The blinking red novelty devil-horn headsets that dotted the mass of pumping fists at the sold-out FleetCenter last Friday night could have meant only one thing: AC/DC were back in town, on the second round of a US tour that started last year in support of their surprisingly good new Stiff Upper Lip (Elektra). Everything was more or less by the book for the veteran Australian hard-rock band: the giant AC/DC bell that descended at the start of the Back in Black classic “Hell’s Bells”; the few obliging women in the audience who bared their breasts for leering frontman Brian Johnson (and for the video cameras) during the Bon Scott–era nugget “The Jack”; the cannons that fired off a 21-gun salute at the close of “For Those About To Rock (We Salute You).” AC/DC have never shown much interest in changing trends, musical or social, or in tailoring their sex-and-drinks-and-rock-and-roll stance to get with the times. Remember, this is the outfit that responded to the alcohol-related death of lead singer Bon Scott with Back in Black, a tribute that featured, among other things, one song about hunkering down and getting totally hammered (“Have a Drink on Me”). Nice.

But that’s the beauty of AC/DC: you know exactly what you’re in for, and you hope that at this advanced stage in their career they can still deliver it. In that sense, what AC/DC have to offer isn’t all that different from what the Ramones fed their fans year after year until their retirement: more or less the same set peppered with a couple or three tunes from whatever their latest album was night after night for more than a decade, with Dee Dee or some other guy on bass shouting “1-2-3-4” before every tune and the Gabba Gabba Hey guy emerging with his Gabba Gabba Hey sign to lead the crowd in a chorus of Gabba Gabba Heys. Except that the Ramones rarely played for more than 45 minutes. AC/DC, despite early signs that Johnson’s voice might give out any minute, clocked in at just under two hours. And that was before the 21-gun-salute encore. This is what a couple of extended Angus Young guitar solos will do for you.

The guys in the row behind me were a little disappointed that the band didn’t whip out “Big Balls.” They were so stoked, however, that when AC/DC laid into “TNT,” one of them tapped the girl sitting next to me on the shoulder and motioned for her to lift her shirt. She wasn’t into it. Or, maybe that was during “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap,” the other tune that features both Angus and brother Malcolm Young growling background “vocals.” They did seem to appreciate it when Johnson thoughtfully and instructively grabbed his crotch by way of introduction to the song “Hard as a Rock.” Now if AC/DC had been a little subtler with the title and called it “Hard as Rock,” then Johnson might have had to be a bit more literal. But that’s never been AC/DC’s style. They just rock; they leave the rolling to the people who are into that sort of thing.