Rod Stewart & The Faces Real Good Time (1975) April 16, 2022.Pink Floyd Delicate Sound of Thunder (1988) expanded (2020) April 28, 2022.Neil Young Official Bootleg Series: ‘Dorothy Chandler Pavilion 1971 Royce Hall, 1971 Citizen Kane Jr.Steve Winwood Back in the High Life (1986) May 19, 2022.Dirty Deeds has plenty of big riffs like the title track, Squealer, and Problem Child, but the other tunes have the band still experimenting with what works. It is stacked with the big rock riffs the band would become known for. The international version of High Voltage is a compilation of the bands first two albums, and T.N.T. makes 80% of it for a reason. Their second album, T.N.T. is the first ‘real’ AC/DC record. It stumbles at times (‘Love Song’) but is filled with enough potential (‘She’s Got Balls, ‘Show Business’) that hindsight can clearly tell you where this band is headed.
Even when it is positioned in the right place on the time line, it is still an oddity. The band’s first album, Aussie High Voltage, acts like a proper first album should. You See, Dirty Deeds is not a straight up AC/DC album. Of course, that decision went on to create even more drama/controversy. The Dirty Deeds story might have ended there if AC/DC hadn’t hit the big time with the release of their first two Top 40 selling albums back to back with Highway to Hell in ’79 and Back in Black the following year. The band’s back catalog saw a surge in sales, and the increase in American import sales of Dirty Deeds from Australia was enough to finally motivate Atlantic to give the album an official release in the land of the free.
The exclusion put the band in a serious funk as they were set to go on their first tour of North America and promote Dirty Deeds. The decision is believed to be the beginning of the end for Mark Evans as AC/DC’s bass player, and for a time put lead singer Bon Scott on thin ice with the rest of the band. Europe published the album, but America did not.
The Americans would see to what was released in the USA and Canada, while those running the show in Europe basically covered the rest of the world. If you lived in those two countries you were going to have to wait another five years.Īt the time, Atlantic Records had different department heads controlling what the label put out in different regions. And if you lived anywhere outside of the USA or Canada you were going to get a version of it to rock out to in 1976. While their style fits those bands, it doesn’t mix with AC/DC or the album’s greasy sense of humor.īut even with an altered track list and a weird cover, Dirty Deeds is pretty darn good. Hipgnosis, a British art design group who had done brilliant work in the past, including the album covers for Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy and Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, was hired for the job. It’s true enough that the bird flipping cover wasn’t going to fly in the more uptight parts of the world, but what they replaced it with is this “high concept” image featuring group of d-bags hanging out in front of a cheap hotel with their identities hidden behind black bars over their eyes. The cover sleeve received a drastic change too. Other changes, like dropping the album’s first single (and one of its better tunes), ‘Jailbreak’, were mind-boggling. So, it was included to give those outside of Australia a chance to buy the tune. Some of the changes had a thread of logic to it. Rocker, for instance, was in heavy rotation in their live sets, but the studio recording wasn’t available to the international audience. The band decided to change the track list for those outside of their native region for various reasons, and thus a second or “international version” of Dirty Deeds was delivered to their worldwide publisher, Atlantic Records. It featured all new tracks and a cartoon album sleeve that most notably featured Angus Young in the background flipping the “Australian Bird”. The first was published by Albert Studios and released in Australia and New Zealand. After several previous attempts to squeeze in some studio time while committed to a heavy touring schedule, a still fledgling AC/DC recorded their third album, Dirty Deeds Done Dirty Cheap, in 1976.
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