Credits:

Rose Tattoo

Description:

If AC/DC are the greatest blue-collar hard rock band of all time, then Rose Tattoo (also Australian, also managed by the Vanda and Young team) just may qualify as the world’s greatest blue-collar punk rock band. Led by impetuous, diminutive frontman Angry Anderson (the Ronnie James Dio of punk?) and the brilliant slide-guitar work of Peter Wells, Rose Tattoo were a mean and not-so-lean gang of tattooed misfits, all of them veterans of the hard as nails Aussie pub rock scene — in short, the kind of guys you’d cross the street to avoid. Released in 1978, their eponymous debut (issued in Europe as Rock ‘N’ Roll Outlaw almost two years later) is a dangerous, unpredictable, monster of a record whose power has hardly diminished an ounce in the decades since. First song, “Rock ‘N’ Roll Outlaw,” draws the line in the sand, challenging all comers to cross at the peril of a split lip; then “Nice Boys (Do