“If people have a passion for anything,” Brian Johnson once said, “they tend to get quite good at it.” The trick is ensuring good timing aligns with the triumph of talent.
After all, rock and roll has never been known for its kindness when it comes to its biggest artists. The amount of goodwill only sticks around as long as the hits keep coming, and if something slows you down, it’s just a matter of time before people start to forget you and move on to the next flavour of the day. Although AC/DC managed one of the biggest career resurrections of all time, Brian Johnson was in shambles when making Back in Black.
To be fair, anyone who loses someone like Bon Scott as their frontman should have their days numbered. The Australian rockers had all the makings of a great album in the tank, but once Scott passed away unexpectedly after a night of heavy drinking, there was no way that anyone expected them to rise again. He was wildly revered – even by peers as prominent as Ozzy Osbourne – as one of the greatest vocalists the genre has ever seen.
Moreover, Scott wasn’t just a fly-by-night vocalist. For the Young brothers, this was as close to a death in the family as they had ever experienced, but Scott indirectly gave them their replacement when talking up Johnson’s performance when hearing him in the band Geordie. Anyone filling Scott’s shoes was bound to have a big responsibility ahead of them, but Johnson managed to be one of the few people who could match his gravelly tone.
First and foremost, Johnson’s screech on songs like ‘Hells Bells’ seemed to blend Scott’s snotty delivery with something a lot more forceful. The more important thing was being able to pay tribute to what Scott had already done, which included him putting his own spin on classics like ‘TNT’ and ‘Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap’.
When speaking about joining the group after the fact, Johnson thought that he wouldn’t make it past the first few days in the studio with Mutt Lange, saying in AC/DC Maximum Rock and Roll, “It was like, ‘Again, Brian, again – hold on, you sang that note too long so there’s no room for a breath’.”
He continued, in awe, “He had this thing where he didn’t want people to listen to the album down the road and say there’s no way someone could sing that, they’ve dropped that in, even the breaths had to be in the right place. And you cannot knock a man for that, but he drove me nuts.”
For all of Johnson’s internal struggles, it’s not like Lange was that off the mark. He was already responsible for making glorious sonic experiments that people loved, and if that meant Johnson singing with dead-on accuracy and going through a song line by line, that was what was going to end up on the final tape. If AC/DC were renowned for formulaic simplicity (in the best possible way), then it mattered dearly that they got it right.
Johnson was more than willing to work for it, thinking it was the least he could do for his predecessor. Even when talking about his role in the band in Behind the Musicyears later, Johnson was diplomatic about serving the band before anything, stating, “I was never brought in to replace Bon. I was there because Bon was there no more.”
Still, Johnson’s view as a substitute for one of the greatest voices in rock has served him well over the years, going on to be one of the leading voices in rock and roll to this day. It’s not always the nicest vocal tone you’re looking for, but it’s often the one that gets the job done the best. For this, he took inspiration from all corners and tried to stretch his talents beyond vocals alone.
As he once explained, “I can’t believe it was 50 years ago that I first heard Paul Rodgers’s velvet voice singing ‘The Hunter’; it became the anthem for every pub, working men’s clubs and city halls across the UK,” said Johnson. “Paul was the epitome of what every rock singer should be; he had the looks, the moves and a soul voice that made everything swing; that’s not an art; it’s a gift.”
