Let There Be Cherry Rock

cherry rock sign
[Sign displayed on the wall at Cherry Rock…]

Have I mentioned how amazing this job of mine is? The people I get to meet!!

On the weekend Katie and I went to Melbourne to chase down some of Bon’s old old friends. And, in a way, to meet Bon himself.

Katie is curating an exhibition of letters written by Bon Scott, which will be displayed in Fremantle in May. The rest of the Bon Scott Project will contain interpretations of the life and work and culture and mythology surrounding Bon. It’ll be interpretations by artists, who (like me) you can pretty much rely on to put their own spin on things.

But this letters exhibition is important. When you enter the room filled with his letters, it will no longer be Bon “as seen by others”. It won’t even be pictures of Bon, taken by others. It will be Bon himself, speaking to you in his own words.

We jumped off the plane and took a cab straight to Cherry Rock. Cherry is a marketing, branding, PR and rockband management company run by a fellow called James Young (no relation to Malcolm and Angus). James’ claim to fame (at least from our point of view) was that he bought a whole swag of Bon’s letters when they went to auction two years ago. These things are pretty valuable, so we weren’t sure if James would be willing to part with them.
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Would you travel across the Nullabor with this man?

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…

LED Sign is GO!

LED sign
[Click on the photo to see it larger…]

I’m happy to report that the LED sign is all systems go!

Marisa from Fremantle Arts Centre went down to the spot where the old bridge comes into Freo and took this snap for me. (Thanks to Pic Lee and John from the Fremantle Chamber of Commerce for punching the message into the system.)

Right now I am in Melbourne with Katie, the curator of the Bon Scott Letters exhibition. We’ve been meeting some amazing old friends of Bon’s from the 1960s and 1970s. Some of them have kindly agreed to let her display some of Bon’s letters, postcards and Christmas cards in the exhibition in May.

The letters are funny, insightful, cheeky and sometimes a bit sad. Stay tuned for the full story.

Authentic Value

stevo from gosnells
[Stevo with his “mint condition” voucher for a special AC/DC songbook. Bec the photographer is in the background. Read about my first encounter with Stevo here…]

Stevo from Gosnells is a one heckuva collector.

I got his number from Robi at the Fremantle Arts Centre. As is often the case with the Bon Scott tragics I’ve been meeting lately, my tentative phone call, which is supposedly just “to work out if you might be up for a visit”, results in an avalanche of information being transmitted right then and there on the phone.

“I’m the biggest collector I know!” Steve said, and then he launched into a big list of the AC/DC items he owns. I had to rein him in – a lot of the stuff he was saying didn’t make any sense to me at all. Blue labels? Certificates of authenticity?? Souvenir songbooks??? Bon’s face on a dollar bill????
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Bon Radio Shenanigans…

billie weston pool hall fans
[Ardent fans pose for a photo by Bec Dagnell in the Billie Weston Pool Hall, Scarborough Beach, WA…]

Word just in… tomorrow morning (Tuesday the 11th of March) I’ll be speaking on the JJJ breakfast show about the life and legacy of Bon, his bronze statue, and my own “relationship” with Bon.

Rumour has it that the Mayor of Fremantle Himself will also be shooting the breeze with Robbie, Marieke & The Doctor.

It should all happen at 8:30am or thereabouts.

Should you perchance listen in and then come over to this humble blog to pay me a visit – you might be able to participate!

I am looking to meet up with Bon Scott fans in the greater Sydney area (which is where I will be blogging from now until the middle of April).

Crazy collectors? Shrine in the shed? Tribute bands playing only 1974-80 Acca Dacca? Long lost love child?…

Get in touch and be featured in the blog!

Cheerio,
Lucas

– – –

UPDATE:

you can listen to the interview online here (7 minutes, 6mb, mp3 file). Thanks Josh for taping it! There’s a brief description of the interview in this comment below. I didn’t get to say as much as I would have liked about Bon and me, but that’s breakfast radio for you I guess. Big on high paced laffs and short on thoughtful pauses!

Going out Laughing…

lucas with angus guitar
[me with Wombat‘s Angus guitar…]

Loyal readers, I’m taking a few days break as I head back to good ole Sydney town.

I’ll be updating next Wednesday with the following exciting episodes:

*BRAINY Musos from Bridge Music take me through the musicological perspective: just why is AC/DC so damn catchy?;
*NOT-SURFIES, BOGANS from the Scarborough Beach crew pose with black candles at Billie Weston’s pool hall;
*DON’T MISS Stevo the mad collector from Gosnells, and his lovely wife Veronica;
*PLUS! I get the perspective of The Mayor Himself;
*AND I meet the descendent of an old old Freo family;
and last but not least:
*I go on a walk of Fremantle to see just how many damn bronze sculptures you’ve already got here (it’s a LOT!)

For all this and more, tune in next week to Bon Scott Blog.

In my absence, feel free to think up pithy slogans for the Big Red Electronic Signboard, or visit the guestbook…

Thanks Freo, it’s been terrific. I’ve had a lotta laffs, I’ve met a lotta cool bogans, I’ve eaten my fair share of gelati…

21 characters, 4 lines…

lcd sign

Yesterday Jasmin and I went down to visit John Longley from the Fremantle Chamber of Commerce. He’s kindly agreed to let us use the Freo red LCD sign. As you drive into Fremantle, over “the old bridge”, you inevitably sit at the traffic lights for an aeon and stare at this electronic billboard. It says things like

DONT DROP
LITTER
IN
FREMANTLE

or

QE2 SHIP IN PORT
WED 5TH MARCH
LAST CHANCE AT
PASSENGER TERMINAL

or

OUTDOOR FILMS
TONIGHT AT FILM AND
TELEVISION INSTITUTE
STARTING 7:30 PM

or (my favourite)

FAREWELL TO CITY OF
FREMANTLE CEO, RAY
GLICKMAN. TODAY
IS HIS LAST DAY.

Continue reading “21 characters, 4 lines…”

The guys rent a warehouse…

acdc warehouse dream

My first AC/DC dream.

The guys rent a warehouse in Sydney. It’s relatively cheap and a lot of space. They take the whole floor, and keep it free for whenever they’re in town. The warehouse is shared with a group of feminist architects. This is during the Bon era. They set to work insulating it for soundproofing. I don’t know what my role is in all this, I seem to be hanging around a lot. Maybe I also have a space to work in the warehouse.

AC/DC only come in on Sundays for rehearsals at first, but later they start to occupy the whole warehouse more and more.

There are a lot of people hanging around, maybe its a bit like Warhol’s factory. Angus, as it turns out, is also a really good DJ, he makes these melodic noise records which deafen and delight. They bring you to a frenzy and then stop just as quickly with a cheesy mozart ending.

I am sitting at the warehouse kitchen table and reading a biography of AC/DC and I discover the following:

“Bon had all his trademark hair carefully shaved off and set into a wig which he wore religiously from that day forward, although he regretted telling anyone about losing his hair.”

The members of the band have a “wall of conquests” where they chalk up another line on the 5-bar-gate whenever they sleep with a girl. Bon is clearly in the lead but I am surprised to see that Malcolm isn’t far behind. To the right of the individual scores is an aggregate tally for the whole band.

One time, sitting around the kitchen table, the entire warehouse collective is trying to write a manifesto or a press release. One of the lines is “if you’re coming to visit us in the morning, make sure you bring up at least ten coffees, they will never go to waste.” It occurs to me, sitting at the table, that it’s strange to have a feminist architecture group sharing with the band. But they all seem to get along pretty well…

The Fine Details

bon and me
[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.
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The Aftermath

I wish my camera hadn’t run out of batteries.

A zoomed-in image of the Bronze Bon was beamed up onto the big screens to either side of the stage. Every so often, some brave youth would do a runner, hop the barrier, and climb up to have his photo taken with the little metal man. Normally, a brazen act like this would have spelled violent eviction for the trespasser. But such was the holy nature of this moment that the bouncers simply smiled beneficently, and gently guided the little rascal back onto the grass.

The trampled grass exhaled some kind of steam. The area in front of the stage was thick with crushed UDL cans, broken sunglasses, lost thongs, cigarette butts, muddy baseball caps, and torn plastic bags. Arm in arm, contented and love-sick, with ears ringing, some of us still humming to the tunes in our heads, the crowd began to shuffle and stumble through this dense swamp of garbage towards the exit.
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