In Which Doctor Casino Listens to Classic Rock Classics for the First Time

I also like picturing the backup singer as Michael McDonald in that SCTV bit, racing in from a thousand miles away to deliver exactly one chorus. Won't you stay just a little bit longer, indeed!

How did they have Richard Pryor though? How common was having a TV on this kind of tour bus back then? Honest question, I have no idea.

First of all, huge huge yays that Doctor Casino is back reviewing these songs! I have been missing our classic rock talks, so much fun. I'm psyched that Jeff W. stepped up to the plate to run the AM Gold poll, I wish it were happening sooner.

Now, to answer the question... this song was written and recorded in 1977, IIRC. It was January 1978 that Jackson flipped me off, so I know that the song was current at the time. Most of the tour buses then did have TVs, of course they weren't equipped for cable or anything like that, they would just pick up local stations that the crew could watch during their down time (and for some of the crew people, there's a lot of down time... those guys work LONG, long days, but some of them kind of work in spurts), and on most crews, there was always at least one guy who was an electronics junkie and had either a Betamax or a VCR. Betamaxes were pretty popular on tour buses from what I remember. Roadies loved anything Sony made back then.

So yeah, they could have been watching Richard Pryor.

Also I should add that most of the crew guys I know hate that song. The line about them working for minimum wage pisses them off, it makes them sound like Wal-Mart workers or something. Crew people get paid pretty well, especially the ones who are on retainer and get paid year round even if they're not on tour. One of my friends who worked for Metallica was making 52K a year in 1990, which equates to about 95K today, plus they're getting per diems for food and shit when they're on tour. And they get goodies. Another friend of mine from when I lived in Seattle works for Pearl Jam, and in addition to his salary, they bought him a Prius for working on an album. Most crew guys are very, very skilled at what they do. A lot of guitar techs are great players themselves who just don't want to perform for one reason or another. I have a lot of respect for crew guys. Plus, they're fun to hang with and there's always at least one person on a crew who loves to gossip and has stories that make mine seem totally dull.

Oooh, thanks for sharing, Sandy! For whatever reason I just never pictured them with TVs, but I think my picture of a "tour bus" is sorta hazy and has more to do with multiple DIY punk bands sharing a van than big rock acts that have a crew and so on.

It's a shame Jackson kind of blew the opportunity to write a good crew anthem, seems like there'd be tons of material for a poignant rock ballad thing, especially in the idea that they can actually play, maybe even better than the band, but choose a different road.

so good to be back at this!

Must not be that popular of a song or the opening chords would get more of a response from the crowd.

to be fair, the live version was the original release. so when they did the live recording, it wasn't out yet. when it did come out, it got oodles and oodles of radio play. fm radio loved those long, serious ones. (but this one required you to sit through a lot to get to the payoff of "stay," which was not quite as good a payoff as, say, the loud part of "stairway to heaven.")

That moment about Richard Pryor sounded really Warren Zevon-y to me.

jackson was producing warren at the time, so that makes total sense.

Not sure what's going on really at this point, who's a thousand miles away from who? The roadies are waking up at home and Jackson has to go on tour?

i believe he's taking to us, his loyal audience, here. we will go home after the show, while he will be getting on a bus headed for chicago, or detroit, he don't know, he does so many shows in a row.

i've always thought this could have been a billy joel song. reminds me of the kind of song the narrator of "the great suburban showdown" would move on to once he got out of the suburbs for good and became a rock star, touring somebody else's suburbs.

The line about them working for minimum wage pisses them off, it makes them sound like Wal-Mart workers or something.

that line always pissed me off, because if jackson thought they actually were making minimum wage, maybe instead of singing about it he should have, like, paid them more.

David Lindley the guitarist, who is a talented weirdo, does the high falsetto.

Ha, I almost brought up Billy Joel too but figured I'd already brought him up too often in this thread!

would be impossible.

I love Joel, but in his live demeanor, particularly on the ballads, he sometimes loses me - but the crowd is loving it. There's this whole dreary, doughy maudlin side of classic rock that clearly struck huge chords. Got that vibe from "The Load Out." Is it a distinct CR phenomenon? I mean ballads are big any old time, but I feel like the Sensitive Rocker, the Tough Road Guy who does have Something to Say From the Heart, letting his guard down, etc., kind of gets solidified around this point. Dunno if it's just the inevitable distillation of various 60s trends and expectations, generational weariness, the emotive affect of the arena setting, or what.

I think it works great on songs I like better - see my effusive praise for "Running on Empty" (notably a more uptempo and energetic performance), but on songs that fall flat it just feels like they're made for aliens.

I'd never heard this Jackson Browne song. Nothing he's done has ever stuck in my head, 'cept Running On Empty and Doctor My Eyes. And Somebody's Baby.

I did not know that was Lindley!

As soon as DC mentioned those opening chords, I felt these gray memories of sitting alone in the DJ studio, looking at the clock and sighing.

I love Joel, but in his live demeanor, particularly on the ballads, he sometimes loses me - but the crowd is loving it.

"Blame it all on yourself, but she's always ~a woman~ ~to me~" *throws piano over the stage; crowd chants Отечество наше свободное.*

Well, that moment I've always been able to get behind.

(lol at the gray DJ booth memory, well-phrased)

while we're on the subject of rock stars chronicling and complaining about life on the road...

SONG #30: AC/DC "IT'S A LONG WAY TO THE TOP (IF YOU WANNA ROCK 'N' ROLL")

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDCs7ijNUVM

"i tell you folks/it's harder than it looks!"

This'll be interesting. I know this band is a Big Deal and that freshmen get issued copies of Back in Black free with their subscription to Rolling Stone, but I really only know the very biggest hits, and most of them I don't like. Actually I think "Dirty Deeds" is the only one I'm ever happy to hear on the radio. I know they have a big deal where the lead singer died and they changed singers early on; I'm assuming this will be the second guy because it has a music video.

It's A Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock 'N' Roll): Starting strong. Big loud riff. Kinda "generic rock riff," I know this kinda thing more through Buckcherry or Black Crowes or whoever trying to channel it, whatever generation of Rock is Back! bands. Na na na na highway, goin' to a show. Got it.

Cool that they have bagpipes in the band, they should mix those higher though. Hey, there they are. That sounds okay. Cool drone quality mixed in with the guitars, lets them cut through the mix without having a choir or synthesizers or w/e. The call-and-response between lead and bagpipe is totally cool. I don't mind this long instrumental section cause the vocal part was sorta generic trite rock on the road stuff. Plus they really sound like they're jamming with the bagpipe people, not like it's just some goof added by the producer, feels like they're really in the same room giving each other winks. Man, if this guy is the replacement guy he sure sounds a lot like the guy on the other hits. Maybe this is one of those old proto-videos? It sounds really punchy and clean though, no 70s haze holding these guys up.

It's bugging me what city they're in, trying to recognize it by its modernist landmarks. Glasgow maybe? Boston? Get it known, get it paid, get it ripped off on the plane! That's how it goes, playing in a band! Man, they're really struggling to think of other things they can do on this parade truck. Should have brought in Bjork.

I dunno man, I wanna hold the five minutes' running time against this riff but these guys are rockin' pretty hard. The rhythm section is just giving it 100%, not letting up, secret might really be the liveliness of the drummer, all this little rackety-tackety stuff in the background makes this a lively neck-swinging toe-tapper rather than a sluggish riff-pounder - "Ba bramp dang donk, ba dunh dump dump" could get reeeeeal tedious otherwise. That's really helpful to the theme honestly, you feel like these guys deserve being at the top - there's no feeling of coasting on their successes here.

Overall, another surprise thumbs up! I still don't think it needs five minutes but it was totally lively and fun... and the bagpipe thing, which could have been gimmicky, just sounded awesome coming out of the speakers.

I know they have a big deal where the lead singer died and they changed singers early on; I'm assuming this will be the second guy because it has a music video.

Nope, this is the original guy, Bon Scott.

It's bugging me what city they're in, trying to recognize it by its modernist landmarks. Glasgow maybe? Boston?

Probably Sydney; this was still early in their career (1975), and I don't think they'd made it off the island yet.

secret might really be the liveliness of the drummer,

otm. Phil Rudd is what makes AC/DC great. I'll take a whole album of isolated Rudd drum tracks over a non-Rudd AC/DC record.

haha reading up on wikipedia it appears i may be wrong about every detail of this song. The bagpipes are synthesized?!

Doc Casino and Tarfumes so very very OTM about Phil Rudd. He was the PERFECT drummer for AC/DC.

Possibly interesting sociological comment: in the mid-to-late 70s, there was a lot of dissent within the ranks of music fans. There were camps and you were supposed to pick one and stick with it. You were either a hard rock/metal kid, an "regular rock" kid (you liked the big selling stuff like Foreigner/Boston/Styx/etc.), a punk kid, or a new wave/glam kid. It was okay to overlap between hard rock/metal and "regular rock" and it was okay to overlap between punk and new wave/glam, but you weren't supposed to cross species, even though all of us secretly loved stuff the other camps did, too. But the one band that EVERYBODY loved openly was AC/DC. The hard rock kids loved them for obvious reasons, the "regular" kids loved them because they were catchy and commercial, the punk kids loved them because they had attitude, and the new wave/glam kids liked them because they were fun and Angus wore a costume. AC/DC brought us together.

I just recently ranked every AC/DC album from worst to best for Stereogum. As I said there, "AC/DC emerged in the early ’70s, when hard rock was at its commercial peak, but rather than head in the jamming, crowd-pleasing direction of, say, Grand Funk Railroad, they stripped their music to engine and chassis and went racing down Australia’s back roads like the musical equivalent of the bikers from Mad Max. And by keeping their heads down and preserving their core sound with zero capitulation to trends, they managed to build a solid career, particularly live, and eventually become legends." They really did have it all from about 1975 to 1979; Bon Scott was a fantastic, sneering frontman, and Angus was a great lead guitarist (he claims he only has one solo, but it's a really good one), but their strongest weapons were Malcolm Young's rhythm guitar, which is dead-on and devastating, and Phil Rudd's utterly no-frills drumming. Once Bon Scott died and Brian Johnson took over on vocals, they became bluesier but less of a boogie band, mostly to their detriment.

There were camps and you were supposed to pick one and stick with it. You were either a hard rock/metal kid, an "regular rock" kid (you liked the big selling stuff like Foreigner/Boston/Styx/etc.), a punk kid, or a new wave/glam kid

I would have been one of the backwards kids who still had Three Dog Night posters in their bedrooms, but this is super interesting! Watching that AC/DC video, and particularly with an eye on the guitarist, I was also funnily reminded of Cheap Trick, who I expect did not cross these lines so much. But there's a real miscellaneous quality to their different styles/presentations, and the one real goofy guy with funny hats and stuff rings this "they were fun and Angus wore a costume" bell for me.

horse, that's good stuff. Y'all are making me like this band more in a few posts than I've done in a lifetime of hearing "TNT," "Back in Black" and "Highway to Hell" ad nauseum (though the latter, I'll concede, has an amazing chorus).

If you do decide to dig into the catalog, pay close attention to Bon Scott's lyrics (he's on High Voltage, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, Let There Be Rock, Powerage and Highway to Hell) - he's actually a pretty sharp writer, though there's a genuinely creepy sexual aggression to a lot of his songs that really wouldn't fly today. I mean, "Squealer" is describing straight-up rape, and gleeful about it.

Yeah, "Squealer" is pretty fucked up.

Great piece, 誤訳侮辱, only I'd put Ballbreaker way higher...maybe even just below Highway. Even though it's not as loud and in-yer-face as earlier AC/DC, it's more direct and sinister. It's the weird guy muttering menacingly behind you rather than the obnoxious drunk shouting in front of you.

I just recently ranked every AC/DC album from worst to best for Stereogum.
I really enjoyed this, thanks.

Watching that AC/DC video, and particularly with an eye on the guitarist, I was also funnily reminded of Cheap Trick, who I expect did not cross these lines so much.

Actually, Cheap Trick DID cross those lines as well, and largely for the same reasons. So did, interestingly enough, Tom Petty and Van Halen. Those were the bands that it was okay for everybody to love (punk kids loved Van Halen because it was well known that DLR hung out at all the punk clubs in LA and supported a lot of the LA punk scene).

Oh, rad! Always thought of AC/DC as just having fundamentally more street cred, or maybe their high just lasted longer.

I love how much thought AC/DC has put into being so thoughtless. Mal's illness has made me respect it even more, the more I read about their process. Because obviously Angus can play, and supposedly Malcolm is even better, but they put their energy into being as dumb and simple as possible. It's a hard rock salve. Also, never forget:

http://www.chunklet.com/index.cfm?section=article&IssueID=6&ID=96

I moved to Minneapolis in 1994, a cheap apartment on the wrong side of I-94. Coming home from the record store one afternoon, I got into a three-car accident a few blocks away from my place. I managed to "limp" it back to my street, but by the time I got there, I realized that I wasn't going to be able to drive it anywhere else.

I called a tow truck and waited outside. It wasn't a good moment standing out front of my shitty apartment looking at my busted car on the street. Some dude came up to me and tried to sell me some tapes out of a Case Logic carrier that he just so happened to have on him at that moment. I told him I wasn't interested just as the tow truck pulled up.

Guy loaded up the husk of my car on to the trailer, I signed the paperwork and handed the tow guy a check. As he was firming up the straps and everything, same neighborhood dude from before comes up and this time, gets a buy from the driver.

Which all leads up to this final moment of me standing on the sidewalk, watching the tow truck with its yellow siren lights turning and my car on its back, motoring south as the intro of "Thunderstruck" begins playing at full volume.

I love how the backing vocals on that and all AC/DC sounds like a bunch of massed trolls.

Great article, horse, and I love that you gave a shout-out to Carducci in the first line. Joe's a stellar guy. He wrote a book, Enter Naomi, about one of my best friends, Naomi Petersen. Joe, Naomi's brother Chris, Kara Roessler, Guy Pinhas, Scott Reeder, and I were trying to collaborate on putting together an online site that would serve as a personal tribute to her and an archive of her work, but it's been hard to coordinate with so many people involved.

Yeah, Rock and the Pop Narcotic is easily the single book of music criticism that's had the most influence on me as a writer, and Enter Naomi is fantastic, too.

naomi petersen was a fantastic photographer! her art was a huge part of how i absorbed a lot of my favorite records.

another band that strikes me as having crossed all those rock/metal/punk/glam lines is motorhead, though they were never quite as big as any of the other bands mentioned above. "ace of spades" was a huge influence, personally, in helping me find my way across some of those borders as a fan.

yeah the punks I was hanging out with in the mid-80's totally dug Motorhead

Oh, yeah, everybody loved Motorhead as well. Especially the hard rock/metal and punk kids. Nobody knew what category to put them in.

I miss Naomi terribly. I love that she is remembered so fondly. I wish she were still here.

Mainstream AOR fans and new wave fans loved Motorhead? Wouldn't have pegged that.

Obviously most of the Motorhead fans were metal kids or punk kids, but Motorhead was one of those bands that it was "acceptable" to like no matter what your chosen genre was. I did know a lot of new wavers who liked Motorhead. Not too many AOR fans that I was acquainted with knew about them, but the ones that did, liked them.

Also, to be clear, the AOR fans were by far the least interested in what was acceptable and what was not, because they weren't the most vocal fans or the ones who really had a clear subculture.

Because obviously Angus can play, and supposedly Malcolm is even better, but they put their energy into being as dumb and simple as possible.

Eh, simple maybe, but I wouldn't say dumb. For me, AC/DC is essentially the electric Count Basie Orchestra in that they do one thing: they swing in a way that no other entity can imitate, much less emulate. Malcolm is AC/DC's Freddie Green.

When I was 13, maybe 14, and getting into metal, a slightly older friend who was deep into punk gave me Motörhead's No Remorse, which he described as "the only metal record worth listening to."

Years later, I interviewed Lemmy live onstage at South by Southwest (this was in 2010 - I was picked because a friend of mine co-directed Lemmy: The Movie), and he talked about meeting John Lydon at an early-ish Motörhead gig, in full punk regalia, and remember him as a kid with long hair and a trench coat he'd spotted at Hawkwind gigs a couple of years earlier.

In high school in 84-85 Iron Maiden was the band the punk rockers and metal dudes all agreed on.

There's one band that came close in imitating/emulating the AC/DC swing: Accept.

Krokus too for awhile

Krokus went back to it. The last Krokus record is a great AC/DC record.

The Cult circa-Electric was a good fake-AC/DC.

yeah, "wildflower" is about as close to "rock'n'roll singer" as it gets without a lawsuit

In high school in 84-85 Iron Maiden was the band the punk rockers and metal dudes all agreed on.

― Gar Tooth (Jon Lewis)

Yeah, I was gonna say earlier that Maiden was another metal band that the punks I knew all liked. Especially early Maiden when Paul Dianno was the singer. They sort of drifted away a bit when Bruce Dickinson took over.