peak of it's abilities retooling to something different.  You could not replace or one-up Bon Scott, yet this version of the band takes on a power all it's own.  Will Rock and Roll even survive?

Yes it will, ha ha.

FOR FURTHER REVIEW:

Let There Be Rock (1977)

Powerage (1978)

If You Want Blood You've Got It (1978)

Black Ice (2008)



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