COOL OR NOT COOL: MARCHING BANDS PLAYING AC/ DC?

The 39^th Annual Brooklyn St. Patrick’s Day parade had all the usual shit with one refreshingly dirty deed. Read on. There were school groups, organizations and individuals wearing green and marching down 7^th Avenue to Garfield Place, and then up Prospect Park West. Some played the bagpipes and wore fetching kilts that showed off their hairy limbs. Some parade marchers shivered from the cold while others waved like they were a Windsor Terrace residing Miss America. The school marching bands were numerous, as usual, some playing Irish inspired tunes like the 1927 Mort Dixon “I’m Looking Over A Four Leaf Clover.” The Fort Hamilton High School (FHHS) Marching Band marched to a different drummer and had the genteel Park Slope crowd either head banging or scratching their heads.  

They bypassed the yawn-inducing classics for a cover of AC/DC’s 1976 "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap". Angus Young always hung onto his schoolboy days by thrashing his damp locks on stage while dressed in a schoolboy uniform, so I’m sure he’s proud of FHHS’s band salute to this classic hard rock tune. It sounded like a foreign upbeat instrumental elevator salute to the original. No lyrics, mind you.

The kicker is that the lyrics are all about a hired hitman that, with the help of “concrete shoes, cyanide and TNT,” will easily and happily do away with people that are disrupting your life. Among those mentioned in the song lyrics are the head of your high school or a lover that broke your heart. As long as these high school band members are spending their spare time putting their trumpets in their teen orifices instead of dusting off their parent’s 1976 Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap album or watching YouTube concert footage of the song, they’ll be safe. Hey, I listened to crazier shit in high school and I’ve never ordered a hit…but then again I wasn’t in a marching band that played instrumental AC/DC.  So what do you think: Cool or Not Cool??