Likeable Bon

Astrobabble, issue ten, has hit the streets of Sydney and Melbourne. It’s available at Red Eye Records and The Sticky Institute respectively. I have also placed a few free copies at Beyond The Ordinary in Balmain, Phoenix Rising Bookshop in Glebe, and The Buddha Bar in Newtown.

This issue completes the cycle which documents the twelve astrological signs in zine format; a project I started five years ago with the intention of cajoling a zinester with whom I was fixated. Ironically, but not surprisingly, it had the opposite effect. Still, what I gained from creating Astrobabble more than made up for my disappointment in love. Or so I keep telling myself.

Anyway, as you can see from the image above, issue ten delves into the life of renowned AC/DC front man, Bon Scott, with whom I share the Sun sign, Cancer. Bon was a thoroughly enjoyable subject to research. He is mythologised in a way that contradicts his sign, but as is usually the case with idols of the stage and screen, Bon had a vulnerable side that was often overlooked for his more appealing rock ‘n’ roll persona.

Sources abound with evidence of Bon’s polite, sensitive, and considerate nature. In many ways, he was a textbook Cancerian; a pipe and slippers man who loved his family and close friends, and abhorred the pretensions of the music establishment.

That aside, the most surprising discovery was his so called ‘toilet poetry’ that masked a talent for writing (Mercury sextile Jupiter). For years, I failed to recognise Bon’s words as anything other than mediocre. I ignored lyrics to High Voltage, Long Way to The Top, Jailbreak, Ride On, Let There Be Rock, and Highway to Hell simply because the point of AC/DC is to mindlessly rock out to the music. Thanks to a Mercury conjunct Pluto aspect, Bon took the writing of AC/DC’s lyrics responsibly and seriously, with a wit and deviousness sorely missing in song writing today.

Bon was also a prolific letter writer and sender of postcards. His correspondences reveal an intuitive feel for language, in which anecdotes are told with zest and humour. Rarely did he forget to mail Christmas and birthday cards to family and friends while he was on the road. Like a pre-office obsessed Nick Cave, Bon constantly carried a notebook and pen, jotting ideas for songs as they came to him, regardless of where he was, what he was doing, or who he was doing it to. He would have made a respectable zinester. Imagine the tales between those covers.