RECORD STORE TALES #1104:
We Don’t Need No, No No No, Parental Guidance Here

In our house, we always had the utmost support.  It didn’t matter if my parents liked the music.  Like it or not, they provided it in spades.

My dad fully enabled my early John Williams addiction.  I had a good collection of Star Wars and Indiana Jones music.  The only way for me to listen to them was on the big family stereo in the living room.  My parents had a good pair of headphones, so noise wasn’t an issue.  There I would lay, my Star Wars toys scattered about, as I read the liner notes to  The Empire Strikes Back, LP spinning at 33 1/3 rpm on the turntable behind me.

Nothing lasts forever but the certainty of change, and in 1984 change was afoot.  Star Wars could not last forever without films to sustain it, and the Kenner action figures were scraping the bottom of the barrel for Ewoks, and other creatures with mere seconds of screen time.  It was, for all intents and purposes for this child, over.

Enter Bob Schipper.  December 26, 1984.  The album was called Masters Of Metal Volume II.

My exposure to music up to that point had been pretty mainstream.  There was an earlier dalliance with AC/DC’s “Big Balls” and some “Mr. Roboto” by Styx earlier, but otherwise I only knew John Williams and whatever MuchMusic was playing those days.  Billy Ocean’s “Loverboy” was a big one.  (The rock connection there was production by Robert John “Mutt” Lange.)  I had Michael Jackson and Culture Club cassettes, but neither were played beyond the big singles.  I loathed slow songs.  I spotted John Fogerty’s “The Old Man Down the Road” and thought it was pretty cool.  My biggest dip into heavy metal to date was Quiet Riot, but that day in 1984 changed the course of my life.

Suddenly the vacuum was filled by Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, W.A.S.P., Motley Crue, Helix, Lee Aaron, Triumph, and Kiss.  Especially Kiss.

So what did my parents do?  They bought me some of my first music cassettes. Powerslave, Walkin’ the Razor’s Edge, Asylum, Condition Critical, and all those seminal albums that shaped my first year as a real music fanatic.  Just as I was obsessed with Star Wars and collecting, now I had a new focus and I was on it like a laser.  My earliest purchases in the field of rock music were magazines:  Faces, and Hit Parader.  I had a Faces Kiss special, catching me up on all the essential facts into 1985.  (Interestingly, the Faces special talked of the next studio album, which was to be followed by Alive III, they said.)  I taped all the music videos off the Pepsi Power Hour like a maniac, soaking up everything I could that wasn’t too scary.  (Venom were scary.  So was Motorhead.)

My parents relinquished control of the VCR to me during the Pepsi Power Hour broadcast time.  5:00 PM, one day a week and then later on, two days a week.  This was seemingly set in stone.  The basement gradually became a music den for me, and Bob Schipper would join me as often as possible as we watched all the latest music I had captured on magnetic tape.  Bob would offer his opinions, pro and con.  We didn’t always agree.  He loved Skid Row, and I was more into Badlands.  He was early on to D-A-D, but didn’t really get what I loved about Savatage.

Whatever demons and dragons were on the covers of the albums I wanted, my parents would buy them for me.  Whether Ozzy was dressed as a priest on the sleeve, or if a guy in a metal mask was being held in a psych ward, they bought the albums.  They never said no.  They never blinked at titles such as Live After Death or Screaming For Vengeance.  I remember my mom once asked me if it was true that AC/DC stood for “Anti-Christ/Devil-Child”.  I kind of laughed.  She let it go.  I think my mom knew how silly all those stories about “satanism in music” really were.  It always seemed so far-fetched, and far removed from the songs I was enjoying in the basement with Bob.

His parents were pretty much the same, except he was older and had to buy his own tapes.  They didn’t mind the shirtless Vince Neil poster on his wall.  Me, I just wondered if he really had a crossbow launcher on his right gauntlet.

A lot of these rock stars looked like wrestlers or apocalyptic warriors from Mad Max.  All these influences poured together in a potpourri of hard rock and heavy metal bands, marketed through the TV and magazines that I was consuming, to appeal to my age group.  I was the target demographic, and it was working.  There’s nothing particularly “evil” about that.  That’s the world of capitalism that I was born into, and that record label executives hitched their wagons to.  I suppose my mom had probably endured something similar when she was a young Beatles and Elvis fan.  Her younger brother, my Uncle Don Don, had Led Zeppelin records.  I was just listening to the next generation of rock down the line.

My parents’ support reached its zenith in 2021, when they bought me the Judas Priest box set, 50 Heavy Metal Years of Music.  Easily the biggest music gift I ever received, it just proved how far they’d go to enable my musical habits.  They don’t understand it, but they support it.  That’s a pretty amazing thing, isn’t it?