AC/DC — “Ride On”: The Slow Blues That Showed Bon Scott’s Tender Side

1976 · Behind the Songs

No riffs, no swagger — just a slow blues, a weary vocal, and one of Angus Young’s finest solos. The AC/DC song that doesn’t sound like AC/DC.

Almost everything AC/DC recorded in the Bon Scott era hits like a bar fight. “Ride On,” the closing track of 1976’s Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, does the opposite: it is a slow, sad blues, played at a weary crawl, with Scott singing in a restrained, almost soulful register nobody expected from him. The lyrics follow a man looking back on the mistakes he made with a woman — and Scott himself told RAM magazine’s Anthony O’Grady in August 1976 that the song was about a guy who keeps getting burned by women. For once, the band’s resident hell-raiser sounded like a man with regrets.

The solo that stops the room

If the vocal is the song’s surprise, Angus Young’s guitar solo is its payoff. Where his usual solos are all flash and velocity, the “Ride On” solo is patient and crying, bending notes like someone talking himself through a bad night. It is one of the most admired solos in the band’s catalog precisely because it shows what Young could do when he slowed down. The contrast is the point: this is the same band, the same guitar, the same voice — pointed in a completely different direction.

An album that took five years to reach America

“Ride On” was cut in the album sessions of December 1975 to March 1976 at Albert Studios in Sydney, produced by Harry Vanda and George Young — the older brother of Angus and Malcolm, and Vanda’s former Easybeats bandmate. Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap came out in Australia on September 20, 1976, and in Europe the same year, but American fans had to wait until 1981 — after Scott’s death — to get an official US release. The delay only deepened the song’s cult: by the time most Americans heard it, it was already a legend among import-bin regulars.

The song traveled in other ways too. French hard rockers Trust covered it on their self-titled 1979 debut after supporting AC/DC in Paris in the autumn of 1979 — a tribute from one band of road warriors to another. And in a poignant footnote, a recording of Scott singing “Ride On” in London on February 13, 1980 — six days before his death — later surfaced on the Bon Scott Forever Volume 1 collection, a last glimpse of the voice at its most vulnerable.