Hopefully you recall how I mentioned that because of my attention to Casey Kasem’s “American Top Forty” during my school years, there was a complete ignorance on my part to music that didn’t necessarily have a huge hit on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart during that era.
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In November of 1979, the top 10 singles in the United States looked like this:
- 1 – No More Tears (Enough is Enough) – Barbra Streisand & Donna Summer
- 2 – Babe – Styx
- 3 – Still – Commodores
- 4 – Dim All the Lights – Donna Summer
- 5 – Heartache Tonight – Eagles
- 6 – Please Don’t Go – KC & the Sunshine Band
- 7 – You Decorated My Life – Kenny Rogers
- 8 – Send One Your Love – Stevie Wonder
- 9 – Tusk – Fleetwood Mac
- 10 – Pop Musik – M
The Billboard album chart showed a slightly different story for that same week:
- 1 – The Long Run – Eagles
- 2 – In Through the Out Door – Led Zeppelin
- 3 – Cornerstone – Styx
- 4 – Midnight Magic – Commodores
- 5 – Head Games – Foreigner
- 6 – Tusk – Fleetwood Mac
- 7 – Rise – Herb Alpert
- 8 – On The Radio – Greatest Hits, Volumes 1 & 2 – Donna Summer
- 9 – Wet – Barbra Streisand
- 10 – One Voice – Barry Manilow
Peaking at #17 on that same album chart was a release titled “Highway to Hell” by Australian rock band AC/DC. The band’s album release the prior year, “Powerage” only managed to reach #133, but taking a listen in 2023, I find it to be a crunchy, gritty and somewhat uneven release, without the knowledge yet that it was the precursor to the Robert Mutt Lange-helmed rockers to come in the next few years. That Mutt Lange – you know, producer of monster hits for Def Leppard, Shania Twain, Foreigner, The Cars, and numerous others.
Many of AC/DC’s most well-known songs (“Back in Black”, “Hells Bells”, “You Shook Me All Night Long” and “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” for example) never approached the top 10 singles chart but have become classics in their own right simply from use in commercials and film and by reputation.
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AC/DC is not a group I was completely unaware of either at the time, as my older brother loved the band (especially “For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)” in 1981). Because they didn’t get a ton of airplay on Top-40 radio, I only heard those songs intermittently.
That limited awareness led me to contemplate which AC/DC track to cover on my latest reaction video. The question was finding a song that I’d never heard but my audience would appreciate. Looking on their list of singles and their respective peak positions, I found the song “Rock ‘N’ Roll Damnation” from that 1978 “Powerage” album that peaked outside of the top 100 albums on Billboard’s Top 200 chart. It appeared to have been a minor hit in England (#24), but without hearing it, it still sounded promising for a reaction.
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