Angus Young & Brian Johnson
The great bands are the ones you knew in high school. For me & my wife, Gwynne, that would be The Eagles, Paul McCartney, The Cars, Bachman Turner Overdrive, ZZTop, Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones, Ted Nugent, and others I only remember when their song plays in the elevator. Unfortunately, Tom Petty died before we were able to see him live but the rest we got covered. That is, except AC/DC. Every music tour-goer I know has a story about almost seeing AC/DC so when a new AC/DC tour was announced with Brian Johnson singing (he hadn’t been for years due to medical issues), we had to go, hell or high water. After looking online at how expensive the tickets were, it just happened to be while Los Angeles was burning, and there was a show at the famous Rose Bowl so there was a huge discount. We got 4 tickets, 2 motel rooms, and 3 round trip airfares for about the same price as one ticket for the same concert in Las Vegas. On the flight there, the birthdate on my ticket was wrong so I had to get a revised one and go back through. While waiting, we bought six cans of specialty beers in the Portland airport at the same price as on the street with no tax, and drank them after we landed in the hour-long rideshare on the way to the motel. We were told our second room was at another motel a quarter-mile down the road which we had to walk to! The rooms had no nightstand, no dresser, no chair, no artwork, no hangers, only a bed.
Gwynne in Stark Motel Room
Heath wanted to go to a brightly colored Mexican restaurant nearby. He was wearing his concert jacket and we must have looked like we were having a good time because the owner gave us two free bottles of Modelo after we’d already drank 2 20-oz glasses. We rideshared to the stadium through an enormous traffic jam. The Rose Bowl was built in 1921, holds 90K visitors, made of crumbling concrete with no elevators, no signs, no guard rails and no handrails. There was no way to get to the seats without everyone in the row standing and getting more intimate than is comfortable. It would be impossible for a disabled person. Half the people in the audience were wearing flashing read horns. When the show started, there was pandemonium. The band sounded exactly like I expected AC/DC to sound; loud! 70-year-old Angus Young duck-walked around like he was half that age, but he looked 10 years older; must have been some hard years of sex, drugs and Rock & Roll. They played for over 90-minutes, 25 of which was an Angus guitar solo. It ended in a fabulous fireworks display in the area of Los Angeles that had already burned down. We walked back through the crowds, no way to get a ride, a couple miles towards our motel. There weren’t as many homeless as I’d thought considering it was midnight but there were too many for me so we got an Uber. Easy-peasy 5 a.m. flight back home the next morning.
Fireworks