Dirt Cheap

dirty deeds cd on the bus to canberra

Following Damo’s advice, I went down to Pitt Street looking for “that bargain CD shop near where that vegetarian yum cha place used to be.” Damo had acquired the entire Bon-era back catalogue there at only ten bucks a pop. He said they were imports from Argentina or something. Who knows how the music distribution business works? It’s a mystery to me.

I found the place. It’s called “Dirt Cheap CDs”. Inside, the AC/DC section (which takes up a fair amount of shelf space) was crammed with Brian Johnson-era releases: Flick of the Switch, Fly on the Wall, Stiff Upper Lip etc. etc. (One of these day’s I’ll do an analysis on Acca Dacca album names, there certainly seems to be a pattern there…)

Dirt Cheap CDs only had one Bon-era album: Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap (1976). I figured given the name of the CD, the name of the shop, and the price of the item, it was meant to be. I asked the guy behind the counter if he had any more early AC/DC stuff. “Nah,” he said, “the computer says we’ve got 2 copies of Let There Be Rock, but I went looking for them earlier and I just can’t find them. They keep getting nicked.” Then he added hopefully: “But hey, you should check out some of the post-Bon era albums too, mate. They’re still pretty good!”
Continue reading “Dirt Cheap”

LAST CALL FOR BON SCOTT DRIVER!

This is it folks! Last chance!

In my callout (BON OR BUST!) I have searched far and wide for a travelling companion to accompany me to Fremantle on a historic pilgrimage across the Nullabor. Many hard rockin’ candidates have fallen by the wayside, victims to that terrible affliction, the “W” word (“ah man, I’d love to go but I can’t get the time off me work”)

What’s wrong with you people!? Throw off those shackles, and in the great Aussie tradition, “Don’t Be a Thickie, Chuck a Sickie!” Ahem, of course, this would have to be a 2 week sickie, at least.

But seriously, I am considering declaring “BUST!” and booking me a flight. Get in touch today if you want to jump on board.

The advantages of the flight, of course, are that on 19 February (the actual anniversary of Bon’s death) I can hang out at the cemetery, rather than being somewhere east of Adelaide. And I can spend the week in Fremantle in the lead up to the great bronze statue unveiling, maybe getting to meet some of the fanatics who have made it all happen over there.

Franck’s Brush with Bon

The imminent erection of the Bon Scott Bronze Statue in Fremantle is drawing fans from around the world. Because of the distance, many international Bon-lovers won’t be able to make it on the 24th of February, but they seem to be following the events from afar with fascination. Franck, a passionate fan from Paris, contacted the Fremantle Arts Centre, to enquire about the best way to get to the cemetery. I emailed Franck, asking him if he had any special stories of his own. Here’s his reply:

Hi Lucas,

Many Thanks to contact me…
Of course I’ve got lots of stories about Bon but the best i think it was in 80’s (1981/1982 ?) during the concert in Paris ; I was 17 or 18 (I’m born in 1964) and Bon with Angus on his back climb down in the arena in the middle of people…they arrive just in front of me and i was paralyzed looooooooool

i couldnt move my arms to touch Bon and Angus and it was very easy….at the end of the concert i was crying alone in a place of the arena and a man come in front of me and says what ‘s the matter ? I explain my story and he says ok dont cry come with me …we have passed the security and nobody ask me nothing just smiling to this man…and we have arrived in the backstage i have entered in a room and here just in front of me Bon / Angus / Malcom and Phil !!!!
after i have dream many time i was playing guitar with them looooooool but no… i have never play with them …just to speak with them and take a glass of whisky.

At this time it was impossible to live a story like that with the french stars in France…french are too idiot…but with Australian stars it was possible.
so god bless Australia…
cheers
Franck

Reyes Del Sonido Metalico

esto es rock
(Above: a scan from Hana’s 1983 Mexican Heavy Metal zine…)

AC/DC actually can put me in this kind of mood…say if im feeling down or whatever, I can put some of these classic Bon Scott albums on and then I get in that kind of hyperactive mood. Something about it takes me back to being fifteen and then I can tap into that youthful spirit…and I think that’s something Bon Scott carried with him as well. That youthful spirit of living the good life…
–Demolition Damo, February 5th, 2007

With this mood-altering theory of Damo’s in mind, I’m a-bloggin’ away with Back in Black blaring through the speakers. I know, I know, it’s not a Bon album (depending on which side of the fence you sit on, vis-a-vis that conspiracy theory) …but I’m yet to aquire any Bon-era albums beyond T.N.T. (I’ll remedy that later on today down at a discount CD shop on Pitt Street Damo told me about). But in the meantime, I’m trying to spit words out on my keyboard with these driving beats and the screeching of Brian Johnson… hammering out words and headbanging (mildly) at my desk …It really slows my word-per-minute rate down, and I have no idea if the resulting paragraphs will be readable, but it sure feels good…

Anyway, I’ve been rummaging through the Bon Scott Blog Mailbag®. Thanks to everyone who’s written or sent in their stories. Here’s a highlight: an email with attached images from Hana, who seems determined to boost my Bon Scott credibility by sending through some extremely rare old Mexican Fanzines. She writes: Continue reading “Reyes Del Sonido Metalico”

Demolition Damo

damo doing a scary face

Damo is one helluva fan. My first big one! I contacted him through a friend of mine, a musician called Lucas who plays a miked-up a shard of glass with his mouth, complete with saliva and blood smearing all over its surface. Damo’s musical predilections, while also pretty wild, at least use conventional guitars and drums and so on.

Damo’s place, a small flat in a housing commission building perched on the southern edge of the fashionable bit of Surry Hills, is a shrine to loudness. Every surface that could possibly transfer noise to the outside world has been fastidiously padded with custom-cut knobs of foam. He’s even built some thickly insulated panels which hinge so as to swing across and clip into place, blocking out the windows. And in the deepest corner of Damo’s tiny abode is a padded cell, a chamber so perfectly sound-proofed you can almost hear your own blood pumping in your veins. It’s here in this airless cave, with just enough room for a computer and a drum kit, that Damo rehearses and records his own music.

“AC/DC is probably the biggest influence on my music” he says, munching away on one of the falafel rolls I’ve brought for dinner. He shows me his prized collection of LPs, original vinyl records in plastic sleeves. “The only Bon-era record I don’t have is TNT. A friend of mine bought it for me as a present, but then the bastard decided to keep it for himself.”
Continue reading “Demolition Damo”

Driving without Bon

Last week I proposed that driving around is one of the better ways to listen to Acca Dacca: you can turn it up loud without disturbing the neighbours… the stereo in the car is pretty good, and somehow the rhythms of the highway meld with the driving force of the rock rhythms.

So to try it out, I picked Diego up from his house, and we went for a spin around Redfern. Earlier, Diego had told me about his first encounter with an AC/DC cassette tape – in Italy in the late 1980s. Telling the story, he couldn’t help himself, and air guitarred the key riff from Back in Black. So Back in Black, naturally, was his album of choice for our drive. I went and bought it from the record store (thereby doing my little bit to help cement it as AC/DC’s highest selling LP of all time).

Bon Scott, of course, doesn’t actually sing on Back in Black: by the time of its recording, 1980, he was freshly dead. Malcolm and Angus Young quickly auditioned for a new singer, who turned out to be Brian Johnson. Now I don’t want to get bogged down in a fruitless never-ending debate, but if you Google “Who is better: Brian Johnson or Bon Scott?” you come up with over seventy thousand hits. So you can see that this controversy, far from being laid to rest, is one of the defining and enduring features of the band.

I’ll reserve my opinion on this for later. In the meantime, you can listen to Diego musing “live” over the top of the album… some of the songs trigger memories of his first home-made tattoo, the time he did a strip-tease to Back in Black and his Eighties enthusiasm for Reggae…

We head down Regent Street, past Green Square to Gardeners Road, and then proceed to loop back up past Redfern Station. As a result of skipping a few tracks we get bored with, the odd nip n tuck in the editing, and muddied by road noises and conversation (apologies to the purists), Back in Black is thus compressed to just 18 minutes.

Click here to listen now, or right click and choose “save target as” to download the file [mp3, 10mb, 18 mins].

Or for the time-poor, here is a shorter version, with just the first six minutes…[mp3, 3mb, 6 mins].

BON OR BUST!!

hitchhike pic
(Image borrowed from here…)

The campaign to find me a travellin’ companion for my trip across the nullabor is in full swing. Yesterday I spoke on radio 2SER’s drivetime show…Next Tuesday there’ll be an ad in the Drum Media, and there are several other tentacles out there, octopussing across the city. Someone will step forward to ride shotgun soon enough, I’m sure!

In case you’ve missed it so far, here’s the call out:

Lucas Ihlein calls for a travelling companion to accompany him on his journey from Sydney to Fremantle for the unveiling of the Bon Scott statue. Potential co-traveller should have own car with working stereo and good collection of AC/DC music. I will pay for fuel and on-road costs. We need to arrive by 23rd of February (so ideally, we should leave on the 18th Feb).

Enquiries to Lucas: lucas[at]bonscott.blog

PS: if you think you’re the one, but you don’t have a car or working stereo, get in touch anyway. Maybe we can wrangle something! Oh, and I suppose if you’re the right person, it’d be ok to set out from Adelaide or Melbourne too!

Driving with Bon

acdc car
(Thanks to this fella for the above image)

Since the best stereo available to me is in a borrowed Toyota Yaris, that’s where I’ve been doing a lot of my listening. I can turn up the volume real loud and in that little bubble, really feel the music. It’s not the same coming out the tinny computer speakers or the crappy kitchen boombox. But sometimes it involves travelling with others, who, for some reason or another, are not entirely convinced of the genius of AC/DC. My girlfriend Lizzie, for instance. While I experience the “OI!-OI!-OI!s” on the song TNT as mischievous, subtly subversive and quite hilarious, (and although these OI!s are very Australian, I don’t find them at all “patriotic”) she cringes at ’em.

And while the poker/card game conceit on “She’s Got The Jack” (eg: “But how was I to know that she’d be shuffled before?“) are admittedly cheesy, for some reason I laugh at them every time. They come across, to me, as a parody of sorts (although, a parody of what exactly?) Lizzie begs to differ.

For my third and final example, take a few lines from the song “Rock and Roll Singer“:

Well you can stick your nine to five livin’
And your collar and your tie
You can stick your moral standards
‘Cause it’s all a dirty lie
You can stick your golden handshake
And you can stick your silly rules
And all the other shit
That you teach to kids in school
(‘Cause I ain’t no fool)

…at the line “You can stick your moral standards” she even has the nerve to scoff, audibly! (which is quite a feat when the music is turned up loud). The basic problem, as I see it, is that Lizzie hates unsubstantiated activist propaganda. To her, “stick your moral standards” is just an impossible paradox (how could you do that, even if you wanted to?)…and therefore scoff-worthy. And yet! – knowing a smidgeon about Bon’s own history, this song comes across as a kind of autobiography. This is not just an abstract song which could be sung by anyone. It’s Bon’s own tale. And it seems that Bon did live this reality (although, of course, he would be dead from it a few years later, but that’s another story).

Whatever your taste, driving around is certainly a good way to experience the music in a full bodied way. As opposed to drily writing about it in a blog, for instance. So I’ve decided to do some audio recordings with fans while we drive. Here’s the idea. You make up your perfect Acca Dacca mix-tape for me, and we’ll drive around with it turned up loud, recording our conversation as we listen. Maybe we’ll go somewhere significant, maybe we’ll just drive aimlessly. Then I’ll edit it a bit and upload it here as a podcast.

Meeting Clinton Walker

Clinton Walker at his desk
(Clinton Walker looking over the Bon Scott timeline he constructed while writing his book…)

It just so happens that one of Bon Scott’s biggest fans lives in Dulwich Hill, only fifteen minutes walk from my house. Last Thursday Katie and I popped around for a cup of tea with him. He took us out to his “den” – a revamped chookshed in the backyard, stuffed with books and records, and spilled the contents of his filing cabinets all over the coffee table.

It’s impossible to recount everything Clinton told us. I won’t even try. In the process of writing Bon Scott’s biography, he accumulated an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject. I was a little overwhelmed by facts and anecdotes. I could have made an audio recording of everything he said, and then uploaded it for you… but then again, you could just go read the book…
Continue reading “Meeting Clinton Walker”

Being a “Fan”…

[Sampdoria Fans in the “Gradinata Sud” – photo pinched from lucadea…]

The Bon Scott Blog spluttered to life late last week. It’s a weird project for me. On the one hand I am relishing my relative ignorance of the subject, so that I can be the student in an enormous worldwide classroom in which my teachers are Bon’s fans. And on the other hand, immersing myself in the subject is no academic exercise – it involves hours of listening to AC/DC tracks at high volume, which tends to change a man somewhat…

I remember, years ago, in highschool, I was an exchange student in Italy. The city I stayed in, Genova, has two soccer teams, “Genoa” and “Sampdoria”. Kids at the local school I attended would always try to sway me one way or the other, competing to secure my allegiance to one of their beloved teams. But how could I choose between the two? I had never previously heard of either team, let alone see them play. I wasn’t really even into sport all that much. The decision seemed entirely arbitrary.

Eventually the choice was made for me. One of my friends, Andrea, dragged me to a Sampdoria game. He bought me a team scarf and a warm can of Heineken from a stall outside the stadium. Andrea was a member of the ultra fanatical Sampdorians and had a season ticket for a spot right behind the goalposts, where the most ardent supporters watch every match. Standing tall on the moulded plastic seats… stomping and shouting… learning the chants, which not only filled the air with sound but also penetrated my chest and churned my guts… letting my body go limp as the fans surged toward the cyclone mesh fence separating us from the elite athletes on the pitch… hollering with genuine pain and incredulity at the referee’s decisions and making that very Italian gesture of hands held together as if in prayer (meaning “how can this be happening??”)… screaming with unadulterated joy as Sampdoria scored its first goal… turning and hugging the man next to me… staggering jubilant and exhausted into the streets outside the stadium, discussing particular kicks and tackles, defensive strategies, umpiring decisions, what ifs… During those two hours I was conscripted into a community which took my loyalty for granted.

After the match, Andrea and his buddies were proud and somewhat boastful to have won me over from the rival Genoans. It was coercive, but I didn’t care. I was sold. I had been through a communal experience which was as moving, bodily, as it was satisfying intellectually. I had something to belong to. I had songs to sing. I had an easily identifiable enemy. I was a fan. It was that simple.