Let There Be Rock

In late 1976 the band were in a slump. Manager Michael Browning got a call in the middle of the Lock Up Your Daughters tour to say that Atlantic in America did not like Dirty Deeds and was going to drop the group. Browning said the band's reaction was to decide that they would show the label. Angus said George Young asked what kind of album they wanted, and they said they wanted a lot of guitar riffs, because touring had fired them up. Vanda and Young produced, with Mark Opitz engineering.

The Australian cover shows the fingers of Chris Turner of the band Buffalo, who recalled that the photographer asked him for a flashy run up and down the neck. The international edition, released in July 1977, was the first to carry Gerard Huerta's AC/DC logo. Its photograph was taken at the Kursaal Ballroom in Southend on 19 March 1977.

Reception

Q magazine named it one of the 50 heaviest albums of all time in 2001. Julian Marszalek of The Quietus called it a stepping stone toward the sound the band reached on Powerage. The biographer Murray Engleheart wrote in 2006 that it lifted AC/DC to the status of an album band. Angus told Guitar World in 2000 that Mutt Lange once said that of all the albums George Young and Harry Vanda made with the band, this was the one he wished he had produced. In 2020 Michael Hann of The Guardian ranked its title track at number four on his list of the band's 40 greatest songs.