AC/DC in Detroit
A Faustian Bargain Played at 11 (Which is Really 15, But Your Ears Bleed at 11)
DETROIT — The devil came to Ford Field last night, and 43,000 sinners greeted him with blinking red horns and fists pumping like piston rods in a blown-out Hemi. AC/DC doesn’t just play rock and roll — they are rock and roll, the kind that smells like burnt rubber, spilled bourbon, and the ozone crackle of a frayed extension cord dunked in a bathtub. Watching them now is like watching Roy Batty’s death soliloquy in Blade Runner — beautiful, violent, and doomed, but goddamn if those blinking red devil horn C-beams don’t glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.
These guys didn’t just sell their souls — they leased them, with a buyback clause written in blood and Marshall stack warranty void stickers. They’re the kind of band that would call Satan "mate," hand him a tinny, and then plug in a Gibson SG loud enough to wake the dead — which, given the number of ex-members currently pushing up daisies, might actually be part of the stage show.
Brian Johnson’s voice is the ticket, a rusted-out chainsaw gargling gravel and glory. The man is deaf, for fuck’s sake, and he’s still screaming like a banshee who just chugged a pint of jet fuel. Steven Tyler once called that voice a "fist in a velvet glove, sledgehammer to the back of the head," but the velvet’s long gone, and the hammer’s just swinging wild now. Doesn’t matter. The crowd carried him like a drunk best man at a shotgun wedding.
Angus Young, 70 years old and still duck-walking like a demented schoolboy who just got a jolt from a cattle prod, is the last of a dying breed — a guitarist who plays like he’s trying to set his own hair on fire. And let’s be real, that hair should be on fire. It looks like a possum’s nest after a lightning strike. But the man is a riff machine, a Chuck Berry demon summoned from the Australian outback and cranked to 11 (which, in AC/DC math, is actually 15, because volume knobs are for cowards).
The rhythm section? A goddamn miracle. Phil Rudd isn’t here (because the universe is cruel), Malcolm Young is dead (because the universe is crueler), and yet the backbeat still says “meet me in the backseat.” They don’t need fills. They don’t need flash. They just need four, and they count it better than any Muppet on Sesame Street.
And the sound — Christ Almighty, the sound. They built a wall of amplifiers that would make Hadrian proud, and they played like they were trying to kill Detroit. Two and a half hours of pure, unfiltered voltage, a setlist that dug up Bon Scott’s ghost (RIP, you glorious bastard) and then bludgeoned the crowd with Back in Black until their fillings rattled. Angus got his 20-minute solo —because of course he did — and by the end, my ears were ringing like a payphone in a meth lab.
This is it, folks. The Second Age of Rock is dying, literally. The giants are falling, the amps are dimming, and the only thing left is the thud of a power chord hitting your chest like a defibrillator. AC/DC is the last of them, a band that can still “make you want to boil your sneakers and make soup out of your girlfriend’s panties” (thanks, Tyler).
And when those goddamn cannons fired during For Those About to Rock, I didn’t just cheer - I howled. Because this is the end, and AC/DC is playing us out.
Hail Satan. Hail rock and roll. Hail the deafening, beautiful noise.
Yes