Okay, now for the second in the fancylady.diaryland.com six favorite songs series...

Girls Got Rhythm - AC/DC

I can distinctly remember the first time I heard of AC/DC. It was way back when I was in my teens. I was hanging around with some friends one day, and they told me about some band they had seen on a late night show the previous evening. The band was called AC/DC, and they had this lead guitar player who dressed like an English schoolboy and gyrated like a madman.

“How was the music?” I asked one of my friends.

“It was not bad at all,” he replied.

The idea thrilled me. I was a kid who fell in love with music retroactively; it was not the contemporary music of my youth that first moved me, but the music of the mid 1960s.

I think the rock music of that era remains unsurpassed, but what I also liked about many of the mid-Sixties acts was what they did on stage.

Whether it was The Who’s gear demolition, a dishevelled Rolling Stones grooving behind the the prototypical frontman Jagger, Hendrix’s guitar burning or behind-the-back picking...I loved it all. I even remember seeing an old clip of Paul Revere and the Raiders, those guys who dressed up in Revolutionary War attire and jumped around in military unison, and thinking their act was ingenious (their music was somewhat less inspiring).

There’s something very rock ‘n’ roll about guys who are their own stage shows. It goes right back to the early days, with Chuck Berry’s one-legged jumps across the stage, or Jerry Lee Lewis’ elbow piano playing, or Elvis’ hip swing.

And it didn’t have to be too self-aggrandizng or excessive. In those days, a stage move that was measured, but original, could speak volumes. The Beatles, when performing ‘She Loves You,’ would shake their mop-tops during the falsetto ‘oooo’ parts.

“When The Beatles first showed this to their colleagues on tour,” writes Beatle scholar Ian MacDonald, “it was greeted with hilarity. (John) Lennon, though, insisted that it would work, and was proved correct. Whenever the head-shaking ‘ooo’s came round, the level of the audiences’ delerium would leap.”

I grew up in the era of the light show and the flashpot. But in a way these things let the band off the hook. When you don’t rely on technology, your act works as well in front of 20 people as it does in front of 20 000. To me, AC/DC, centred as they were around Angus Young’s schoolboy character, seemed to be reclaiming an early rock ‘n’ roll legacy.

The first song of theirs that I heard was ‘Highway to Hell.’ It was okay--it’s now an anthem to some--but it didn’t move me as I had hoped. Nonetheless, a local radio station decided to preview the entire ‘Highway to Hell’ album, and I listened in, wondering if I’d like the rest of the record any better.

My question was answered when the disk’s second track came on.

The addictive riff, the infectious drum groove, the British Invasion-style call/answer choruses, the lead vocals that emphasized mid-Sixties, bluesy phrasing over melody, all AC/DC hallmarks, were all vividly on display in ‘Girls Got Rhythm.’

You can easily imagine this song being screamed out by Eric Burdon and the Animals, or Van Morrison and Them, sometime around 1965. The amps would be Vox instead of Marshall, the sound a little rawer and more reverb-soaked, but it’s fundamentally a mid-Sixties kind of tune.

Was it a couple of years ago already that they held that SARS concert in Toronto...to revive tourism there? I remember the CBC’s Jian Ghomeshi admitting, almost as a reluctant revelation, that AC/DC’s performance was awesome.

Well, duh. In a sense, AC/DC are everything that the hipster crowd wants; a stripped down, unpretentious, self-deprecating outfit that draws its inspiration from the unsullied, early days of rock ‘n’ roll. That it has taken the alt-rock intelligensia so long to figure this out says something in itself.

AC/DC followed ‘Highway to Hell’ with the monster ‘Back in Black.’

"It's time to recognize," said columnist and blogger Colby Cosh recently, "that 'Back in Black' has transcended its genre and time."

By genre I assume he means heavy metal, but that’s a pretty unsuitable and shallow label for AC/DC’s sound. As for transcending their time, I’d say their music does so inherently (not to mention their attire; Young’s schoolboy suit never goes out of fashion, nor does the jeans/t-shirt combo favoured by the rest of the band. Gilligan and the Skipper change their look more often).

I think all the ingredients that keep the band from falling into some ghetto of genre or era are nicely summed up in ‘Girls Got Rhythm.’ As they once put it themselves:

“Rock ‘n’ Roll is just Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

I’ve noticed that there's a marked intolerance among the right-wing punditry of any criticism aimed at the Bush administration regarding its handling of the relief effort for Hurricane Katrina.

Criticism of Bush is instantly labelled as ‘politicizing’ a tragic situation; anyone voicing such criticism is denounced as a crass opportunist.

This rule applies only to a degree, however. If there’s a chance to score points in favour of the right, then the aftermath of Katrina is fair game.

Even then, some of the points being scored strike me as a bit dubious.

Check out, for example, Canadian conservative pundit Mark Steyn’s analysis of one of the factors contributing to the worsening of Katrina’s impact, courtesy of radioblogger.com...

“The people who had reviled SUV's, that the environmental (movement) want to get rid of and want to ban, they were able to drive away from the city. The people who were dependent on public transit, and did what the government did, and went into this appalling situation in the Superdome, they're the ones that have been failed by their governments.”

Ah, so that’s whose to blame. All those damned environmentalists.

Did it not even occur to Steyn that the people left in New Orleans immediately following the hurricane's landfall were there because they can't afford an SUV, or any other type of vehicle for that matter? Or does being an apologist for Bush mean adopting a Soviet-like denial of any reality that doesn't square with the party line?

Of course Steyn is the same guy who used the murder of Swedish foreign minister Anna Lindh in a Stockholm department store a couple of years ago--specifically the failure of bystanders to apprehend her murderer--as an opportunity to conclude that socialistic policies had led to a ‘culture of passivity’ in Sweden.

Such is the life of the polemicist. It must be a pretty tedious business trying to wring whatever drops of dogma you can out of every miserable event that unfolds.