“Back in Black.” “You Shook Me All Night Long.” “For Those About to Rock (We Salute You).” “Thunderstruck.” Brian Johnson‘s catalog of songs with AC/DC since joining the band in 1980, following the death of their longtime vocalist Bon Scott that same year, are some of the band’s classics.
Throughout his career with AC/DC, from their 1980 release Back in Black through Power Up in 2020, Johnson has always maintained the highest respect for Scott. Johnson still abstains from performing the band’s 1975 hit “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll)” out of respect for his predecessor.
Before Johnson or Scott were in AC/DC, they even bonded over pints of beer. In the early 1970s, when Johnson was fronting Geordie, the band played in Torquay, England, and was supported by a band called Fang. “[I was] watching this band and thinking ‘They’re pretty good,’ and afterward having a beer with the singer, who was Bon Scott,” recalled Johnson. “And we swore undying friendship after getting a few beers down because we were from the same kind of background. He [Scott] was from Glasgow originally, just like Angus and Malcolm, and just years later finding out who this guy was, it was the man in Torquay. It was Bon Scott.”
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Johnson added, “If it hadn’t been for him telling the boys [in AC/DC]—he said some really nice things about me—and when I put two and two together, that was ’73. I think [Fang] finished the tour that year and went back to Australia and I got a funny feeling it was ’74, ’75 when Bon joined AC/DC, so it wasn’t long after that.”
Throughout his career with AC/DC, there was also a song that remained one Johnson loved. Released on the band’s fifth album Powerage in 1978, “What’s Next to the Moon” was never released as a single but was always a favorite of Johnson’s.
“Well, I wish we did it,” said Johnson of “What’s Next to the Moon,” which he’s performed live with the band a few times, but was released two years before his time in AC/DC. “We only did it [a couple of times], and I loved it to death.”
‘Heavenly Body Flying Across the Sky’
Co-written by Scott, Malcolm, and Angus Young, the morbid track suggests the gruesome murder, on the railroad tracks, of a girl called Casey Jones.
Well, I tied my baby to the railroad track
Cannonball down the line
Giving that woman just a-one more chance
To give it to me one more time
Engineer wishing he was home in bed
Dreaming about Casey Jones
Wide-eyed woman half a mile ahead
Thinking about broken bones
It’s your love that I want
It’s your love that I need
It’s your love, got to have
It’s your love
Heavenly body flying across the sky
Superman was out of town
Come on honey, gotta change your tune
‘Cause it’s a long way down
Clark Kent looking for a free ride
Thinking about Lois Lane
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a suicide
And that’d be a shame
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“We were in the studio, and I had just broken a string,” said Angus Young in 1979 on writing the song. “Instead of changing my guitar, I preferred to keep the one I had, because that day I had a hell of a sound, so I changed the string and, in order to test the arrangement, I played a few notes followed by a chord. That was exactly the intro to ‘What’s Next To The Moon.’ Malcolm said, ‘This would be good to start a song.’ And here it was.”
Photo: Kevin Winter/Getty Images
