Senior year of college on a Saturday night. I was living off campus with five other like-minded idiots. We'd all been off doing our own things that night. I was heading back downhill (our house was at the bottom of a long hill, oddly planted in between five or six sorrority houses. That would've worked out really well had Granville, Ohio not imposed the "whorehouse law," which considered any house containing four or more unchaperoned young ladies "a brothel". So, basically, they were all empty and used only for sorrority functions). Anyway, I'm heading downhill after some disapointing party or whatnot, and halfway there...I can hear loud, loud music coming from our house. Even from two blocks away, I can make out the familiar strains of Brian Johnson of AC/DC, screeching "Hells Bells," it echoeing creepily around the rural expanse of the verdant, spring evening. "What the fuck is going on?" I'm thinking. I mean, we were renowned for playing music loud, but not
this loud. As I get close to the house, I'm overcome with a sense that something's wrong...and am somewhat intimidated. I notice no cars in the driveway, but the AC/DC is
*BLASTING*. I walk in -- it's a very surreal scene. The music is so loud that it's almost hampering my vision. I see blood smeared on the back white wall and there's a fist sized hole in the windowpane next to it. All the doors are wide open. Strangely, there is no one home, no note, no explanation.
I walk through the entire house (I still haven't touched the stereo, now pumping the third or fourth track off of Back in Black with tinnitus-courting power). There isn't a soul there. I go back downstairs and finally flip off the stereo.
I'd later learn that my roommate Ed had fielded a call from home to inform him that his mother had just passed away. In his grief, I suppose to cranked up the AC/DC (hey, whatever makes you feel better, I suppose), but something came over him, and he punched the window....immediately starting to bleed severely, prompting him to run outside flag down our friend Steve who was mercifully driving by. Steve took him to the infirmary.
As much as I adore Back in Black by AC/DC, I'll always associate it with that strange feeling of prescience and dread.
Do any of you have similar music associations?
― Alex in NYC (vassifer), Monday, 9 May 2005 18:59 (twenty-one years ago)