POP MUSIC REVIEW : AC/DC Electrifies in Long Beach

The Australian band AC/DC has been accused of writing the same song over and over again since it began in the mid-’70s, thumping assemblages of pentatonic power riffs and locker-room innuendo.

But it’s at least as good a formula within the context of arena rock as, say, Vivaldi’s was within the context of the late Baroque era--1980’s “Back in Black” may have been the best hard-rock album of the ‘80s--and at the Long Beach Arena Saturday, AC/DC delivered a perfect arena show.

Openers Love/Hate, Los Angeles rockers who have more in common with AC/DC than the slash between the halves of their names, would’ve blown a lesser headliner off the stage. But they were messing with the wrong band.

AC/DC’s lead guitarist Angus Young, a 33-year-old man dressed in a short-pants school uniform the color of Burgundy wine, still looks like somebody’s hyperkinetic little brother granted a wish by a genie.

He dashed across the Long Beach stage, did a dance that looked like stomping grapes and whipped his head back and forth. On a vast, monochromatic stage set that looks as if it were assembled from components purchased at Organizers Paradise, Young is the only bit of life you need.

When he sustained a single note of feedback, the crowd cheered; when he jumped up and down, they cheered; when he brandished his guitar at a 45-degree angle from his groin, they got up on their chairs and pumped the horned fist.

Some lead guitarists might project the image of gods, but Young is the hard-rock everyman--he’s the Bart Simpson of rock ‘n’ roll, and every teen-age boy in the audience secretly thinks he could do the same if he owned a really good electric guitar and his brother was a famous record producer.

Singer Brian Johnson has a sort of Heathcliff virility, the jovial swagger you’d expect from Tom Jones, and a voice that sounds like what happens when you accidentally step on a cat. He might be the least charismatic man ever to front a Top 10 hard-rock band, and the most solid.

Rhythm guitarist Malcolm Young, Angus’ shaggy older brother, is the key to the AC/DC sound--it’s his chunky, mildly syncopated riffs that make the band so immediately identifiable--but he has all the stage personality of a pick-up pedal-steel man on a Tammy Wynette tour. Bassist Cliff Williams and drummer Chris Slade are even more faceless.

But in the way that AC/DC’s thumping, foursquare beat makes even the mildest syncopations swing way funky--which is why idiot-simple AC/DC songs rock so much harder than the most complex Red Hot Chili Peppers riffs--the band’s gray stage presence sets off Angus Young’s brilliance all the more clearly. Saturday, there were cannons and inflatable Angus-demons and even hell’s bell, but an AC/DC show, like a Springsteen show, centers on one short guy with a guitar.