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“Get your horns!”

That was the cheerful cry of the long-haired vendor selling plastic red devil horns at Sunday night’s AC/DC concert. A week before Halloween, the Greensboro Coliseum throbbed with glowing, blinking horns worn by kids of all ages. The Australian hard-rock legends were in town, and it was time to raise a little hell.

They gave a nearly sold-out coliseum crowd two straight hours of what they came to hear: a pummeling program of stripped-down, guitar-powered favorites from their canon (and, during the encore, their cannons).

From “Hell’s Bells” to “Hell Ain’t a Bad Place to Be,” AC/DC gleefully rolled down the “Highway to Hell,” with guitarist Angus Young leading the charge. A runway led from the stage midway into the arena, and Young and vocalist Brian Johnson made frequent use of it to get close to the crowd. The rest of the band — the rock-solid rhythm section of guitarist Malcolm Young, bassist Cliff Williams and drummer Phil Rudd — generally stayed clustered around the drum riser. In case you’re wondering, Young still wears his schoolboy uniform onstage, right down to knickers, white socks and beanie.

The show opened with an animated sequence of AC/DC aboard a runaway train. The cartoon morphed into a simulated onstage crash. Amid much smoke, fire and noise, a black locomotive screeched to a halt and AC/DC tore into “Rock and Roll Train.” It was one of four songs plucked from “Black Ice,” their latest album. The bulk of the program consisted of much older classics. Of the 16 other songs they performed, only “Thunderstruck” was recorded after 1981. That’s not necessarily a complaint. No one goes to an AC/DC concert hoping to hear obscure album tracks from “Fly on the Wall” or “Flick of the Switch.” The new material was strong and well-received, but it approached the limit of the audience’s tolerance for the unfamiliar. And so AC/DC gave them the songs that have been the backbone of their live show for decades.

As a whole, the show was solid, though not a single standard deviation away from any other AC/DC show I’ve ever seen.

The regular-set finale of “You Shook Me All Night Long,” “T.N.T.,” “Whole Lotta Rosie” and “Let There Be Rock” was muscular, energetic and liberating. On the last of these,

Angus Young pulled out all stops, soloing atop a small circular stage that rose above the crowd. Then he dashed back down the runway and reappeared on yet another elevated stage, where he exhorted the crowd to further heights of feverish abandon –– not that they needed much encouragement.
 

Parke Puterbaugh is a freelance contributor who lives in Greensboro. Contact him at parkeputerbaugh@earthlink.net.