Aye aye oh! Shake your foundations.Sometime in fifth, or as late (!) as sixth grade, I started reading Stephen King. Night Shift and Skeleton Crew, his early collections of short stories, were and remain my favorites. (Although you must read The Long Walk by his Richard Bachman alias if you haven’t. One of my top five books of all time.)
In 1986, King’s directorial debut Maximum Overdrive came roaring into theaters, which means I must’ve seen it in ’87 on VHS or HBO. It’s a fun film–not to say “good”–based on King’s short story “Trucks,” starring a very smarmy Emilio Esteves, although to say the movie “starred” anyone is a stretch. The opening sequence includes a mechanical drawbridge that raises on its own!!! and makes cars crash all over the place. Later, kids are slain by rapidly ejecting soda cans!!!
But the soundtrack that played over it all . . . merciful Zeus. I had found AC/DC.
Which, I was promptly informed by my Missouri-Synod Lutheran school classmates, was an acronym for
AFTER CHRIST/DEVIL COMES!!!
I am not making that up. True story. I still remember the kid’s name who first told me. And he was certain of this.
I tracked down the soundtrack to Maximum Overdrive; officially, AC/DC’s Who Made Who album, which only contained three new songs: the title song and two instrumentals, with the rest being a sort of “best of.” I started scooping up AC/DC tapes
(New tape smell! Someone bring that back!)
as quickly as I could afford them. My favorite, still ranking as a top-five desert-island pick, was Fly On the Wall. Every song hit just the right note for adolescent me, with great riffs and colossal middle fingers raising to lyrics like:
Born in trouble they gave up on me/Teacher preachin’ what not to be/Call me dirty trash my name/Just tell the boys that I’m gonna be/Back in business again!
You could find this poetry scrawled on one of the yellow tab divider sheets in my Trapper Keeper in eighth grade. When I drafted a couple friends to make my first horror movie at the ripe old age of 13, I knew which music I’d be using for my soundtrack.
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I wrote the notes to what turned into my first movie in sixth grade. I was home alone, and a few odd things happened, like rain with no visible clouds, the lights flickering, and the cats acting . . . okay, like cats, so maybe that wasn’t exactly noteworthy. These eerie events!!! formed the basis of what became my first feature film, The Moon Daemon.
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There are a number of things I could complain about when it comes to my K-through-8 school. Hell, there might even be a faint whiff of lawsuit if I closed my eyes and concentrated. But there are two specific things they did great, for which I am seriously grateful.
One: They let me write a novella, Derro the Warrior, which I later took to a Young Authors Conference at Arizona State University. That book stood in for a yearbook (I have zero yearbooks from the school), and was signed by everyone I liked, or everyone who tolerated me.
Two: They let me shoot a movie and edit it with their equipment. A horror movie. With a sound track by AC/DC. That included “Hells Bells.”
In retrospect, part of the allowance the staff must have made was the film didn’t star my best friends, two or three other ne’er do wells like myself. Rather, the film starred me, the pastor’s kid, and the board of elders’ kid.
It’s always about who you know.
But who cares? They let me make the thing and screen it during class time!
Furthermore, for all the things I could tell you about when it comes to my parents, and there’s plenty to go around, I have to give my dad credit: the guy put on a truly ridiculous costume and played the Big Bad for me in the movie. I mean…that’s love. Ain’t it?
He has a three-pronged garden tool for his right hand. BOO!
Now, this footage has not been seen by anyone — except maybe Joy — since 1988, when I showed it to my then-girlfriend and her family so they could appreciate the true genius that was my film. Inexplicably, instead of recoiling in horror, they laughed. A lot. And oddly, they insisted on referring to the film not by its blockbuster title The Moon Daemon, but rather as the diminutive Bucket-head.
Well, okay, maybe it’s because he had a bucket for a head. That makes sense.
Ridiculous or not, when we screened the film in class, we did get one legitimate, startled shriek from a girl when the titular character suddenly appeared behind us as if by teleportation. That was a great moment for me. It meant I could physically affect people by storytelling. That’s no small thing.
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I don’t remember the last time I listened to an Ozzy song on purpose. Decades. Nothing against Ozzy, he did some damn fine work; it’s just that tastes change. I know a guy who’s gone from Exploited to Enya. ENYA! I don’t get it, but it happens. It happens.
(There’s a handful of Enya songs I like, too, but again…it’s been decades since I actually listened to one of them.)
I never lost my taste for AC/DC, though. With AC/DC, there are no surprises. That explains why some people don’t like them, I suppose. For me, they’re a comfortable old leather jacket, relic of a bygone time, yet valuable for exactly that trait: It takes but one progression or riff to take me back to when getting in trouble was fun; when I lived in that short moment where everything was new, everything was the first time. Watching some other old videotapes recently, I took a note about my friends and I, regarding my fiction: “Don’t forget the joy. Everything we did, we did with unfettered f***ing joy.” And it’s true. We did suck the marrow out of life, we did take everything–good and bad–to the Nth degree.
(Sometimes I miss that part of me.)
AC/DC does that, too. They’re never not fully engaged, whether it’s blowing up your video or shaking you all night long. Yeah, it all sounds alike. Yeah, it gets repetitive. But I like that predictability. You can trust AC/DC to give you a simple chord progression, a sweet solo, and a driving beat. AC/DC is everything that’s good and right about hard rock, and when I listen to them, I’m reminded viscerally about that brief moment in time when it only made sense to videotape a horror movie with a zero budget, no script, and a dad with a bucket on his head.
Good times. It’s what AC/DC and eighth grade should be all about.
