Bon Scott died about six months
after the release of Highway to Hell.
I was fifteen years old.
I loved him, his weirdness, his humor:
I loved it when he pretended
to keel over at the end of “Shot
Down in Flames,” and I loved
his rock-uncharacteristic nod
to Mork and Mindy at the end
of “Night Prowler.” He may have
been my first dead rock star, and
the first of mine to die in this stupid way,
essentially by drinking himself
into oblivion. As a fifteen year old,
I would have seen the title
of his last record to be a kind of
prediction about his destination
in the everlasting hereafter.
I don’t think I cried, but I was sad
and felt it as a great, bewildering loss.
I was reluctant to embrace
Brian Johnson, that interloper.
But Back in Black is clearly a better
album; it’s sonically better, the songs
are stronger, but outside of these
things, it’s no AC/DC departure,
an oxymoron if there ever was one,
except for that the song list
on the back cover is incorrectly
sequenced, and that Johnson,
unlike Scott, is humorless in
his lyric and in his delivery.
There’s still a few head-bangs
left in me, but I have to be careful.
There is something so great about
that “Back in Black” groove. That
hiccup break transition and that
turnaround toward the end both rival
the best of Zeppelin. These days,
though, when I really want to rock,
I’m not likely reaching for AC/DC.
Toward the end of my teens and
into my sixth decade on the planet,
I became too weird, too smarty-pants
for the limited lyrical palette of
sex, booze, fighting, and rock and roll.
The needle gets stuck in a groove
at the opening riff of “Rock and Roll
Ain’t Noise Pollution” as I’m sticking
the vacuum attachment inside of a
pair of shoes that have collected
a year’s worth of hair ball dust
in the mud room. I’ll unstick
the cartridge, finish this album,
put on these shoes I’ve cleaned up,
then take the dogs for a walk.
Postscript: this is the first poem of what I hope will be series of poems inspired by the project of listening to every record in my collection in alphabetical order. Admittedly, “A is for AC/DC” is a dumb title for a poem, but I think I will continue with this convention just so that readers can distinguish poems in this series from other poems. All of them will have dumb titles, then, indicating the letter of the alphabet and the name of the artist up for consideration, at least for now.
Notes on the vinyl editions: Although I owned both of these albums as a kid, I sold my entire collection in 1987, so my current Hell and Black are both used copies, in relatively good condition, although the covers are ratty. Each record skipped or got stuck during playback only once. Otherwise, clean copies, relatively quiet, very few icky artifacts. Probably early pressings, maybe original.
michael jarmer 
🤘