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”

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].