(Album ©1980, Atlantic Records)
Normally, when writing about my favorite 
album covers, I just talk about the cover and maybe the songs on an album, and it’s sales. But with this record, the conditions under which this record got made are critical to the cover’s design.
In early 1980, AC/DC was riding high. Their last album, 1979’s Highway to Hell, and the subsequent tour, had finally established them as a legitimate global headlining act after 5 years of grinding through the cycle of recording an album and then touring to support that album every year. The Young brothers were busy writing the basic tracks for their next album, which would be their 7th in 6 years, when their singer, Bon Scott, suddenly died from the tried-and-true “choking on his own vomit after passing out drunk” in late February. Suddenly, all of their progress was in danger of slipping away.
The band were really excited by the new songs they had written, and they didn’t want to sit on the new music – so they started auditioning new singers almost right away. One of the singers they reached out to was former Geordie lead singer Brian Johnson, who went to London from his home in northern England twice to audition. After the second audition, he was invited to join the band.
AC/DC hired Johnson on April 1st, and before the month was out, he was down in the Caribbean within the month, where they were recording at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas with a new producer, Mutt Lange, for the first time. The band played him an album’s worth of largely finished tracks, needing only lyrics. Johnson went to work, under a ton of pressure, and emerged 5 weeks later having recorded one of the greatest rock albums ever. This record is now the second highest-selling album of all time, behind only Michael Jackson’s Thriller (not a great album cover), with over 50 million units sold!
The band wanted the album to be a tribute to their former singer, both with the title “Back in Black” (they had a great song recorded with that title), and the album cover being all black. The record company wasn’t willing to “risk” that, insisting that the band’s logo be presented in grey outline. Four years later, Spinal Tap “released” Smell The Glove with an all-black cover, after having their original cover design rejected by their record company, which was a clear spoof of this one. Seven years after that, Metallica got in on the act, releasing their eponymous 1991 album with only their logo and a “Don’t Tread On Me” snake on the cover, both barely legible, more a watermark than a fully-printed image. But AC/DC did it first, and a cool, influential cover combined with a raft of killer songs turned this album into an all-time blockbuster.
