AC/DC in Atlanta Prove If It Ain’t Broke, Turn It Up – Review and Photos

Photos and Review by Max Stewart

AC/DC have never really cared about reinventing itself. And we are thankful for that.

For more than five decades, the Australian rock legends have essentially operated from the same instruction manual: plug in the guitars, find a riff that could knock a hole through drywall, crank everything to an irresponsible volume and let it rip. There are no acoustic interludes. No mid-career synth phase. No orchestral reimagining of the catalog. AC/DC figured out exactly what AC/DC was a long time ago, and on Thursday night at Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium, they proved there is still absolutely no reason to change the formula.

The Power Up Tour rolled into Atlanta on August 27 with The Pretty Reckless handling opening duties. Taylor Momsen has become a bona fide rock frontwoman, carrying the kind of rasp and swagger that works particularly well when you are staring down tens of thousands of people waiting for AC/DC. The hour-long set included “Death by Rock and Roll,” “Follow Me Down,” “Make Me Wanna Die,” “Heaven Knows” and “Going to Hell,” alongside newer material. It was pretty much the appropriate appetizer before spending the next two-plus hours having Angus Young riffs rearrange your internal organs.

Then the lights went down.

“If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It).”

“Back in Black.”

There are opening punches, and then there is that.

AC/DC took the stage around 8:25 and delivered 21 songs over roughly two hours and twenty minutes. The amazing thing is how little explanation any of it requires. When Angus Young walks onto a stage in a schoolboy uniform holding a Gibson SG, you know what is about to happen. There is something almost comforting about it.

Then he starts playing and “comforting” probably isn’t the right word anymore.

At 71, Young still performs like he has been plugged into the same electrical outlet as his guitar. The duckwalk is there. The ‘stiff upper lip’ expressions are there. The SG is there. Most importantly, that unmistakable guitar tone is still there: dirty, sharp and somehow capable of making a stadium feel like a sweaty club.

AC/DC songs aren’t complicated. That’s part of their genius. Angus and the late Malcolm Young built a language out of the spaces between (usually three or four) chords. The riffs breathe and the drums hit you directly in the chest. “Shot Down in Flames” gave way to “Thunderstruck”, a tune we might have expected to encore but turned Mercedes-Benz Stadium into one gigantic chant early in the night. Then came the iconic riff on “Have a Drink on Me” and the ominous tolling of “Hells Bells” (complete with a massive bell lowered over the stage). Even 2020’s “Shot in the Dark” sounded completely at home among the classics… the rare late-career ‘new song’ that doesn’t trigger an eye roll or a run to the beer line, but instead proves AC/DC can still squeeze fresh blood from that same gloriously familiar formula.

And standing in the middle of it all was Brian Johnson, still sounding like a man gargling gravel while leaning out the window of a speeding muscle car. Johnson doesn’t need pristine vocals because pristine vocals would sound completely ridiculous in AC/DC. “Highway to Hell,” “Shoot to Thrill,” “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap”… they need some dirt underneath the fingernails and need to sound a little dangerous. Behind Young and Johnson, Stevie Young (rhythm guitar and nephew of Angus and Malcolm), Chris Chaney (bass) and Matt Laug (drums) kept the whole machine locked into that unmistakable AC/DC pocket… no unnecessary flash, just a brutally tight rhythm section giving Angus and Brian all the room in the world to run wild. Of course, the ghost of the late singer Bon Scott still lives inside these songs, his spirit permanently stitched into the DNA of AC/DC.

Rock music spends a lot of time worrying about its own mortality. Every few years somebody asks whether rock is dead, and then somebody else writes an essay explaining why it isn’t. AC/DC doesn’t seem particularly interested in the discussion. They just turn the amps on. And suddenly you’re surrounded by generations of people screaming “THUNDER!” at the top of their lungs. That’s the argument.

There were older fans who probably bought Highway to Hell when it came out. There were people my age who grew up hearing AC/DC blasted from car stereos on FM radio in the 90s / 00s, football stadiums and every questionable dive bar in America. I actually attended the show with my friend from high school, where we learned songs like “Back in Black” and “Thunderstruck” together on guitar. And there were Zoomers and young kids in blinking devil horns hearing these songs live for the first time. These tunes are timeless in the canon of rock n roll.

The second half of the show became almost comical in the number of epic songs AC/DC still had sitting in the chamber: “Sin City,” “Jailbreak,” “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap,” “High Voltage,” “Riff Raff” and “You Shook Me All Night Long.” Any one of those could anchor another band’s encore. For AC/DC, they’re just Tuesday. Well, Thursday. “Whole Lotta Rosie” led into the night’s centerpiece, an extended “Let There Be Rock” that essentially became the Angus Young Show. He kept putting up his ear to the crowd soaking in the cheers that he so well deserves, he is a showman and keeps stadium shows fun and not pretentious. Young stretched the song into a massive guitar workout, squeezing every possible squeal, bend and ounce of distortion out of the SG.

It wasn’t tasteful. It wasn’t subtle. It was f*cking AC/DC. The encore brought “T.N.T.” before the inevitable finale, “For Those About to Rock (We Salute You).” And then came the cannons. Because of course there are cannons. That’s the beauty of this band. AC/DC has never needed to wink at what it is. There is no irony here. There are giant bells and devil horns and schoolboy uniforms and cannons firing inside football stadiums while 40,000-plus people scream about rock n roll. It’s ridiculous, glorious… and it works.

There is a temptation with legendary bands to spend the entire night measuring the present against the past. Is Brian Johnson the singer he was in 1980? Can Angus Young move like he did in 1979? Of course not. Nobody can outrun time. But great rock n roll was never about perfection anyway. It was about the feeling when somebody hits the right chord at an irresponsibly loud volume and, for a few minutes, everything else disappears.

AC/DC figured that out decades ago. They haven’t reinvented the formula. They’ve just spent more than 50 years proving how damn good the formula was in the first place.