When Bon Scott leered, "Lock up your daughter, lock up your wife, lock up your back door," on AC/DC's North American debut album, High Voltage (1976), he wasn't so much issuing a threat as celebrating his inalienable right to be crass. AC/DC showed how much fun true tastelessness could be and how liberating it could sound. These Australian delinquents played their bloodshot blues rock with the venom of punk rockers and the swagger of drunken lechers.The first batch of remastered reissues from AC/DC's catalog captures the band at its politically incorrect peak.

High Voltage and Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap (1976) find the quintet already sure of its strengths: The guitars of brothers Angus and Malcolm Young bark at each other, Phil Rudd swings the beat even as he's pulverizing his kick drum, and Scott brings the raunch 'n' wail. The subject matter is standard-issue rock rebellion; Scott pauses only once to briefly contemplate the consequences of his night stalking in "Ride On."

The boys graduate from the back of the bar to the front of the arena on Highway to Hell (1979), with a cleaner sound courtesy of Shania Twain's future husband, producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange. The songs are more compact, the choruses fattened by rugby-team harmonies. The prize moment: Scott closes the hip-grinding "Shot Down in Flames" with a cackle worthy of the Wicked Witch of the West.

A year later, Scott drank himself to death. Yet the band went on to make its 1980 landmark album, Back in Black, in which his iron-lunged replacement, Brian Johnson, bellows, "Have a drink on me" without a shred of shame. From the ominous "Hell's Bells" to the bawdy "You Shook Me All Night Long," AC/DC flipped off the Reaper and gave Scott and his fans the best tribute they ever could have desired.

“All Along the Watchtower”

Jimi Hendrix got hold of Bob Dylan's early John Wesley Harding tapes and in late 1967 recorded a version of "All Along the Watchtower" with the Experience in London. Dissatisfied with that first development, Hendrix brought those tapes with him to New York in early 1968 when he began work on Electric Ladyland. Eddie Kramer, Hendrix's engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Hendrix "was still looked upon by his basically white audience as the mammoth black guitar hero. There was a constant fight within him to expand himself." Hendrix's successful take on Dylan's work has long been recognized by the songwriter. "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way," Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his Biograph box set. "Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."