A dimly lit club in Spain. Mark Kozelek stands alone with an acoustic guitar and begins playing What’s Next To The Moon. The audience hears a melancholy folk ballad. Nobody hears AC/DC. Nobody hears hard rock. One listener later swears it’s a Leonard Cohen song. Only afterwards comes the reveal: the songwriter they’re admiring is Bon Scott.
When we caught up with Kozelek at his hotel, he played haunting acoustic arrangements of Rock ‘N’ Roll Singer and Riff Raff. But the songs became something altogether different. Reflective. Fragile. Almost haunted. Yet somehow they lost none of their power.
Best known as the founder of Red House Painters and Sun Kil Moon, and recognisable from his appearance as bassist Larry Fellows in the film Almost Famous, Kozelek built a career mining heartbreak, isolation and the darker corners of the human condition. A gifted and often polarising figure whose own life and career have not been without controversy, he heard something in Bon Scott that many others failed to see: not a frontman, a writer.
“There was just something sinister and dark," he said. "There was just something so ragged and raw about it. Honestly, the Bon Scott era is only the era of AC/DC that I’m really familiar with. For me, Highway To Hell and Powerage were the best records.”
Kozelek was listening for storytelling. Years later, he found himself returning to Bon’s songs with nothing more than an acoustic guitar. What began as an experiment quickly became a revelation. The songs didn’t resist the transformation; they welcomed it. “I found that the Bon Scott lyrics were just so conducive to folk-style playing. The lyrics just sort of fall out and fall into this place for me that’s just very comfortable to sing them.”
Song after song underwent the same strange metamorphosis. Take away Angus Young’s guitar. Take away the amplifiers. Take away the high volume. What remained were vivid characters, detailed observations and complete stories. “They’re very poetic and very descriptive. He tells an interesting story in all of his songs.”
The more Kozelek played them, the more he realised he wasn’t reinventing the songs so much as uncovering another side of them. “The Bon Scott songs translated naturally to what I do. I always connected with the storytelling. The lyrics stand on their own. It’s as if they’re my songs.”
Perhaps the greatest validation came when those recordings eventually found their way back to AC/DC’s inner circle. “Malcolm Young heard the record and liked it. Brian Johnson was supportive of it as well.”
A songwriter known for intimate folk confessionals had taken some of the loudest music ever recorded, stripped away nearly everything that made it recognisable, and earned the approval of the men who knew those songs best and had played them hundreds of times.
The remarkable thing wasn’t that Mark Kozelek could make AC/DC songs sound like folk music, it was that Bon Scott’s songs were strong enough to survive the transformation.
Mark Kozelek's album of AC/DC covers, What's Next To The Moon, was released in 2001.
