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March 31, 2006
They Had the Biggest Balls of Them All
That’s Angus out front, making a spectacle of himself as usual, as the soon-to-be-late Bon Scott peers over his shoulder. At left, Malcolm broods in the background.
Today’s birthday is AC/DC lead guitarist Angus Young, born March 31, 1955. That makes Angus 51, and as far as I know, he’s still touring the world in his school uniform with short pants. Well, more power to him. As it were.
Coincidentally, I’ve been listening this week to Highway to Hell, which is pretty much flawless from the opening chords of the title track to the final fadeout of “Night Prowler,” where Bon Scott mutters “Shazbat. Nanu-nanu.” (Anybody born too late to understand what this means: Google “Mork and Mindy.”) Highway to Hell is the best album of its kind ever made, although it’s hard to say what kind that is exactly. AC/DC is a hard band to classify; they’re undoubtedly a rock band, but what kind of rock band? They’re too rhythmically nimble to be heavy metal, too heavy to be pop. Just calling them “hard rock” seems like a cop-out. It might be more accurate to say that AC/DC is a genre unto themselves. If you have High Voltage, Highway, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, and maybe Back in Black, you have everything you need in the genre.
While Angus gets all the attention for his flamboyant solos, stage antics, and sartorial sense, AC/DC’s real anchor is brother Malcolm’s rhythm guitar. In the band’s heyday Malcolm Young combined with bassist Cliff Williams and drummer Phil Rudd to form a three-headed rhythm monster rivalled only by Richards/Wyman/Watts or the Who. If you doubt me, just listen to the gut-hammering, surprisingly funky call-and-response riff that powers “Girl’s Got Rhythm.”
And then of course there’s Bon Scott himself, an innovator in the field of “macho guy who sings about sex while shirtless and still kind of sounds like a girl.” Scott left this Earth in 1980, drinking himself into an early grave รก la Hank Williams, but not before penning the lyrics to such classics as “Big Balls”:
Some balls are held for charity and some for fancy dress
But when they’re held for pleasure they’re the balls that I like best
My balls are always bouncing to the left and to the right
It’s my belief that my big balls should be held every night
Replacement Brian Johnson took over for Back in Black, which became AC/DC’s best-selling album, and while you’ve got to love songs like “Hell’s Bells” and “Rock’n’Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution,” the band’s been in slow decline ever since. (Then again, who hasn’t?)
So go ahead and raise a toast to Angus tonight, slam one down for Malcolm and the boys, have a moment of morbid introspection in Bon’s honor, then annoy the neighbors with a top-volume midnight airing of “It’s a Long Way to the Top If You Wanna Rock’n’Roll.” You’ll be glad you did, especially once the bagpipes kick in.
Posted by bill at 4:10 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
March 27, 2006
Poetic Spam Strikes Again
Today's message was a little more confrontational:
simply front man
your a self-fulfilling prophecy outlying as spent!
shambles acrid, to dancer, manicure instance report card
asshole totalitarian marketability, good-natured oppressor
uneasy ticket consummation
the humidity
regenerate conjugate as twelve, depraved decoration the regret
restless unease in that presumptuous volley
the publicity, an exam rye, the hotshot and remoteness
the glamorously involuntary with effeminate, refined melody
nab as unbalanced or scholastic the graphics truth
twinge leafy, allure, kingpin pronoun, with prong, as mudslinging
now madam the testimony
Posted by bill at 7:39 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Return of the Poetic Spam
Some crafty entity who wants to give me stock tips has been evading the spam filter with strings of random or semi-random words. Honestly, I don't mind so much, because I get to read stuff like this:
bigamist cinnamon municipality
chore lisp of leg: ascribe, dish, a men's room to new year to daring
and a bone-dry seashore blueberry as scrutinize vivisection was punctual
the childish retriever is a guardian angel,
poisonous poetically, dwelling storeroom, estimation,
bush capture polluted that discriminating regress warm-blooded student to stigmatize this
and slather was heat as fame melt the hire
outgrow air, demoralize hairbrush
Posted by bill at 2:33 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
March 20, 2006
We Love You, Mr. Perry
Lee “Scratch” Perry behind the console at the Black Ark.
Today is the 70th birthday of Rainford Hugh Perry, better known to the world as Lee Perry, a.k.a. Scratch, a.k.a. the Upsetter, a.k.a. Pipecock Jackxon…I could go on, but you get the idea.
Scratch casts a long shadow over the history of reggae music, and could be considered one of the most influential figures in the history of recorded music, period. Along with people like Brian Eno and George Martin, he was a pioneer in the use of the recording studio as an instrument. In the five years after he built the Black Ark, his Kingston studio, and before he burned it to the ground for reasons that have never been made clear, he produced a staggering body of work that was not so much ahead of its time as simply out of time. Today, if you listen to an album like Junior Murvin’s Police and Thieves, The Congos’ Heart of the Congos, or the Upsetters’ Super Ape, it doesn’t sound old, it doesn’t sound new, it just sounds like nothing else in the world.
And he accomplished all this with a four-track system that was far from state of the art even in 1975, transcending the limitations of the equipment with a combination of technical ingenuity and what appears to have been some kind of voodoo. As Scratch put it himself, “It was only four tracks written on the machine, but I was picking up twenty from the extraterrestrial squad.”
Which is fairly typical of the kind of thing that has been known to come out of his mouth over the years. Always an eccentric, Perry went off the deep end in 1979, putting the torch to his own studio in an act of monumental perversity. The liner notes to the Arkology box set describe the Black Ark’s demise this way:
Perry is said to have been seen in various parts of Kingston walking backwards, striking the ground with a hammer, for two days before the Black Ark was destroyed. Some have suggested that Perry burned the Ark by accident, while others believe Perry destroyed it on purpose to foil the tactics of his enemies. Still others claim that Perry burned it in a desperate attempt to rid himself of of the unwanted attentions of a German tourist. Whatever the case, the Ark was indeed destroyed. Perry was detained for three days for suspected arson, only to be released without charge due to lack of evidence.
In the subsequent years, Perry has continued to make music, some of it quite good, much of it pretty shaky. But his legacy is secure, embracing as it does a strong influence on the career of Bob Marley, a key role in the invention of dub, and a formidable discography. No one is quite sure how many records Perry has made—some were pressed in small quantities on obscure Jamaican labels—but if you count both those released under his own name and those produced for other artists, it certainly goes well into three figures. Considering the uniform quality of his pre-1980 oeuvre, that’s an amazing amount of music.
So take a minute today to tip your hat to Mr. Perry. If you have more time, you might want to check out Mick Sleeper’s birthday Webcast at http://www.upsetter.net/scratch/.
Posted by bill at 6:16 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 15, 2006
The Documents of Hector Maze: 7.4
So what could I do but ask Larry to take me to the Heart of Darkness? Mind you, I didn’t actually say “Larry, take me to the Heart of Darkness.” I doubt that particular sentence has ever been spoken by anyone. Although I could be wrong; many strange things do indeed come to pass.
For instance, it turned out that Larry and I were not just from the same Eastern metropolis, but from the same neighborhood. This gave us something to talk about as we made our way to the other side of the park. Our progress was fairly slow, partly because we were in no particular hurry, and partly because Larry’s car accident had given him a hitch in his git-along, as he put it. They don’t talk like that where we come from, but I guess he’d picked it up somewhere.
Eventually we came to a sort of dock where people were lined up to board a series of small replica steamships at the edge of a narrow river. I was pretty certain that there was no river in this geographical location, so I was forced to conclude that it was either quite an impressive feat of engineering or a hologram. Or maybe mass hypnosis. I didn’t know what to think anymore, except that everything in this place seemed to be running smoothly. Elasticland was a mindfuck, but a very successful mindfuck. What then were the difficulties Rubelcaba had referred to?
A question suddenly occurred to me. “Hey, Larry.”
“Yeah?”
“That last thing we did…with the tunnels…you’ve gone through it before, right?”
“Sure, lots of times.”
“Then why didn’t you know the way?”
“It’s different every time, man.”
I puzzled over this as we waited. Each of the little boats carried only a few people, so we were in line for a while. Larry amused himself by chatting with the park employees who were hanging around, each of whom he knew by their first name. After awhile my mind began to wander. Music from the 70s came up on my mental jukebox, for some reason. I heard Billy Joel singing, “Slow down, you crazy child….” Then Carly Simon: “I had some dreams, they were clouds in my coffee….”
The temperature began to dip as fog came rolling in. I had foolishly failed to layer up sufficiently, so I started having second thoughts about the whole enterprise. But then we reached the front of the line and Larry, myself, a young couple, and a pair of teenage boys were shepherded onto one of the boats. David Essex was crooning “And where do we go from here” as we pulled away from shore and headed off into the fog.
Posted by bill at 7:51 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 7, 2006
The Documents of Hector Maze: 7.3
This time I actually did go around shaking hands, grinning like some idiot politician. I think I may have high-fived someone. This is unlike me, but I was so elated at having come out of the darkness that I had forgotten myself. Which is nice.
My high had settled down nicely into a post-peak afterglow, and it occurred to me that a good smoke would really hit the spot. If only a had a cigar…and then I remembered that I did, in fact, have a box of cigars in my backpack that a thoughtful former self had placed there for just such an occasion.
After a moment’s rummaging I had the brown tin and a lighter in my hand, and I decided to offer a smoke to the handful of my fellow travelers still hanging around. A tall, bearded guy named Larry took me up on the offer, and we seated ourselves on one of the benches scattered around the meadow, which was set up like a pleasant little neighborhood park.
Larry, it turned out, was an Elasticland regular. He was on disability, he said, but once a year he blew a sizable chunk of money on a seasonal pass, which provided him with all the entertainment he needed.
“So what’s your favorite ride?” I asked him.
He frowned. “Um, we don’t really like to call them ‘rides.’ We say ‘experiences.’”
“OK…so what’s your favorite experience, then?”
His frown changed instantly into a big, sloppy grin. “Oh, the Heart of Darkness. Definitely.”
“What’s that?”
Larry’s smile became the sly smirk of an insider. “It’s a trip, man.”
Posted by bill at 5:40 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 6, 2006
The Documents of Hector Maze: 7.2
As we marched, we systematically made our way through the rest of Bill Murray’s historic words.
“Into a 10,000-foot crevasse, right at the base of a glacier. Do you know what the Lama says?”
A pause. “No.” Another pause.
“Gunga galunga. Gungala gungala gunga.”
“So we finish the 18, and he’s gonna stiff me.”
“And I say, ‘Hey, Lama! Hey! How about a little something, you know, for the effort, you know?’”
“And he says, ‘Oh, there won’t be any money.’”
“‘But when you die, on your deathbed, you will achieve total consciousness.’”
We were now approaching the end of this particular stretch of tunnel, and I held my breath, hoping that this was the actual exit instead of another false alarm.
“‘So I got that going for me.’”
Which it was; the tunnel opened into a lush, green meadow that looked like the Garden of Eden itself. A chorus of voices intoned the last line as we walked out into the sunlight:
“‘Which is nice.’”
Posted by bill at 3:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 5, 2006
The Documents of Hector Maze: 7.1
My heart seemed to be beating very quickly. It was thundering in my ears like a bass drum played by the Jolly Green Giant, and I realized that I was very, very high.
There was something creepy about this tunnel, above and beyond the general darkness and dankness. Much later, I would find out that giant speakers throughout the tunnel generated sub-audible bass tones designed to unsettle the paying customers. At the time all I knew was I was feeling very eager to get to the other end, so I stepped up my pace.
I think everybody else was feeling it too, because no one was saying a word. The dripping sound was getting louder, more insistent, more annoying, and then I felt something pass very close by my head, something with wings.
Somebody screamed behind me, and then somebody else, and a deep voice boomed out “Jesus Christ!” Yes, we were having a weird time of things, but fortunately the light was getting closer now, and in a couple of minutes we were standing before a large circular opening. Which turned out to be a dead end; it was covered with thick plexiglas, and when we discovered this sighs were audible all around. New tunnels extended to the left and the right, with new, smaller points of light at either end. There was some debate about which way to go. “Just keep taking lefts,” I said—as much to myself as anyone else—and started off in that direction. Most of the others came with me, while a few went the other way and a couple just stood there paralyzed.
It might have been better to try and keep the group together, but at that point I was in a hurry to get out of there. It was getting colder, and darker, and this was really not how I wanted to be spending my time. We were going uphill now, not getting the best traction, and the mood in the group was growing tense. At one point the fifteen or so of us just stopped for a minute and breathed. Then a voice came from toward the back:
“So I jump ship in Hong Kong, and I make my way over to Tibet, and I get on as a looper at a course over there in the Himalayas.”
It took me a moment to process the reference, but when I did, I was able to supply the next line. “A looper?”
Another voice picked up the thread. “A looper. You know, a caddy, a looper. Jock.”
I felt the tension draining out of the crowd at the sound of the familiar words. A woman’s voice continued: “So I tell them I’m a pro jock, and who do you think they give me? The Dalai Lama himself. The flowing robes, the grace, bald…striking.”
It had taken on the quality of a religious recitation now. The guy who had started it off came back in: “So I’m on the first tee with him, I give him the driver, he hauls off and whacks one.”
I interrupted to take the next line, always a favorite of mine. “Big hitter, the Lama. Long.”
I turned and started walking toward the distant light. The others fell in behind me with military crispness and a renewed sense of purpose.
Posted by bill at 1:39 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack