In a recent interview with Dean Delray, Jay Jay French recalled the AC/DC gigs with Axl Rose as the frontman. The rocker confessed that he only watched a short clip of Rose filling in for Brian Johnson just to show off and how he thought the Guns N’ Roses frontman would fail.
“I think I saw a clip here and there, because I wanted to see how bad he looked, right? And he looked so different, funny where he was, but he was cutting it,” he explained. “Here’s the point. There were people that were laughing about the idea of him replacing [Johnson], and then people saw it and said, ‘Wow, he did it!’ [Despite] all the naysayers and social media mavens [who] diss everything in the world, he actually pulled it off.”
Axl Rose filled in for Brian Johnson back in 2016 for 22 dates of their tour. Johnson had to step away because of serious hearing problems but was able to come back in 2020. Even though Jay Jay French loved Rose with AC/DC, he knows the band was ‘lucky’ to get Brian Johnson as their frontman. “Well, think about how lucky Van Halen was to get Hager, and how lucky AC/DC was to get [Brian Johnson],” the guitarist said during the same interview. I mean, talk about lightning in a bottle. You catch it once, and you’re already ahead of the game by 1,000,000%. Catch it twice? It’s like winning the lottery twice. How do you do that?”
He added, “Like, how does Hager come in and create that world for them, that was even bigger, in a way, than David Lee Roth, you know?
AC/DC took a break after their ‘Rock Or Bust’ tour wrapped up. They got back together in 2020 with the same lineup and dropped the ‘Power Up’ album just two months later.