When did AC/DC become so huge?

Truth be told, I love Bon and Brian equally. Axl, not so much ;p

 

yep, when appetite came out, i thought that's ok ... but at some point it got to the stage if i heard him i would start grinding my teeth and want to punch something ...

 

I liked the energy of Appetite but Axl soon made me hate it and everything else they’ve ever done. I’m way off topic; apologies to the OP.

Ahem.

 

I saw AC/DC at a 5,000 seat arena in 1986. Even though Back in Black was a monster album, just a few years later they were not playing Enormodomes. That came later on.

 

I'm not a fan of AC/DC. I have never owned any of their albums or singles.
I repeat you have no idea about how popular AC/DC were/are in Australia.

 

Izzy and Adler are the gods of G'N R to me. Slash has some good solos that would be less good without the rhythm section's riffage and accents.

 

Here in Australia I reckon they became huge around the time of the Dirty Deeds album. That was the impression I got when haunting the record shops and developing a life long passion for music as a teenager.

High Voltage and TNT set the platform.

We can't help it if the rest of the world was slow to catch on.

 

Early Axl was great. I love him on Live Like A Suicide and Appetite. After that he ( and they) lost me.

 

But they hit a peak as a touring act, electrifying performances on the BIB material, plus a couple of old anthems and they (just about) could have skipped HTH, they were that white hot on stage by 1980. A tiny bit slicker than before, and that was what the 20,000 seaters needed.

I say this as my favorite album of their's is HTH.

 

An enviable career in evey way. They got to be an up and coming cult band, a mega-juggernaut top smash band, then back to a scrappy little cult band for a spell, then a mega-juggernaut band once again, and then beloved dinosaurs.

...... and then AXL

 

I think the time Acdc released Hi Voltage/TNT and Dirty Deeds was the height of the Sherbet/Skyhooks heyday. Skyhooks had the clever, smarmy lyrics that appealed to young University students, as well as the teenage girls. Sherbet, mostly the teenage girls and young homebuyers. Acdc cut that up the middle and appealed to teenage girls and hoods Plus they probably soaked up the post-Sharpie audience that Billy Thorpe and Lobby Lloyd had developed. It was maybe the immediate years after Glam was being transformed into a harder sound over here.

 

Maybe ironic in that you'd expect it to be by a British band instead.

 

It's weird but they were huge in Florida early on but it didn't go nationwide until Highway to Hell then BIB made them household names

 

The irony was in relation to this comment that had been posted There is more to the world than Australia.

According to Wikipedia 2nd place goes to Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon & 3rd spot (& top selling album by a US artist ) Meatloaf - Bat Out of Hell

 

To be fair to the US, if it wasn't for American music we wouldn't have an Acdc

 

There's no way that you hear something from AC/DC at a bar and your feet don't star stomping. Thunderstruck has got to be one of the most hard rocking song of the last 30 years. Heck it became my lawyer's signature song everytime we beat my exwife in any of the trials and lawsuits that looney put me thru. AND WE WON THEM ALL. So yeah, that song holds a special place in my heart.,

 

They didn't get much airplay in Knoxville, TN until Back In Black.

Things kind of flattened out after that, until "Thunderstruck" became ubiquitous.

 

I think the tipping point was when FM rock radio started playing that intro to "Hell's Bells". Most distinctive rock intro ever, despite it being somewhat of an echo to John Lennon - "Mother".

 

The mid-'80s were pretty fallow for them - I don't remember anyone saying "dude, you've got to hear Fly on the Wall!" - so when "Thunderstruck" came around it felt like a real "they're baaaack!" moment.

But I think they went supermega with the advent of the classic rock format and it's incredible shrinking playlists. They simply stood out more amongst the trillionth spins of "Hotel California" and "Sweet Home Alabama".

 

Agreed, was hearing them in the 1970s in Florida quite a bit before the nationwide explosion.

 

That was my experience too. I saw them first on the Fly on the Wall tour, and the only one where I remember seeing empty seats was on the Ballbreaker tour. Getting tickets for the Stiff Upper Lip tour wasn't hard, but the Black Ice tour sold out very quick, and frankly I didn't really care any more

 

I think the 80's "drop off" tends to get overstated. It's not like they have ....... ever ...... stopped being a massively popular band. For Those About To Rock is where most bands would have suffered a backlash for being too popular but all that actually happened was they downscaled a bit and released a couple of dirty and scuzzy little albums that contained no obvious hits or anthems, while still maintaining their place as a major concert attraction. It's also easy to forget now, but at the time, Blow Up Your Video was seen as something of a comeback. And this was after they had a nice little hit in Who Made Who. So when Razor's Edge came around with such an instant massive hit in Thunderstruck, it all snapped back into place.

I also think the lesser success of Flick and Fly have something to do with how popular MTV was at the time and how important videos were to a song or album's success. For Flick, all they did was shoot some ugly and drab rehearsal footage and farted it out as a video, and with fly, they overshot and did a whole mini-movie thing that was hard to fit in with regular MTV programming, therefore didn't get really any rotation. For Who Made Who and Blow, they released some "proper" videos that looked good (enough) and got into rotation, which helped them build back some momentum until Thunderstruck.

 

Pretty much the same for me, except I saw them on every tour from Highway to Hell up to and including Black Ice. Fly on the Wall tour I got two tickets off a tout 5 minutes before the show for £5 (for the two!).

 

They were huge in Australia then went to England and started to become really popular there. Unfortunately Bon died and it all went downhill from then on. Don't like Back in Black obviously. The only stuff i've liked without Bon have been a few tracks off Stiff Upper Lip, though definitely not the stupid title track.

Angus: "Oh let's do a track where the lyrics are full of sexual innuendo, we haven't done anything like that for at least 5 minutes."
Brian: "Good idea, then how about a song that has the words 'rock' or 'rock and roll' in the title too, just to do something unique!"

 

Flick of the Switch is just a raw, simple rock ‘n’ roll album. Not an emphasis on hits or hooks, but just letting it rip. It’s one of my favorite Johnson albums due to it having absolutely no pretense to it whatsoever.

That said, it didn’t exactly keep the momentum going for the band.