Archive for the 'Rumours' Category

Air Guitar Tips

Published
by
Lucas
on April 11, 2008
in Rumours
. 6 Comments



[C-Diddy wows em with his air guitar prowess...The original video is posted here.]

Yesterday I was visiting the museum where I occasionally work, conducting children’s art workshops. Lately I only make rare appearances, mainly due to the fact that I’ve been galavanting around the country with this Bon Scott business. But people in offices love a bit of news from the outside world, so I found myself chatting over the cubicles about Bon and his fans, enthusing about some incredible AC/DC performances I’ve seen on YouTube lately, and crowing about my new career as an air guitar judge.

Being an “open plan” office, people inevitably overhear (and eavesdrop on) each other. So while I was raving to my colleague Nicky about all this stuff, from across the room Penny the conservator pricked up her ears. “WHAAAT!?” she screamed. Or, would have screamed, except it’s an open plan office, so she kind of hush-screamed, and the look of intensity in her face made up for the lack of volume. She couldn’t believe I had landed this plum gig with zero experience. It was so unfair.

Penny told me a story about going to see Magic Dirt play at the Annandale once. She and another female friend air-guitared so energetically that a small circle of fans began to gather around to watch the spectacle, ignoring the band on stage. Then she beckoned me over to her desk, and clicked onto YouTube so that I might witness the greatness of the video above, featuring world-reknowned air-guitarist C-Diddy. And lo, I was indeed impressed.

“Nobody in Western Australia will come close to C-Diddy,” she said. “But as a judge, it’s important to know the benchmark of excellence.”

Being the first air-guitar enthusiast to come into my life, Penny wasted no time in presenting me with some criteria for judging the competition:

1. It’s not about realism: Get over the idea that air guitarists have to know how to play a real guitar, or hit the “real” notes as if playing. It’s a performance, and has to be judged on that basis, first and foremost. On the other hand, note how C-Diddy creates the illusion he is actually holding an instrument. A kind of Marcel Marceau mime skill. Top marks.

2. Costumes are very important, perfect bodies less so. Note C-Diddy’s whacky open shirt and Hello Kitty chest piece, eclipsing his chubby belly.

3. Engagement with the audience: note that C-Diddy acknowledges his audience, and calls for them to participate in shouting out the chorus.

4. Women who participate get extra points. Since there are not many of them.

5. Use of the overbite while strumming, in order to convey the idea of intensity of concentration loses marks, according to Penny. Too contrived. Come up with something interesting to do with your facial expression.

6. Bonus points if you bring your own air-roadies or air-groupies, anything original of this sort…

Thanks Penny. I hope this blog post doesn’t result in an office-wide ban on YouTube. Or my blog.

Mr Know-it-All

Published
by
Lucas
on April 7, 2008
in Rumours
. 2 Comments

air guitar championships

Katie, the hard-working media expert from the Fremantle Arts Centre, has somehow managed to convince the WA Chapter of the Air-Guitar Championships that I would be a good celebrity judge for their state final in a couple of weeks.

The winner, as judged by me (and some other minor experts) will be heading to Darwin to compete in “The Nationals”. Hence their slogan: “It’s a long way to the TOP (END) if you wanna rock n roll” (don’t blame me, I didn’t come up with it).

What’s more, rumour has it that the West’s best vapour-strummer will be invited to perform his (or her?!) fave AC/DC song at the launch of the Bon Scott Project in May!

Stay tuned for all the finer details. And, ahem…can anybody point me towards some criteria for good air-guitar method?

Would you travel across the Nullabor with this man?

Published
by
Lucas
on March 18, 2008
in On the road and Rumours
. 7 Comments

ben scott

Exciting news on the blog today. Ben Scott, the yet-to-be-officially-ratified Love Child of Bon Scott, has been in touch via the guest book. Ben has announced his willingness to be my travelling companion for a second pilgrimage to Bon’s final resting place! BON OR BUST is back on!

I first met Ben at the cemetery on the 19th of February at Bon Scott’s graveside. Since that time, Ben has followed the Bon Scott Blog closely, posting comments rather loudly in CAPITAL LETTERS on a regular basis. He emailed me a few weeks back to say he’d just raced across from Perth to Melbourne to buy a late-model Falcon he fell in love with through the Auto Trader. Now he’s enrolled in a course in Metalliferous Mining (Open Cut) at TAFE, which will increase his income greatly when he returns to that great open cut mine, WA.

So… fingers crossed… if the dates all work out, it could be me and the Love Child on the road together. Who would have thought?

- - -


UPDATE: (19 March 2008)
Woops!
Sorry to get your hopes up folks. Ben just shot me another email. It seems there’s been a change in the dates of his mining course, which will now be happening precisely at the time we wanted to travel, and he can’t get out of it… Bummer.
So it’s back to the drawing board again…

The Fine Details

Published
by
Lucas
on March 2, 2008
in Rumours
. 2 Comments

lucas with bon
[The author clutches Bon's knee and wonders what will become of him...]

Everyone, it seems, wants to know exactly where the bronze sculpture of Bon Scott will end up.

Forgive me if I’ve got some of the following details wrong. I’m sure it’ll all come out in the wash.

On Wednesday Simmo came to pick me up in his cream Kingswood station wagon, for another look at the statue. We drove the two blocks over to Greg’s studio, where we took some great closeup photos of Bon’s face and shoelaces and buttons and veins.

There was a definite sense of relief in the workshop. Greg was out, but one of his assistants, Alastair, told us about the week leading up to the big unveiling. Greg had been extremely anxious about the statue. More than any of the other dead-white-males he’s sculpted in bronze, the Bon Scott statue would have the eyes of a million experts scrutinising it for defects. The team put the finishing touches on the statue at midnight on Thursday. Greg looked crestfallen. “I’ve fluffed it,” he said. “I don’t know why, but it’s just not quite right.” But being made of bronze, it was too late to change anything.
Continue reading ‘The Fine Details’

A few Bon Scott rumours…

Published
by
Lucas
on January 26, 2008
in Rumours
. 0 Comments

Apparently there’s this guy in Emu Plains who is a master on the didj. “He can play any AC/DC song on it”. This is told to me in the pub by my friend Geoff, who lives in Vancouver. He’s visiting Sydney briefly, and this local knowledge tidbit was told to him by Bill, a busdriver on an “Oz Experience” trip to the Blue Mountains…

Geoff’s friend Ben, sipping beer across the table, has the following to contribute:

“My cousin’s partner’s dad used to hang around with Bon back in Freo. Once they went to get tattoos together, and Fred, that’s his name, he chickened out, but Bon went on to get a big snake tattoo all down his side. Or was it on his arm. Anyway, he lives in Esperance now, you should go visit him when you make your big road trip. And this guy Fred’s daughter, apparently she’s a nanny to the Rolling Stones.”

Outside the pub, I bump into Scott. At first I can’t remember who he is, it’s been years since we worked together doing picture framing. Now he’s got his own business. I tell him about my search for a travelling companion for the big pilgrimage to Freo for the statue-unveiling-concert. “Oh shit, I’m interested man, I’m interested. I’m a big fan.” His eyes glaze over while he’s talking to me. I imagine his brain processing all the re-organising he’s going to have to do to make this trip. “Ah, you know it takes five days to drive there, right?” I ask him. I’m doubting he’ll be able to spare that much time off work. But he reckons he’s gonna have a serious think about it and get back to me. We shake hands and agree to stay in touch.

Talking with Scott for five minutes on a street corner in Darlinghurst is one thing, but I begin to wonder what it would be like to spend five days together, cooped up in a car heading across the scorching nullabor plain. Is this wise?

Bon and Me

Published
by
Lucas
on January 24, 2008
in Rumours
. 4 Comments

Everyone has a Bon Scott story.

I just got back from overseas, and my friends ask “so what are you up to now that you’re back?” When I reply, “I’m working on a project about Bon Scott, you know, that guy from AC/DC”, there is generally a pause, and either a look of incredulity, or almost immediate raucous laughter. You see, I’m not really the kind of person who you’d think of as an enthusiast for these things. My interests tend to be a bit bookish. I have a tendency to over-intellectualise, which fits more with an interest in obscure corners of conceptual art history, than Aussie rock legends. So it’s all very amusing, isn’t it?

The next thing that happens is that, once my so-called friends have gotten over their ridiculing of my rock credentials, they inevitably launch into their own stories about AC/DC. Here’s one by Diego, who is describing a scene from a small town outside of Turin, in the north of Italy:

When was it? Oh damn, I was driving around, so I must have had a licence, so that makes me 18…so I suppose it must have been about 1988 then. I was driving around with all my friends, and someone had this tape, I can’t remember where it came from, did my sister give it to me? Anyway, we put it on and it was wow! You know [does air guitar and sings the riff "na, na na, na na....di-di-di-di-du-do"] and we were really into it but we had no idea who it was, we figured it must have been Rod Stewart or something. It wasn’t until a long time after that someone told me it was AC/DC. You know, we knew nothing about that stuff, but it were were really into that guitar bit.

The funny thing is, I’m not even convinced that the famous riff Diego sings while telling this story is an AC/DC song. But who knows? Certainly not me. There are so many famous guitar riffs. They’re like pithy quotes from Shakespeare: we all recognise them, but we can’t always remember where they came from.

Diego asks a few other questions which betray his enthusiastic but hazy grasp on AC/DC-ology:

“Wasn’t Bon the one who wore the funny hat?”
“No”, Keg says, “that was Angus, and it was a school uniform.”
Diego: “Oh, I thought they all had school uniforms”…

-but never mind that, he immediately picks up his air guitar and launches into song, in his Italo-Aussie accent: “ROCK-AND-ROLL-MAKES-NOISE-POLL-U-SHUNN!!”

Immediately I find myself correcting this in my own head. It should be “rock and roll AIN’T noise pollution!” (The meaning is quite specific, although Diego’s misreading is, I must admit, an interesting slip). (Read the full lyrics here.)

And then it dawns on me that after only a couple of days into my career as a fan (which consists, thus far, of the paltry reading of the first half of Bon Scott’s biography, and listening to one single album), it’s already started: I’m becoming an AC/DC nerd. Mothers of Australia, lock up your daughters. I’m about to bore them to tears.

*post script: according to further research, the riff Diego was singing was an AC/DC track. Click here to listen to Diego himself rendering the riff in all its glory…

Integrity versus Popularity

Published
by
Lucas
on January 22, 2008
in Rumours
. 4 Comments

…some rough Bon Scott notes.

Have spent last few days reading the biography by Clinton Walker. Only up to page 105, ie the whole period before Bon joins AC/DC.

After no luck in local bookshops, finally found the biography at the Newtown Public Library. Immediately adjacent to the music biography section is the magazine section. On top of the pile of dishevelled mags was Rolling Stone, May 2007, Issue 665. On page 38 there should have been an article about Bon Scott (entitled “was he really as bad as they say?” or some such), but when I turned to page 38 the whole piece had been torn out.

I spoke to Katie, who is curating a small display of Bon Scott’s letters, which will go into an exhibition at Fremantle Art Centre in May. She said a lot of letters were sent by Bon to his ex-wife, and ex-girlfriends, while he was on tour. These could make interesting reading, but she has to track them down. Some of them were sold to a private collector in Melbourne…maybe some are installed in a bar on Flinders Street. Katie has trawled through the biography herself and constructed a rough timeline of Bon’s life. Tomorrow, we’ll go together to meet Clinton Walker, the author. He’s written a bunch of titles about Aussie rock and music/cultural history.

My first impressions of the book: very readable - it makes a compelling story. The main tension which drives the tale is Bon’s anti-establishment attitude - the desire to not be trapped into the conventional habits of everyday life: job, house, wife, kids. Early on in the book, Walker hints at how problematic this attitude would be for Bon later - when the craving for “home” made him a very lonely man on AC/DC’s relentless touring circuit.

The other thing that amused me about Bon’s early music career was the tension between integrity and popularity. It seems, according to Walker, that he had an authentic “voice” (both for singing and for writing lyrics), but that the Australian music scene was unreceptive to this voice. But Bon was not against what looked like “selling out” in order to get attention and gain airplay. One of his early bands, the Valentines, completely remade their image a few times, transforming themselves from bad boys to bubblegum rockers (with matching uniforms) and back.

The provinciality of the Australian music scene in the late 1960s is quite fascinating, as was the “radio ban” Walker mentions, where major labels were banned from Australian radio stations for a year or so. These “social history of music” chapters are great - they show the restrictive artistic milieu in which Bon was emerging - it seems bizarre that he was bumping around the scene with saccharin singers Johnny Farnham (at one time Bon’s next door neighbour) and Johnny Young. I’m looking forward to finding out more on that.

After the library I went up to the record shop to blow some of my hard earned cash on acca dacca. They had about 5 Bon Scott era CDs, I picked the earliest one I could find, TNT. It’s a pretty famous album I guess, with the tracks “It’s a Long Way to The Top (If you wanna rock and roll)” and “TNT”.

At the bus stop in Enmore I bumped into Vanessa. She came over for tea and we listened to the album together. My immediate observation was that it was catchy: damn catchy. Something about those guitar riffs struck a note in my belly. This is not something that can be easily explained.

I also noticed that the lyrics on the album are often about the following: the process of becoming a rock and roll star; what life’s like in a rock band; “how hard we rock”; etc etc.

Me to Vanessa: “I know nothing about the 1970s Aussie rock music scene, but there is definitely something in common with the conceptual art that came out about the same time. Both seem very self-referential”.

I’d like to find more connections between the two. It seems impossible that the pared back films of Anthony McCall and the pared back riffs and lyrics of AC/DC, occuring at precisely the same time, could have happened in hermetic bubbles, entirely unconnected to each other…