There are plenty of ways to make a rock song stand out. You can write a killer riff. You can turn up the amps. You can have your singer scream about the hardships of life on the road.
Or, if you’re AC/DC in 1975, you can throw some bagpipes into the middle of the song.
That is exactly what happened with “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ’n’ Roll),” the immortal AC/DC anthem that combines the Angus and Malcolm Young’s electric guitar attack with one of the most unlikely sounds ever to appear on a classic rock record.
And in honor of Bagpipe Appreciation Day, it’s worth revisiting the story behind how Bon Scott came to play them on the song, a tale as entertaining as the finished recording.
The bagpipes weren’t part of the song when AC/DC first began working on it. During a studio jam, however, producer George Young — the older brother of Angus and Malcolm Young — remembered that Scott had once been involved with a pipe band and suggested they try adding bagpipes to the song.
Scott agreed.
There was just one problem.
He didn’t play pipes in the band.
“I was the drummer!” Scott reportedly admitted when it became clear that the rest of the band had assumed he knew how to play the instrument.
Rather than abandon the idea, Scott did what any self-respecting rock frontman would do: he went out and bought a set of bagpipes.
The pipes reportedly cost him $479 Australian — about $650 U.S. dollars in 1975 — an eye-watering amount of money at the time. As AC/DC bassist Mark Evans later recalled, that kind of money could have bought “two Strats.” (A new Fender Stratocaster retailed for approximately $325 to $395 at the time.)
Scott then had to work out how to play the things.
The result was one of the most distinctive arrangements in rock. The bagpipes don’t merely appear as a novelty sound pasted over the song. They become part of the song’s architecture, answering Angus Young’s guitar in a brilliantly strange call-and-response passage before the band charges back into the main riff.
It was also, unsurprisingly, a nightmare to reproduce live.
The bagpipes’ drone is fixed to a particular pitch, meaning the rest of the band had to tune around them. According to Evans, AC/DC played the song live only around 30 times, and the bagpipes themselves were eventually destroyed after Scott left them at the edge of a stage and fans got hold of them.
The song’s famous bagpipe part also became increasingly inseparable from Scott himself. After his death in 1980, Brian Johnson chose not to sing “It’s a Long Way to the Top” out of respect for his predecessor.
Angus Young later recalled that the song’s title came from a note Bon Scott had scribbled in a book.
“And then Bon had that little scribble on the back of his book,” Young said. “‘It’s a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll,’ which said it all, you know, especially for a band like us.”
The quote gets to the heart of what made the song work. Beneath the bagpipes, the riff and the swagger, “It’s a Long Way to the Top” is about the grind of trying to make it as a rock band — the endless travel, the bad food, the cheap hotels and the hard work required to reach the top.
The irony is that AC/DC found a way to make that long road even stranger by adding bagpipes to a hard-rock song — and having a drummer learn to play them.
