POP MUSIC REVIEW : AC/DC Stays Plugged In to Same Circuit : But Aussie band’s standard fare at Irvine Meadows is a far cry from the cavalcade of evil that some religious leaders make their performances out to be.

While Saturday’s AC/DC performance at Irvine Meadows typically drew its share of bawdy and boisterous audience members, it certainly wasn’t the cavalcade of evil that some religious leaders have made the shows out to be.

Some kids in the audience were indeed doing their best to live up to the galling recent statistics on teen drinking (they got tanked up beforehand--the Meadows didn’t sell any beer at the show), but most were just having an upbeat time to the exuberant, muscular music. The tone was nothing like last year’s Dio-headed metal bill at the Pacific Amphitheatre, where PCP smoke and a violent mood hung in the air.

AC/DC had the bad luck to have Richard (the Night Stalker) Ramirez as a fan. He had even left an AC/DC cap (similar ones are yours now for a mere $18, kids, along with $12 AC/DC panties) at the scene of one of his mayhems. While a psycho like Ramirez could just as likely have been set off by a “Quincy” episode, it was a 1979 AC/DC song, “Night Prowler,” that allegedly inspired his crimes.

Then, this past Jan. 18, three fans died in a crush of people at an AC/DC show in Salt Lake City. Again, the tragedy was something that was out of the band’s hands, but it couldn’t help but reflect poorly on a group already assailed for its purportedly satanic lyrics.

AD/DC did and does still sing a lot about hell--”Highway to Hell” and “Hell’s Bells” were among Saturday’s featured songs--but it was clear in the group’s giddy show that to this band hell is about as real as Fantasy Island, just part of the cartoonish landscape of its rough and tumble songs.

Rather than having a kinship with Black Sabbath and the other iron-handed Satan’s-buddy bands, AC/DC seem the natural descendants of Slade. That British band, one might recall, was one of the first in the heady, progressive ‘60s to stand up for equal rights for numbskulls. Its response to the foment of the times pretty much was, “Stuff the revolution and the cosmos; we’ll be down at the pub.”

AC/DC has appropriated that credo, along with Slade’s crunch-happy approach to pop and catchy shout-along choruses. Headed by (British-born, transplanted) Aussie guitarists Angus and Malcolm Young and British singer Brian Johnson, with bassist Cliff Williams and drummer Chris Slade (late of the Firm), the band is working-class all the way. You won’t catch these guys biting the heads off bats, unless maybe you bet them a beer to do it.

Though, at 36, Angus Young is now closer to being 50 than 20, he still dresses in his trademark schoolboy uniform and remains one of the most antic showmen in rock. While aggressively riffing or soloing on his Gibson SG Saturday, Young was in constant motion, hurling himself from one extreme of the stage to the other or falling to the floor and kicking his legs in the air.

It isn’t just Young, but virtually everything about the band which remains unchanged. Johnson still sings like a scratched chalkboard on helium, while Malcolm Young remains a rock-solid rhythm guitarist. And songs from the current “The Razor’s Edge” album showed no progression from the 12-year-old songs in the set.

If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it, they say, and AC/DC has a leg up on most metal bands in having a sound, albeit limited, that clearly is its own. At a time when most other alloyed outfits are doing clone-like “sensitive” semi-acoustic ballads--requisite now that market researchers have determined they need them to woo the female buyers--the Youngs and Co. do nothing but hard-driving rock, with the subjects ranging from rocking all night to rocking all night, if titles like “Sink the Pink” give you their drift.

That classic was missing from Saturday’s show, which opened with a raging version of “Thunderstruck” from “The Razor’s Edge.” Tall cages were erected behind the band, and there were ramps to either end of the stage which, like the emergency ramps on mountain routes for runaway trucks, helped to slow Angus’ charges down. Massive lighting structures went through gyrations above the stage.

A number of props were employed, from inflatable parade-float-size grotesques of Angus’ head and of a rotund madame, to a huge bell which Johnson struck with a mallet on “Hell’s Bells,” to some very noisy cannons used to close the encore song “For Those About to Rock (We Salute You).” Near the show’s end Angus appeared on a hydraulic platform in the middle of the audience.

In spite of all the props and equipment whizzing about, the music was as frill-free as ever. The 20-song set spanned the band’s career, including “Back in Black,” “Sin City,” “Who Made Who,” “The Jack” (a jaunty tune about contracting venereal disease), “You Shook Me All Night Long,” the mid-’70s “TNT” and “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.” During the marginally melodic “Moneytalk,” Johnson poured buckets of “Angus dollars” (fake money bearing Young’s likeness) into the crowd, then chucked the buckets into the audience as well.

On “Jailbreak,” Angus took an extended guitar solo full of snarling, harmonic-spewing menace and long vibratoed notes that sounded remarkably like the playing of the late Free guitarist Paul Kossoff.

Angus has a reputation for mooning his audiences, and he went through a tedious, protracted striptease ritual, only to reveal a pair of shorts with the stars and stripes rather than his notorious bum. The show as a whole ran a little long as well, with its two hours and 15 minutes logging in somewhere between generous and interminable. Twenty slices of the same cake can be too much.

At least it’s a tempting, original recipe cake to begin with, which is more than can be said for opening act L.A. Guns, which sounded just like any of 8,000 identical pouting metal-lite bands now primping in the L.A. basin. They sure had their sensitive semi-acoustic ballad, “The Ballad of Jane,” along with all the other rote notes and postures.