Back in Black290

a Reviews & Short Pieces: Australiana 501 wonderful use of sound, “Broadway Vision,” “The Pretty Young Wife,” and the elegies “In Memory, Vincent Buckley 1925–1988” and “For Jim 1947– 1986.” Zwicky’s powers lift poetry out of death with sensitivity and majesty: Darkness. The brief and infinitely graceful dance of body, fluid arc of upraised arms, the dance in air, in empty spaces, the rush to bite down, all, all in beauty. Remember, he said. Remember. Black child, I will. I do. Back in Black290 FEEL THAT BACK IN BLACK has the best opening of any rock album. The I tolling bell, the sense of mourning mixed with threat, the slow guitar picking out an ominous death march with the heartbeat drum behind it that builds to an address by what may be the Devil declaring that he’s coming to take you, the listener, to Hell. It’s “Hell’s Bells” we hear. It’s both a warning and an invitation. And those factors were always at the core of AC/DC. The first time I heard Back in Black was memorable. Picture coastal rural Western Australia, hundreds of miles from the major centre of population (Perth), and four or five panel vans with their backs open, so-called chicks in skin-tight jeans posing to their advantage and their ‘Rock’ boyfriends (‘Rocks’ were a ‘working-class’ gang of the time) in black tee-shirts, black jeans, and ripple-soled desert boots (or ‘DBs’), swigging from ‘long-neck’ beer and Jack Daniels bottles, rocking out to the new AC/DC album beside the Chapman River. They were passing bongs around, and probably hyped on speed as well. My brother and I, and a mate, stumble across the scene, attrac- ted by the hard-driving music, finding ourselves suddenly the centre of atten- 290 “Devilishly loud and a little bit dangerous,” The Australian (26 July 2010): 17. A tribute on the thirtieth anniversary of AC/DC’s 1980 Back in Black album, this is an extended version of a piece that originally appeared on the BBC World Service programme The Strand. 502 S PATIAL R ELATIONS a tion, until we too start head-banging to the title song, “Back in Black,” and consequently live to tell the tale. It was wild colonial convict music. Even though the new lead singer Brian Johnson hadn’t been transported, he seemed to have the necessary tough cre- dentials. And those ‘Rock’ guys around us beside the river – many of them would likely end up in prison, and they knew it. But they’d always be back. Resurrected. Bon Scotts become Brian Johnsons. I was seventeen and had been listening to AC/DC since they first appeared on the Australian television rock and pop show Countdown. To understand what AC/DC meant to Australian kids of that era, especially if you were working-class or, as I did, went to a working-class school and lived just out- side a State Housing Commission suburb, you had to appreciate the threat their music presented to adults, and to the middle class. Kids who were into AC/DC then were really considered a threat to soci- ety. Pumped up on their music, they might become violent at any time. So the myth of the suburbs went. Maybe you had to be there. The band’s appear- ances on Countdown, with then lead singer Bon Scott snarling his often ag- gressive and seductive poetry into the camera, did nothing to alleviate middle- class discomfort. My musical life went from the sublime to the ridiculous — without making any judgments about which pole is which. Mum taught classical piano and I listened to Beethoven and Bach at home. Down the road I listened, with the Williams twins, to “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap,” to a solid no-frills rock and roll that said it as it was on the streets, or at least as we imagined the streets. Back then, gangs were on the rise in the neighbourhood. ‘Rocks’ and ‘Surfs’ fought pitched battles in parks; then skinheads appeared on the scene, prompting rhymes such as: Oh what joy oh what fun We had the skinheads on the run But the fun didn’t last Because the bastards ran too fast. That’s when I was living in the city. We moved to the country, and I was in Geraldton when the last Bon Scott– AC/DC album came out, the menacing and death-affirming Highway to Hell (1979). Not long after this, Scott choked on his own vomit, paralytic-drunk in a car in London. It seemed AC/DC were finished. But then they rose again. Although it’s not overtly stated, when we heard that an album entitled Back in .

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