Five Years Late, Six Times Platinum: The Wild Ride of AC/DC’s Dirty Deeds
About this episode
This episode explores the tumultuous journey of AC/DC's album 'Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap' and its cultural significance.
In 1976, an exhausted AC/DC wrote "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap" between tour stops, built around a line Angus Young lifted from a cartoon villain's business card. What followed was stranger than the song itself: an Illinois couple harassed for years because their real phone number matched the lyrics, a U.S. label that shelved the album for nearly five years and almost dropped the band, and a chart-topping American release that landed over a year after Bon Scott's death — competing directly with AC/DC's own new record at the time. In this episode of the Behind The Song podcast, Janda traces Bon Scott's wild backstory, the humor and heartbreak in his lyrics, and how this scrappy, nearly-buried album became a platinum classic on two different timelines. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .
People in this episode
Host: Janda
Topics covered
- AC/DC
- music history
- album release
- Bon Scott
- classic rock
- cultural impact
Keywords
- AC/DC
- Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap
- Bon Scott
- album history
- classic rock
- music industry
- 1970s
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: AC/DC
Books & works: Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap
Places: Illinois
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- Remembering Dolly Parton
- The Class Of ‘76: An A+ Year for Classic Rock
- Us and Them: The Band Divorce Behind Pink Floyd's The Wall
- Grateful Dead fans and the "Days Between"
- Don Henley: The Boys Of Summer and the Eagles’ Long Goodbye
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