Abe Vigoda to AC/DC

Abe Vigoda - Skeleton
I can't really explain (nor do I entirely 'get') the no wave scene except to say that city folk and Los Angelinos in particular are incredibly tolerant of noise. Not sound - noise. But at least Abe Vigoda has that tropical dash of "whitey sees the world" that comes through best on songs like "Dead City/Waste Wilderness" and "Gates." And a terrible ironic band name hasn't prevented them from being a low profile local institution for the past 6 years - I was surprised to discover that Skeleton is their third LP. Their song titles are better. "Whatever Forever" is, fittingly, 40 seconds of...noise. With a similar "just not giving a shit anymore" schtick for the past 15 years, the real Abe probably approves.

On a personal note, I saw Abe Vigoda open for Vampire Weekend at the Wiltern at the tail end of VW's debut album hysteria. Or at least I would have, if my buddy Jeff hadn't turned and walked out of the room after hearing 3 seconds of their opening song. That really sums it up.




AC/DC
Did you know that Back in Black, the gritty bridge from 70s glam rock to 80s glam metal, is the best-selling album by any band? Only MJ bests them worldwide with Thriller. It's easy to see why with its meat-and-potatoes appeal, the first two tracks beloved by baseball closers ("Hells Bells") and Iron Man directors ("Shoot to Thrill") alike. But still, how do we get there from here? The themes of Back in Black are insanely dark (natch), touching on death, crime, murder sprees, prostitution, alcoholism, and, lest we forget, noise pollution. It's a perfect example of the clear distinction between happy-go-lucky hedonism and balls-out nihilism. These are some of the nastiest party songs ever written. Of course, the song "Back in Black" is as fine a eulogy as has ever been written, flipping the proverbial bird to moderation in all its forms. "Shook Me All Night Long" is almost sweet in its relative subtlety (how do you envision "American thighs"?) compared to, say, "Giving the Dog a Bone."

"Relative" is truly the watchword when it comes to AC/DC. It all lies in the Bon Scott-Brian Johnson schism: the former's death seemed to inspire the group to go even more obvious in the lyrics. I don't expect much more from AC/DC, but my scattered collected of singles reveals a handful of songs that are game attempts at something more complex than Back in Black would lead one to believe. "High Voltage" and "Live Wire" (what I call "the electricity songs") are charmingly clever in comparison to the 7th grade humor of "Dirty Deeds Done Dirty Cheap" (admittedly, you shouldn't go looking for wit in a song about a murder-for-hire business with the phone number 36-24-36).

"It's A Long Way to the Top (If You Want to Rock and Roll)" says fuck you, here's some bagpipes, which win a slim 3-2 judge's decision against the lead guitar in the call and response instrumental section. You gotta have serious cojones to put that much bagpipes in your lead single (Scott was, of course, ethnically a Scot). "Girls Got Rhythm" is the best thing about the Dead or Alive trailer. "For Those About to Rock" is hard rock's 1812 Overture; "Thunderstruck" isn't bad but is one of Johnson's worst sandpaper vocals. "TNT" again weaponizes the body...or the guitar...or the music itself. There's a lot of masculine id in these songs that no number of footnotes can keep straight.

I thought "Let There Be Rock" originally had a racist lyric in its dense origin story where "the white man had the smarts/the black man had the blues." But the Internet claims that what the white man had was "schmaltz." This kind of makes sense but also kind of reverses the stereotype. And I don't know if I buy a Yiddish word in an AC/DC song. Jury's still out.

And duh, "Highway to Hell" is unstoppable, the quintessence of the simple relentless energy of the classic AC/DC compositions - just as impressive as the virtuosic bursts that characterized popular metal post-Back in Black. Just as important, it was the band's first single to chart in the U.S. and the last featuring Scott as lead vocalist (unless you count the posthumous "Big Balls," and I don't, though I've always wanted to work a phrase like "posthumous big balls" into a post).