Episode #20 - The Rock Goddess Homework
The Runaways - Waitin’ For The Night (1977) | AC/DC - If You Want Blood … You’ve Got It (1979) | Metallica - Metallica (1991)
Occasionally, the boys get to sit down for an hour and chat to people who have actually contributed to hard rock and heavy metal’s rich tapestry, and when they do they challenge their guest - or in this case, guests - to choose the three albums that they’ll review in a future episode.
It was no different when Rock Goddess dropped in for a chat (well, we say dropped in - we were all in lockdown, so Julie and Jody Turner were on one end of Zoom and the lads were on the other end).
The brief is simple: three albums released between January 1, 1970 and December 31, 1995, none of which have featured on the show already.
And we have to say that Jody and Julie came up with a trio of absolute belters - all of which were, on paper at any rate, capable of bothering the top 20 of the Hall of Fame, if not the rock and roll utopia of the top three.
The Runaways - Waitin’ For The Night (1977)
It’s difficult to say anything about The Runaways that hasn’t already been said, but we’ll give it a good old college try.
If The X Factor had been around in ‘75, this band would have been the One Direction of their day, only more pleasing on the eye. All you really need to know about that is that The Runaways were the product of an idea nurtured by self-styled Los Angeles impresario Kim Fowley, an influential, pedatrory and downright loathesome excuse for a human being who had a mind to put together an all-girl band that would transcend and transform the US music scene.
Fowley would later deny that the concept was his, stating he was approached separately by guitarist Joan Jett and drummer Sandy West who wanted to start a band. He introduced West and Jett to one another, and they formed the band as a result. Micki Steele was added on bass and vocals and The Runaways started life as a power trio.
Later, Lita Ford joined to take on lead guitar duties, with Jett switching to rhythm guitar. Soon after, singer Cherie Currie joined, assuming singing duties from Steele who was then jettisoned completely in favour of new bassist Jackie Fox, thereby completing the classic line-up. Hits followed - most notably the infectious Cherry Bomb - and The Runaways became a runaway success.
When this album came out, two short years after Jett and West met, the band had lost Currie, Jett had assumed singing rights and the whole shooting match was in freefall - a train wreck being played out in glorious technicolour. Infighting, divided loyalties, manipulation, exploitation, inappropriate sexual relationships, allegations of rape and psychological and substance abuse make it a wonder the album got made at all.
But did the grubby back story being played out behind the scenes help the quality of the album? Or was the end product just another of its victims?
AC/DC - If You Want Blood … You’ve Got It (1979)
As the lads would be the first to testify, for the ability to induce slack-jawed awe there is very little to match vintage AC/DC in full flight. Much as the boys love Beano - Mark most of all - it’s hard to disagree that a shirtless, winking Bon Scott, flanked by the whirlwind of perpetual motion that is Angus Young and the thundering back line of Malcolm Young, Cliff Williams and Phil Rudd is an irresistable juggernaut of noise, swagger and sass.
The visceral live experience of AC/DC is impossible to capture in the studio. Much of the band’s 70s output does a decent job of trying, but you never quite get that tingle when the backing tape stops mid-song (never at the end of a song, mind), the lights go down, the amplifiers start to hum and that first power chord shatters the silence.
If You Want Blood … is AC/DC’s first attempt to bottle the magic and sell it in volume. Recorded over two nights at the Glasgow Apollo during the UK leg of the Powerage tour, it’s the album that in 1980 turned Mark’s head from Michael Jackson and Fat Larry’s Band when he heard Whole Lotta Rosie blasting out of another kid’s ghetto blaster (look, all the pretty girls were into soul, Mark was 15 and saturated with explosively high levels of testosterone, and if what it took was wearing a dapper belt and owning a copy of Off The Wall and pretending to like it, then that’s what it took … so leave it, okay?)
Anyway, it’s enough to say that this is an album that all three lads are very familiar with. But onced they got past the fact it’s ‘AC/DC doing tracks you've heard countless times before only marginally differently and with a backdrop of people shouting’ (© Steve Davies), how did it stack up as a whole?
Metallica - Metallica (1991)
Ah, yes - the black album. Should that be capped up? The Black Album. Yes, it probably should, since that’s pretty much become its title in all but formality to the majority of the 31 million people around the world who own a copy of it.
Since the dawn of time, there are only 21 albums in the world that have sold more copies than this. If you strip out the albums that don’t qualify for consideration by this podcast, then the boys were looking at the 7th best selling album of all time. Of those rock albums that lie above it in that list, two have already been admitted to the Hall of Fame and, at the time of writing, both are in the Top 10, and one is on top of the pile.
All of which is to say that in this episode the boys found themselves dealing with one of the true contenders for the that coveted #1 spot.
It is also one of two albums - the other being Metallica’s Load - that’s responsible for the birth of this podcast. Two years earlier, during a boys weekend away and following yet another pointless debate about which of the two albums was the better, they decided to score them track for track to finally put a nail in the coffin of the argument.
So - spoiler alert - they knew, in broad terms at least, what the outcome of this review was going to be. But without referring back to those scores, would a week of repeated and forensic listening change their affection for it?