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

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.”
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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.

hero ick, icon ick

The following email, entitled “hero ick, icon ick” came through from my friend Anne today:

hows this. not a word for months and then a deluge. no, but it’s interesting, this next blog you’ll be doing. half an hour ago i was googling heath ledger who’s apparently just overdosed in his manhattan digs. can’t say i’ve ever paid much attention to the bloke, but i enjoyed ‘brokeback mountain’ and ‘i’m not there’. anyways, seems there are a lot of fanclub sites out there for heath, as well. and no doubt for a lot of other stars, alive and dead (another one that comes to mind, coz i’ve just seen the fillem ‘control’ is ian curtis of joy division).

so i was just having a little lie down after getting your email and thought about how we are surely the only species that does this – elevates certain individuals to such lofty heights. i mean, this is definitely not in the order of something as pragmatic as queen ant-ism. we just love mythical figures. or need them, more like. i wonder if it’s a religious urge. icon-ism. especially since pictures and other forms of representation figure so much in the process of elevation and mythologising. bio’s too of course. and when it’s singers, it’s their music and their lyrics combined with their personal narratives. so i dunno. maybe i’m on the wrong track here. maybe it’s about poetry and poets and philosophers, in a new package for popular culture. what do you think it’s about lucas? hmmm … i guess you’ll find out, maybe, by doing this blog. wish i could drive across the desert with you.

Hearing the news, I too had a moment of sadness for poor Heath. He was 28. Bon was young too, only 33 when he died. (They also both grew up in Western Australia.) I guess as the breaking news came through about Heath’s death, it made me realise, to a very small degree, what it might have been like for an AC/DC fan to hear the news of Bon’s death, back in Feburary 1980. A sense of lost potential. The idea that he was only just beginning to hit his stride. That his best work was still in front of him. And so on.

Like Anne, I have been wondering about the transformation of a single human into a “cultural icon” – and the similarity of this phenomenon to religion. If someone is dead, we can make him into whoever we want. And no matter how unheroic the circumstances of Bon’s death (“death by misadventure due to acute alcohol poisoning” or something like that) there is a sense in which he is a kind of “martyr”.

Beginning the Bon Scott Blog

I’m starting a new project. It’s all about Bon Scott, the singer from AC/DC. He died in 1980. During the first half of this year there will be a Bon Scott Project in Fremantle, Western Australia. That’s where he spent much of his childhood, and that’s where he’s buried. Apparently his is the most visited grave in the Freo cemetary. A bunch of fans have gotten together to raise the money to have a bronze statue of Bon made up. The statue will be unveiled on February 24th at a memorial concert. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, rumour has it that not all his fans think a bronze statue is the best way to memorialise their hero.*)

I have been commissioned by the Fremantle Arts Centre to write a blog about all of this. I’ll be travelling to WA in February for the statue unveiling and concert, and again in April/May when there will be further festivities and an exhibition by visual artists responding to Bon’s life and work. My mission, hazy as it is right now, is to interact with “the fans”, whoever they might be.

I’ve been asked to do this project based on my previous blogging projects, Bilateral Kellerberrin, and The Sham. In those projects, I spent an extended period of time blogging about a small country town in WA, and my own home suburb in Sydney. In this new project, I will need to get my head around a different kind of “site” – no longer geographically specific, but a site which revolves around a community of people who are dispersed throughout the world, and who hold in common their enthusiasm for Bon Scott.

I have to disclose from the beginning: I am not a fan. I certainly don’t dislike the music of AC/DC, but it’s just never crossed my horizon in any significant way, and I’ve never gone out of my way to listen to it. The earlier work of Bon Scott, before he joined AC/DC – well, I know nothing about it at all. So the Bon Scott Blog will certainly be, at least at the beginning, my autobiographical account of “coming to know Bon Scott”. I hope that some of the fans will take me under their wing and show me the “Tao of Bon”.

My first task is to get to Fremantle for the concert and statue unveiling on the 24th of February. I’m looking for an ardent fan as a travelling companion to drive with me across the nullabor from Sydney to Perth. The candidate would need to have a working car with a good stereo, and maybe some camping gear. I will pay for the petrol. Please contact me at shortleftleg[at]yahoo[dot]com to register your interest. (I guess we’d need to leave at least 5 days in advance…)

*but I can’t remember where I heard this rumour. Searching around the net, looking at the enthusiastic sites maintained by fanclubs, I haven’t seen anything critical of the idea yet. Maybe I just dreamed it.