Highway To Hell by AC/DC

I think it was the blood splatter, coming from under my bed, that finally did it.

I grew up in an area of Phoenix called Freeway Park. Our house was somewhere in the middle of our street which ran about 500 yards long, which was one of seven identical streets – all the same home builder, cinder-block homes built in the 1950s, adorned with swamp coolers which underachieved spectacularly versus the Phoenix summer heat. At one end of my street was a frontage road to the interstate freeway, on the other end was a big cotton field that was a mile across, until the mid-1980s when a developer came in and turned it into office buildings, a golf course and apartments. 

I’m an only child but there were loads of kids living right around my house so I had plenty of people to hang out with. Our front yard had no trees (and no shade), so it became the football field, soccer pitch, kickball diamond, whatever. Having no older siblings around to introduce me to music, I learned about it from whomever I could. When I was 10, a kid at school named Tommy introduced me to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40, which became a weekly obsession for me, with fingers perched on “record” and “play” on my cassette recorder, ready to nab my favorite songs as they were counted down each Saturday night at 6pm. I wrote the names of the songs on pieces of typing paper with Crayola markers and Scotch-taped them in sequence on my wall, moving them around each week as songs moved in and out of the countdown.

Next door to the right lived a Latino guy in his 20s named David. He was single and he drove a white Camaro. On most weekend mornings, he played R&B music really loudly with his front door open for the whole neighborhood to hear. On the other side of us was a German couple and their two kids, Andrea and Stephan and their little brown dog, cleverly named Brownie. Their parents owned a small tropical fish shop, and their dad ran it. Mom stayed home. The parents seemed miserable and kind of cold. I kicked a soccer ball through a side window of their house once and feared for my life, but their Mom was actually cool about it.  

I got along well with their kids. Stephan was three years older than me and about six feet tall, super skinny and awkward and crazy book-smart. He was into chemistry and science, and one afternoon, he came over to tell me he had built a bazooka and wanted to know if I’d go with him down to the cotton fields to shoot it into the sky. While it turned out to be more like a supercharged model-rocket launch, it had some sort of fireworks attached to it which made enough of a noise upon blast-off that we momentarily feared for our lives.

Andrea (pronounced Ahn-dré-uh) was two years older than Stephan, tall like her brother, with blonde feathered hair that was accurate for the early 80s. My mom often hired her to babysit for me and we’d listen to the radio and she’d tell me about the bands and the songs we were hearing. On one occasion, she decided my hair needed to be feathered too and attacked me with a blow-dryer and hairspray.

I would go over sometimes to swim and hang out with Stephan, and having just discovered Top 40 music and records, I was curious about Andrea’s record collection. She was obsessed with Rick Springfield, and unfortunately, Scott Baio. Her walls were covered with posters and teen magazine pictures of Shaun Cassidy and Peter Frampton. We’d hang out in her bedroom and she’d play 45’s and let me look through her albums. She had Air Supply’s “Lost In Love” and Foreigner “4” and the new Rick Springfield album at the time, “Success Hasn’t Spoiled Me Yet” and something by Cheap Trick.  We goofed around listening to “Knock Three Times” by Tony Orlando and Dawn. She also had the “Rich Girl” single by Hall & Oates, and we’d scream along to the scandalous last line, “ah you’re a rich bitch girl!”, drawing an eye roll from her brother. 

“Who’s A-C-S-D-C.?” I asked.

“What?”

I was holding a copy of an album with some tough looking guys on the front and I had never seen it before. One of them was sneering.  He had horns coming out of his head, a weapon of some sort in his hand. I showed her the album.

“Oh,” she laughed. “That’s A-C-D-C.  That’s not an S.  That’s a lightning bolt.”

I studied it for a minute.

“Is this…acid rock?” I asked. I heard the term somewhere, figured maybe this was it.  She laughed again.

“No, that’s something else…this is just really hard rock.  Bon Scott was the singer even though he sounds more like he’s screaming sometimes, he’s actually dead now. Angus Young is the guitar player, that’s him with the horns. He’s cool and he’s really good on guitar.”

I was a little freaked out. The one guy was dead?  They looked scary to me. Not like Hall. Or Oates. The album was called “Highway To Hell” too.

“What does A-C-D-C mean?”

“I think they’re Satanic.  It stands for Against Christ, Devil’s Children,” she said. 

I shuddered. I stared at the album and quickly set it down on her bed.

“Can we listen to Jessie’s Girl again?” I asked. 

Andrea played a few more songs but I kept thinking about ACSDC…or AC/DC. I had never heard of them, nor had I listened to anything that was “really hard rock”.  My record collection at that point included some 45’s by the Beach Boys and Olivia Newton-John. For albums, I had some K-Tel compilations, Billy Joel’s “52^nd Street”, “Private Eyes” by Hall & Oates and The Adventures of Muhammad Ali and His Gang vs Mr Tooth Decay.

Anyway.

I was curious about this “A-C-D-C” record so as I got ready to leave, I asked Andrea if I could borrow it, “to play for some friends at school”, I said. I thought that sounded more cool.

“Yeah, sure. Bring it back whenever you’re done.”

I carried it home…clutching it to my chest with two hands, not really sure what to make of it.  I rushed it to my room, making sure my mom didn’t see it, not wanting to upset her. I set it on my bed and stared at it. 

For about a half hour.

Then I turned it over. The songs listed on the back had names like “If You Want Blood, You Got It” and “Shot Down In Flames” and “Night Prowler” along with “Highway To Hell”.  No, these were definitely not friendly song titles like “Jessie’s Girl” or “My Life” or “Lost In Love”… and there was the scary Angus guy again on the back, no horns this time, but looking like he was…possessed or something.

I decided to go for it. Moving slowly, I removed the record from the sleeve…I carefully set it on my turntable on Side One and turned on the unit.  The record started to go round and round. I looked at the turntable arm.

Then I heard Andrea’s voice:

“I think they’re Satanic.  It stands for Against Christ, Devil’s Children,” she said. 

What does that mean, I thought. Do they actually worship Satan?!  Did Satan kill the Bon Scott guy? Does it mean they do, like, animal sacrifices or drink blood or something like that?  I had heard something about a heavy metal guy named Ozzy Osbourne biting off the head of a live bat because he was a devil-worshipper. Was this what A-C-S-D-C was doing too???

My heart was beating fast. I snapped off the record player, grabbed the disc off the turntable and shoved it back in the album jacket, and looked around my room, frantic.  What to do?  I couldn’t take it back to Andrea already, I would look like a baby. I didn’t want to put it next to my other records – they might get…I didn’t know.  I also didn’t want my mom to find it.  So I put it in my closet, on the top shelf, on top of a stack of board games, telling myself I’d figure out what to do with the scary devil record later.

I put on Muhammad Ali vs Mr. Tooth Decay.

For at least a couple of weeks, I kind of forgot about the devil band’s record that was hiding in my closet. Then, while trying to get my game of Sorry down from the closet, I knocked “Highway To Hell” to the floor and I felt my 10-year-old blood run cold. Angus and the others were staring up at me from the floor. It was like a reminder – the devil was still in my house. In my room.  

I quickly slipped it under my bed and ran to play Sorry with my friends. 

That night, I found myself dreaming about records again. I used to dream that someone opened a Tower Records where the cotton field was, so I could just walk there anytime to look at records anytime I wanted. But my record store dream began turning into a nightmare – the Highway To Hell cover popped out of the “A” section and came alive. Angus’s face rose up…became huge and red…and fire shot from his ears. The weapon I thought he was holding was actually his tail, which slashed around. He gave a low growl, then he snorted like a bull…and roared…and blood came spraying out of his mouth!

I shot up in bed, jumped off, crouched down and looked down below for the record.  It was resting, right where I’d left it. There was no blood, none that I could see anyway.

It was early in the morning. My mom was still asleep. It had to go.

I grabbed the record and ran to the back door, unlocked it and shoved it open as quietly as I could, dashing into the early morning of the backyard.  It was barely light outside. An alley ran along the backs of our houses and there were giant trash receptacles every few houses. I had to make it go away somehow – I just had to get it out of the house…NOW. 

Our gate to the alley was secured by a padlock and long chain, I would make too much noise trying to find the key and then unfurling the chain – someone was bound to hear me, and then I’d have to explain what I was doing. So I came up with another plan, right on the spot.

I flung that crazy Satan record over the fence, into the alley, as far as I could, away from my bedroom and my board games and my Mom and my K-Tel compilations.  I was not ready to rock, not that hard, not just yet.

It would be a good few weeks before Andrea would ask me if I was done with the AC/DC album. I was hoping she’d forget about it but she didn’t.  I made up some lame story about lending it to a friend at school who kept forgetting to give it back to me and I was really sorry and I’d buy her a new one. Thankfully, she didn’t take me up on that – I had no idea how I would have come up with the money. She bought the story.

“Did you like it?  It’s really cool, isn’t it?” she asked. “You have to hear this other album, called ‘Back In Black.’”  I nodded.

Eventually, with the aid of MTV and learning not to be a big freaking baby, I came around on AC/DC and became a huge fan, seeing them live and buying most of their albums.  And that wasn’t the end of that family’s musical introductions for me.  Four years later, Stephan drove me to high school most days – he was a senior and I was a freshman.  He’d installed – all by himself – a new cassette deck in his 1976 white Monte Carlo and he introduced me to some great music. We had a healthy choice of tapes for our daily commute, including the Sex Pistols “Never Mind The Bollocks”, “Black Celebration” by Depeche Mode, a Toy Dolls compilation, Oingo Boingo’s “Nothing To Fear” and “Only A Lad” and ABC’s “How To Be A Zillionaire”.

No AC/DC, though.