With my conservative upbringing, it goes without saying that hard rock wasn’t really on the playlist at my great-grandparent’s place. This is where a bit of irony kicks in.

I’d been invited to tag along to a church-league baseball game on St. Joe’s Island by my cousin, and his family. On the drive, his father opened up a CD case (which happened to have a man with devil horns on the back), and popped in the first disk of AC/DC Live.

The extended intro to Thunderstruck sounded like an approaching storm, and had this ominous feeling about. It all felt like something that I shouldn’t really be allowed to listen to, but I was mesmerized. Then, that riff kicked in, and I was hooked.

As soon as I got back to my great-grandparent’s house, I made sure to call up my mother, and tell her all about it. Setting aside the fact that I thought Thunderstruck was called “Thundershock”, she seemed pretty amused by my enthusiasm towards the whole experience.

A few years later, around the beginning of high school, I would go on to use what money I’d saved to buy my own copy from Music World. Needless to say, I felt like I was officially becoming a cool teenager.

In fact, my love of this album resulted in a Christmas gift of Back in Black from my mother, that same year. In retrospect, I think of my mother as pretty cool for gifting me that bad boy. I mean, it’s not like she was one of those oblivious parents who had no idea what she was buying her child. She knew exactly what she was doing. Song titles like “Hells Bells”, “Have a Drink on Me”, and “Let Me Put My Love Into You” didn’t phase her one bit. This was AC/DC. Her kid was showing an interest in the “classics”, and she was all too pleased to nurture that interest.

My Uncles proved to be of a pretty similar mindset. That same Christmas Day, I was over at my grandmother’s for Christmas lunch. Once my Uncles had been made aware of my interest in AC/DC, I was immediately bequeathed all the AC/DC CDs in their possession. In the course of 24 hours, my meager CD collection (maybe 8 or 9 albums) exploded to include the majority of the AC/DC discography. This, by itself was a pretty big part of my musical identity all through high school. Baggy jeans, and a big AC/DC t-shirt were a pretty iconic look for high school-era Soup. A good chunk of the other bands that I got into were by virtue of my interest in AC/DC….thinking about it now, I could probably dedicate an entire blog to the music that I listen to, as a direct result of AC/DC Live.

It goes without saying that this album left an impact.