ac/dc
~ First I dreamed about Angelina Jolie. Not Angelina. Her hair. Her hair extensions. There were these two long golden-blonde braids sitting on a table. They were supposed to wind up attached to Angelina Jolie's head. Then the space heater in my bedroom kicked in, and I woke up.
~ I fell asleep again and dreamed about an apnea machine. It was this cap you wore on your head when you went to bed. It measured electrical impulses. As soon as your brain wave pattern showed that you had fallen asleep, a stick would come out and poke you in the ribs and wake you up again.
~ The third dream I had was about AC/DC. This was a parallel-universe AC/DC in which there was no Angus Young, it was just Brian Johnson singing and three hot chicks playing instruments.
I was chatting with one of the ladies and she said "We might have to cancel the concert tonight, we are desperate for a guitarist. Oh, you play? Wouldn't happen to know any of our songs, would you."
And I said "Would I," and I opened my closet to reveal a row of books on "How to Play AC/DC Songs on the Guitar."
So the next thing I knew I was onstage playing guitar for AC/DC. We opened with "Highway To Hell." The crowd was freaking out, holy shit I'm onstage with Brian Johnson and a bunch of hot chicks, SO many people here. I was losing my mind, I was all over the stage, rolling around, playing AC/DC songs on my Gibson SG. Holy shit I'm in AC/DC.
Four or five songs into our set and I was jubilant. I still couldn't get over the sheer size of the crowd. It felt amazing to have so many people giving their energy back to you. We kicked into "Let There Be Rock." I knew all the songs. All that time spent playing along with the records had paid off.
There was an instrumental part where the singer moved to the back of the stage and the band worked it out for a while. I started bringing down my playing, getting quieter and quieter. The rest of the band followed my lead. Eventually I stopped altogether.
There was no sound on the stage, just the murmuring of a restless crowd.
Then I started clapping in time to the beat of the song. The audience started clapping with me. Tens of thousands of people, all clapping along. Amazing. I didn't even know what I was going to do next but I was loving the moment.
One by one I caught everyone's eye onstage, and at an invisible count of four we all slammed into the main riff of "Let There Be Rock." By the time the song finished I was euphoric.
But then something weird happened. The song ended and I was looking around to see what to play next. Right away I heard the opening chords from "Strutter" by Kiss come over the sound system. Was the band starting a cover? No... the music was coming through the PA. The house lights were coming up. We were being hustled off the stage.
The concert is over? What's going on?
Apparently Brian Johnson had stormed off the stage in disgust. My crowd interaction had rubbed him the wrong way somehow. He wasn't even around backstage. Apparently he was furious. One of the women in the band had to explain to me.
She told me, "Brian was pretty pissed off at you. He said 'What the hell does he think this is, some kind of jam band?'"