The Agora Ballroom, Cleveland — AC/DC's breakthrough US broadcast

On August 9, 1977, AC/DC played the Agora Ballroom in Cleveland, Ohio, and DJ Kid Leo broadcast the entire show live on WMMS — the Cleveland FM station that had been championing the band in America before most of the country had any idea who they were. The radio broadcast reached an audience across the Midwest on the night of the show, and the recording has circulated among fans ever since as one of the essential documents of what the band were in a small room at the peak of their Bon Scott years. Cleveland and WMMS are substantially responsible for AC/DC having an American career at all: the station's programmers heard something in the records that the mainstream American market had not yet found, played them relentlessly, and created the conditions for the band's US breakthrough.

The Agora in its various incarnations was one of the primary rock venues in Cleveland — a city that, through the late 1970s, was one of the most important markets in the country for hard rock, partly because of WMMS and partly because of an audience that had developed unusually strong opinions about what constituted the genuine article. Cleveland crowds were notoriously discerning; being adopted by Cleveland meant something. AC/DC were adopted enthusiastically, and the August 1977 show captures the precise moment when that relationship was at its most electric.

The 1730 East 24th Street address has since been redeveloped; the Agora itself relocated and continues to operate at a different Cleveland address. The original building is gone. The broadcast, however, survives in full — Bon Scott's voice, Angus Young's guitar, and the Agora crowd, recorded on a hot August night in a room that held a few hundred people while a much larger audience listened at home.