Let There Be Rock

Released

Let There Be Rock was AC/DC’s fourth album in Australia, but only their second in the US (their first two, High Voltage and T.N.T., were combined into a reworked High Voltage, and their third, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, wasn’t released in the US until 1981, again with a different track listing). On the US version of LTTR, only one song is changed: “Crabsody in Blue,” a dirty joke set to a crawling blues tempo, is cut, replaced with “Problem Child,” from Dirty Deeds. The result is maybe AC/DC’s hardest album — no ballads, just one face-punching, sneering rocker after another, including many of the band’s Bon Scott-era classics like the title track, “Bad Boy Boogie,” “Hell Ain’t a Bad Place to Be,” and the punk-blues, not-as-misogynist-as-it-initially-seems “Whole Lotta Rosie.”

Phil Freeman