AC/DC Shrugs Off a Death and Rocks On

They have this Intense fucking loyalty," muses Brian Johnson the next day over a late breakfast. "The kids don't want to just come. They want to be part of it. They want a T-shirt that says 'I like AC/DC, and I'll fight anybody who says different.'"

A stocky, friendly bear of an Englishman who is rarely seen in public without a checkered flat cap tilted down over his forehead, Johnson joined AC/DC last April after the accidental death in London on February 19th of original vocalist Bon Scott. (Scott, 33, died of asphyxiation — choking on his own vomit after an all-night drinking binge — not of alcohol poisoning, as originally reported.) This is Johnson's first U.S. tour after a rocky decade fronting his own band, Geordie, and he is genuinely impressed by AC/DC's drawing power as well as the Top Twenty sales of Back in Black, the band's sixth Atlantic album. "The kids just flock to see them," he crows in the thick accent of his hometown of Newcastle.

Most reviewers do not share his or the fans' enthusiasm. From the time the Glasgow-born Young brothers — who moved to Sydney, Australia, with their parents, sister and five older brothers in 1963 — formed AC/DC seven years ago, the group has been mercilessly slagged as heavy-metal morons and their audience as tasteless cretins. Despite the bad reviews, a punishing tour schedule (their current trek began in July and goes through February) and Scott's untimely death, AC/DC have continuously refused to give up, and Back in Black is their just reward. With the title and all-black cover meant as a silent tribute to Scott, the album entered the English charts at Number One and is a safe bet to match the platinum sales in America of last year's Highway to Hell.

The band's snowballing success can be attributed in part to the heavy-metal renaissance now sweeping both countries. But the only thing AC/DC share with such current metal champions as Ted Nugent, Van Halen and English upstarts Def Leppard, Judas Priest and Saxon is the universal scorn of critics. Compared to the boorish, macho plodding of most heavy-metal heathens, the AC/DC sound is nothing more and nothing less than aggressively catchy song hooks brutalized by a revved-up boogie rhythm, Malcolm's jackhammer riffing, Angus' guitar histrionics and Johnson's bloodcurdling bawl.