AC/DC Is Like a Religion

It’s all too common that we hear stories about musicians having been forbidden from listening to rock music at home when they were younger. Yet, they still manage to make a career out of it. Mastodon’s Brent Hinds said that AC/DC was like a religion for him growing up, though he wasn’t allowed to listen to it… because of religion.

The Mastodon frontman detailed his love for AC/DC on the podcast, AC/DC Beyond the Thunder. He grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and the first instrument he learned to play was the banjo, which he used to teach himself to play Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” Eventually he upgraded to an acoustic guitar, and his father promised he’d get him an electric one if he stuck with it.

“I was also forbidden to listen to AC/DC and KISS and Black Sabbath because of the satanic connotation of it,” Hinds admitted. “It was the artwork and the lyrics, and all of the song titles.”

“My dad’s really religious, all of my relatives are. So they were [like], ‘You can’t listen to AC/DC or Black Sabbath, you’ll go to hell.'”

Thus, Hinds had to sneak his music tastes. He got ahold of a Highway to Hell cassette tape while he was on vacation in Florida with his family around the age of 11, and listened to it alone by the pool. He was sunburned so badly that he had a white square on his chest, because that’s where he left the cassette player.

The rocker described his first time hearing AC/DC as “electrifying,” and that it made him feel “really alive.”

“Angus [Young] is one of the first guitar players that I was really, really influenced by because when I heard other guitar players at the same time, they were doing stuff that was like, too complicated-sounding,” Hinds explained of AC/DC’s impact on him.

“AC/DC is like a religion,” he praised, along with Thin Lizzy. “It’s the quintessential rock ‘n’ roll band.

Listen to the full interview below.

Brent Hinds Speaks to the AC/DC Beyond the Thunder Podcast

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