When I was barely in grade school, my first “favorite” band was AC/DC. 20 years later, I’ve fallen in love with those raunchy Aussies again.
After my parents added onto the family house in 2001, they purchased this much-too-large entertainment center for the living room. It had more cupboards than I did in my lifetime, and they were loaded with photo albums, sports memorabilia, VHS tapes, and snow globes. CDs were at their peak popularity, and Dad had a huge collection of them. When I was bored, I’d go through the CDs, passing through a Cheech & Chong record, my mother’s Garth Brooks collection, and other mixes that family friends would burn for my father, such as both Traveling Wilburys albums and the American Graffiti soundtrack.
Soon, I was begging my mom to buy me a copy of Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap during a Walmart trip, back when Walmart still had a CD section worth poring over. I was mystified by the men and women on the cover with their eyes censored—so much so that I would draw portraits of myself with black boxes over my eyes, too. It was the fall of 2004, when I was juggling a growing, profound love for AC/DC with a short-lived obsession with Jesse McCartney’s Beautiful Soul. The latter would hit its peak a year later, when McCartney guest-starred on an episode of The Suite Life of Zack & Cody.
But the crude, circuit-breaking riffs of Angus Young, the heart-monitor strums of his brother Malcolm’s rhythm guitar, the panging, skull-rattling beats of Phil Rudd’s drum kit, and Bon Scott’s shredded, deep-throated wail outlasted every other band that entered my orbit for at least six, maybe seven years. I carried a portable CD player everywhere like it was a wallet full of cash; the screenplay of my favorite movie, School of Rock, arrived as if it was written out of the ashes of Angus’s red-hot intro lick on “It’s a Long Way to the Top”; I worshipped a discography of devil horns, tight denim with cock outlines, schoolboy garb, and one album’s booklet insert, which had a picture of a giant blow-up doll with massive knockers.
