AC/DC released Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap in Australia on September 20, 1976, through Albert/EMI. Their third Australian studio album put Bon Scott’s criminal characters, sexual jokes and moments of regret into the same collection. It closed with “Jailbreak,” a song whose absence from the international edition would leave American listeners waiting even longer than they did for the album itself.
The Australian recordings were made at Albert Studios in Sydney with producers Harry Vanda and George Young, the older brother of guitarists Malcolm and Angus. Scott, bassist Mark Evans and drummer Phil Rudd completed the lineup. Finding time to develop another record was a problem. “We didn’t have much time to do that album,” Malcolm told Mark Blake in a 1992 interview for Metal CD, later republished by Classic Rock. He recalled going into the studio after gigs to work on new ideas around the band’s touring commitments.
Some of those ideas came from television. Malcolm credited Angus with finding the title through Dishonest John, the villain in the cartoon Beany and Cecil. Scott also adapted a phrase from an Australian mosquito spray advertisement for the song. Its narrator offers violent solutions to other people’s problems at bargain prices, making a sales pitch out of threats. Elsewhere, “Big Balls” stretched a joke about formal dances into an entire song, with Scott’s exaggerated upper-class voice making the double meaning impossible to miss.
“Ride On” gave that same singer room to sound wounded. The band slowed into a blues arrangement while Scott’s narrator considered loneliness and his own mistakes. Placed near the end of the Australian album, it interrupted the boasting with a quieter performance before “Jailbreak” returned to a story of confinement and escape.
Listeners overseas received a different sequence. The international edition removed “Jailbreak” and “R.I.P. (Rock in Peace),” adding “Love at First Feel” and “Rocker,” the latter already familiar from Australia’s T.N.T. album. The sleeve changed, too: the illustrated Australian cover gave way to the Hipgnosis photograph of people standing outside a motel with their eyes obscured by black bars. These were two distinct editions of the record, with different songs as well as different packaging.
Atlantic’s American operation initially declined to release either version. Speaking to Ultimate Classic Rock in 2012, Evans recalled learning that the label considered the album inadequate. The explanation that reached him concerned both its production and Scott’s vocals. Evans was careful about the limits of his knowledge, noting that relatively little information filtered down to him and Rudd. His account nevertheless placed the objections squarely on the recorded music and the singer who had helped write it.
By the time Atlantic issued Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap in America in 1981, Scott had died and Brian Johnson had recorded Back in Black with the band. That album’s success created a much larger audience for AC/DC’s earlier work. The delayed release therefore introduced a different singer to listeners who had discovered the group through Johnson, while offering established fans a record they had previously needed to seek out as an import. It reached No. 3 on the U.S. album chart.
“Jailbreak” remained outside that American edition. Its U.S. release finally followed on the 1984 EP ’74 Jailbreak, which collected five recordings from AC/DC’s Australian catalog. The song that had closed the original album reached American record buyers through a separate release eight years later.
