Record Store Tales

#909: It Was Back in the Summer of ’83, There’s a Reason I Remember It Well

RECORD STORE TALES #909:
It Was Back in the Summer of ’83, There’s a Reason I Remember It Well

Part 1.

Put yourself in my 10 year old (going on 11) shoes.  Imagine the summer of 1983.  We were surrounded with nothing but the coolest stuff.  The A-Team was huge.  Michael Knight was riding high.  There was a new Star Wars coming.  There were even two new varieties of Coke:  Caffeine Free Coke, and Caffeine Free Diet Coke.  I didn’t know what caffeine was, I just wanted to try them all.

The first sign that we had a cool year ahead of us was when my mom came home with a new box of cereal one day.  It was probably Cheerios; regular or Honey-Nut.  On the front:  “STAR WARS BOOKLET INSIDE!”  This must be in advance of the new Star Wars movie, Revenge of the…what?  The title had been changed to Return of the Jedi.  Less edgy to be sure.  We learned that George Lucas changed it because Jedi do not take revenge.*

These cereal box booklets were our first look at some of the iconic new images from Episode VI.  Speeder bike troopers, Jabba the Hutt, and the unfinished new Death Star.  This image surprised me the most, even more than Jabba’s ghastly physique.  It didn’t make sense that the Empire would build a brand new Death Star, when the first was destroyed so easily.  But that was our first glimpse of what was to come.  We couldn’t wait to get the new toys.  I had dreams of anticipation building towards the release of the movie.

Next into our lives came the official Marvel Comics adaptation, which of course told the entire story before we saw the movie.  We waited for crowds to die down before going to see a new movie.  I had the single issue “Marvel Super Special”, my best friend Bob Schipper had the four-issue limited series.  About half way through reading the comic, I stopped myself in shock.

“Teddy bears?” I gasped.  “There is no way George Lucas would put teddy bears in Star Wars.”

But he did.  He put teddy bears in Star Wars.  Fortunately, the Ewoks were cooler on screen — fierce but funny warriors that I could accept if not embrace.  It just seemed so…sudden.  Calculated.  Even as children, we sensed this.  Jedi was the most “kiddie” of all the films, with the cutesy bears and burp jokes.

Then came the day we finally saw the movie in theaters.  I think we went with my schoolmate Ian Johnson, although my sister remembers that as our second time.  I know we joked around with him before the film — what if the whole thing was a big tease and they never found Han Solo?  We laughed at the idea of the Millenium Falcon flying around for the whole film, and never finding Solo.  Making you have to wait ’til the next movie…or the next…before Han finally came back.  Of course, we knew that wasn’t going to really happen.  We knew this was the final movie in the trilogy.  (We didn’t foresee we’d have to wait 16 years to get another Star Wars, or 32 years to get to the “what happens next” part.)

I can’t remember exactly how I felt through the film.  Awe at Luke’s cool new Jedi look.  Confusion as to how I was supposed to take Vader — the villain I hated — as redeemed.  I legitimately hated Darth Vader.  Could I forgive him?  Not at first.  “Look at his eyes,” said my dad.  “He was good again.”

We universally loved the speeder bike chase through the woods.  The busy space battle that eventually goes into the very superstructure of the Death Star.  And yes, Han Solo’s return.  Finally, we had use for our Han action figures again!

Oh yes, the action figures.  The Return of the Jedi wave was the best of the series yet.  We started getting our first new figures from the series around the same time my cousin Geoffrey rolled into town.

Part 2.

We both loved and feared when cousin Geoff came to visit.  So full of energy.  Much more than me.  We had great times, but usually tinged with a hint of destruction.  This is a kid who gave himself the nickname “Alligator”.  1983 was one of those wild summers.  We had the best times with Geoff, but I still came home with an injury.

It began with new toys.  My mom took Geoff, my sister and I to Stanley Park Mall.  We each got to pick one new Star Wars figure.  It was unanimous who we thought was best.   We each decided on the new Luke.  What a figure!  A cloth cloak, a laser pistol, and a lightsaber were packed inside the plastic bubble.  Three accessories!  Unprecedented.  Then, as told in Record Store Tales #653:

We waited on a bench while my mom did her banking.

“Come on let’s open these,” said Geoffrey.  My sister and I always waited until we got home.

Geoffrey ripped open his Luke.

“Why are you opening that now?  You’re going to lose the gun.  Just wait until we get home.  This is our last stop.”  I attempted to reason with my cousin but he had Luke out of the package.

Within the first five minutes, he lost the gun.  Before we made it home, he lost the lightsaber too.

“I told you so,” was something I relished saying to him.  My Luke, by the way, still has all his accessories 35 years later.

Geoff’s grandparents on his dad’s side owned a huge piece of property in the country with a swimming pool, and the most amazing landscape to explore.  Grassy fields gave way to trees, and I don’t think we ever hit the end of the property when we went walking.  It simply went on forever.  Any time we went there, it was a treat.  We spent a few days at the prorperty that summer, swimming and running pretending we were Jedi or superheroes.

The house had an amazing “back yard”.  There was a steep downwards incline, which you traversed via a series of stairs and landings.  To us it was huge!   It seemed like you were climbing down a mountain.  At the bottom: the swimming pool and all the land you could run through for hours.

There was a radio and a barbecue.  I remember hearing “Sister Christian” on the radio for the second or third time ever.  I didn’t know the name of the song, or the band, but I heard neighbours playing it on their stereos.  I assumed the song was called “Motorhead” by Motorhead because on a fuzzy radio, that’s sure what it sounded like.  “Motorhead!  What’s your price for flight?”

We had a great time swimming whenever we felt like it, and playing Star Wars the rest of the day.  Our figure collections were growing.  By the end of the summer, I had an Imperial Guard and Kathryn had her first Ewok, Logray the “medicine man” of the tribe.  Lando in his new disguise had also landed in our collection.  The figures really were outstanding this time, with more attention to detail and accessories.

But you can’t play Star Wars forever (especially when one of us has a Luke with no weapons) and so we explored the countryside.  As described earlier, my cousin Geoff had a lot more energy than me, and physics tells us that energy cannot be destroyed, merely transformed.  He transformed his into force.  We were playing some sort of game in the grass, involving running and hiding.  At one point Geoff spotted me and came barrelling my way.  I dove out of his path into a bush.  I thought I had escaped the pain, but the pain was only beginning.

The skin on my hand was starting to sting and bump, for I sought shelter amongst the stinging nettles.

It was bad!  My aunt got some creams and bandaged up my arm.  My hand was numb for hours.  And we were going to see a movie that night!

Part 3.

There were no cineplexes.  Our family movie tradition was going downtown for dinner and a flick.  My mom remembers the restaurant well:   “It was owned by Tommy Chaggaris, who owned the Fairway restaurant at Fairview Mall.  The restaurant was called The Chaggaris’.”

They made really good chicken.  Cousin Geoff used to simply call it “Tommy’s Chicken” when we would take him.  My mom continues: “Dad knew Tommy Chaggaris quite well, and he always treated us like royalty. He was very wealthy and owned restaurants and strip malls all over the city.  His wife lives across the street from friends of ours. He is long gone. A really nice guy.”  This is where it gets funny.  Sometimes Geoff would simplify the name and tell people “We went to Tommy’s place for chicken!”  I guess there was a strip club in town also called Tommy’s, so that story often needed extra clarification.

The plan was to see Return of the Jedi again, this time with Geoff.  However, we were told by the adults that the sound in the theater where Jedi was showing was really bad.  I didn’t care, neither did Kathryn or Geoff, but the adults didn’t want to spend money on a movie and not understand the dialogue because of dodgy speakers.  Fair enough, so we chose Superman III instead.  I had the novelisation, but now we were going to see the latest chapter of Superman.  One of our other favourite franchises of the 80s.

We knew it was getting poor reviews, but what else was playing in 1983?  War Games, Octopussy and Trading Places were a little more mature than we were.  And nobody wanted to see Jaws 3 in 3D!  So Superman III it was, partly by default and partly because how bad could a Superman movie really be?

Kind of bad.  But I liked Richard Pryor**, and he made me laugh in Superman III.  Kathryn and I both liked the part where he got drunk wearing the gigantic foam cowboy hat.  We did not like the real villains.  We preferred Lois Lane to Lana Lang.  We would rather have not seen Superman turn evil due to a synthetic form of kryptonite.  We didn’t get the scene where Clark Kent fought Evil Supes.  Was it real or was it metaphorical?  It was weird, is what it was to us.

We came back to the beautiful house in the woods and discussed the movie.  We never accepted that a computer could challenge Superman, but that was the big climax.  Superman vs a computer built by Richard Pryor.  A computer that seemed to be able to improvise and turn people into computer zombies at will.  And had weird video game-like displays with sound effects taken from the Atari Pac-Man game.

“The worst Superman,” was our unanimous vote.  But we got to see it — always a treat in itself.  Even if a movie was bad, going there was still a treat.

It wouldn’t have been a proper summer without an injury, so I’m glad Geoff helped me check off all the boxes in 1983 (and a few other years!).  We had a blast.  Spending all day with Star Wars action figures or in a big swimming pool with the sun on our backs and Caffeine Free Coke in our hands.  It was the last summer of the Star Wars era.  Toys changed, and when Geoff returned in 1984, we were onto something new.  Something that was More Than Meets The Eye.  But there was a definite shift.  1983 closed a chapter.  With Star Wars having drawn to a close, the vacuum had to be filled.  At the same time, I was getting older and discovering new interests.  In 1984, the favourite contender was an American rock and roll band out of Los Angeles called Quiet Riot.

I still cannot really let go of the fact that Geoff lost Luke’s gun and lightsaber within minutes of opening him.  Those things are going for like $80 now!

 

*Revenge of the Jedi caused a problem for the folks over at Paramount, working on Star Trek II: The Vengeance of Khan.  In order to avoid problems, they changed the title of their film to The Wrath of Khan.  

** At that point, Pryor’s career was shifting to younger age groups.  He had a revelation in 1979 after a trip to Africa, after which he ceased using the “n” word in his routines.  1982’s The Toy exposed kids our age to Pryor.  Ironically, The Toy was directed by Richard Donner who also directed Superman: The Movie.  Yet Superman II and III were credited to Richard Lester, who geared them in a slapstick comedic direction.  This is one of Superman III‘s defining traits.

#908: Practice Practice Practice

RECORD STORE TALES #908: Practice Practice Practice

Time for another confessional!

After our amazing interview with Paul Laine a little while ago, I finally have the confidence to say that I feel like a good interviewer.  I didn’t always feel that way.  My very first interview, with Eddie Jackson of Queensryche, was 20 years ago.  That was a great interview, but I didn’t think I was a good interviewer yet.  I felt like I needed a few more under my belt first.  My next interview didn’t go nearly as well, and I stopped pursuing them.

Here’s the truth.  I don’t care how stupid this sounds.  You go and interview Paul Laine yourself if you think this sounds stupid.

When I was younger…I used to practice interviewing rock stars in my room.

Paul Stanley.  Ace Frehley.  Bruce Dickinson.  I made up questions and I practised asking them.  I worked on my cadence and imagined loose, fun interviews.  I pictured myself improvising followup questions.  I practised!

This continued into my 20s.  Listening to albums.  Reading interviews.  Thinking, “I could do better than this.”  Pondering the questions you really wanted to know the answers to.

I’m happy that I’m now well past the point of practising.  Only experience can be my guide now.  If this shtick comes naturally to me, it’s only because I practised at it for years!

 

#907: Lake Listenin’

RECORD STORE TALES #907: Lake Listenin’

These days, I like playing music at the lake that takes me back in time.  Maybe that’s the curse of getting older.  Everything reminds me of something else.  Since that’s the case, I might as well make the most of it.  If I’m having a good time at the lake, there is nothing better than music that reminds me of having a good time at the lake.

I set the scene with a very relaxing drive, to the 80s tunes of Kim Mitchell’s self-titled EP, plus Shakin’ Like a Human Being, and The Sport of Kings by Triumph.  It was golden.

Instead of diving right into the nostalgia pool right away again upon arrival, I officially started the weekend with some music that is new to me:  Coney Hatch and Andy Curran.  My current favourite Coney Hatch tunes are “First Time For Everything” from Outa Hand, and “She’s Gone” & “Wrong Side of Town” from Friction.  Arriving Thursday night, these tunes, along with Curran’s “No Tattoos”, led our evening on the porch, watching the sun set.  Not only did the tunes get us psyched for the weekend, but also next week’s LeBrain Train.  Andy is our guest again, so I am preparing once more.

I closed the night studying up for the next day’s episode:  the Nigel Tufnel Top Ten Judas Priest albums.  This “remastered” episode was an update on one that Harrison and I did on Facebook Live a year ago.  I re-watched the episode from the previous year, very much enjoying myself.  Harrison and I had a great time the first outing, though the second one surely topped it!

When I’m at the lake, I try to keep the volume to a reasonable level.  I like to take a walk to the end of the driveway and down the road and check the levels.  A little music at the end of the driveway is OK but I don’t want to hear myself down the road.  However, I said “to hell with that” for the rest of the weekend, when the neighbours had a loud party on the Friday night.

“I hope they enjoy ‘Detroit Rock City’ at 6:00 am,” I said.

So that’s how my Saturday began:  Destroyer, cranked.  Destroyer has never been my favourite Kiss album by a long shot, but for some reason it just clicked with me that morning.  The cool breeze coming off the lake, the birds and squirrels bickering over my head; and Kiss Destroyer on the speakers.  Things you don’t think would go together, but in my brain, actually do.  I would have played Destroyer at the lake as a kid — many times.  The difference was, now nobody was telling me to turn it down.  Apparently that “if it’s too loud, you’re too old” thing doesn’t apply.  As I get older, I love it loud.

After Destroyer came Rock and Roll Over, Dynasty, and the complete audio to the video Exposed.  This included all the studio tracks from the music videos, all the live tracks exclusive to the video, and even that little nugget of Paul and Gene harmonizing on “I’ll Be Back” by the Beatles.  As a kid, I made something similar on a cassette.  I recorded all the live stuff and “I’ll Be Back” from the VHS tape and made an album out of it.  I left off the music videos.  Today, I ripped all the music from the DVD directly to mp3 and made a double album out of it!  I sat there in wonder listening, imagining what my younger self would have thought of such an audio miracle.

That’s a lot of Kiss though; solid Kiss with no other bands breaking the streak.  When I did finally need an intermission from Kiss, I chose Iron Maiden’s Piece of Mind.  I actually bought that album at the lake in the summer of ’85, at an old record store that used to exist on the main street.

As far as volume goes, keep in mind I’m blasting my music on a $24 pair of speakers from Amazon.  The guy partying across the street must have had something stronger because I could identify “The Impression That I Get” by the Bosstones easily from my seat on the porch.

“I hope they like Star Wars,” I said as I cued up The Empire Strikes Back on my Disney Plus.

I had another revelation while watching Empire.  Objectively, it could be the best Star Wars, but because nostalgia is my thing, I flashed back to 1980.  1981.  1982.  1983.  The golden era of Star Wars fandom.  For a long time, at that ripe age, we were left with two major cliffhangers.  What would happen to the frozen Han Solo, and was Darth Vader lying about being Luke’s father?  Hard to believe but we spent years — an eternity of a child’s age, a significant fraction of our lives — not knowing the answers.

We also had to spend this time making up things to do with our Han Solo figures.  He was frozen in carbonite at this time.  Sometimes I took my Solo figure and froze him in ice in the freezer.  We used our imaginations.  Empire was such a huge part of our childhood.  For me the Empire era ran from age seven to just before age eleven.  It was the Star Wars for which I had all the collector’s cards (first series), the soundtrack, the “story of” record, the comic, the novel, colouring books, and just about everything else you could buy.  The bedsheets — check.  Dixie cups — check.  Burger King glasses — also check.  We had a good chunk of Kenner figures from that era.  We had everything we could possibly get our hands on.

Except the movie itself.  That, we could not recreate on a whim.  We brought our toys, our comics and our cards to the lake so we could re-imagine the movie.  But we could not watch it.

That was a luxury that was not lost on me as I sat on the porch watching the Battle of Hoth.  I smiled ear to ear knowing this.  Something unimaginable during the actual Empire era.  Though, we did indeed see The Empire Strikes Back at the lake.  And it wasn’t the special editions.  We saw the original, at the drive-in.  It was in a double feature with a bicycling movie called Breaking Away, which we slept through.  My sister slept through most of Empire, too!  She was only three.

I took a break in the middle of The Empire Strikes Back to take a dip in the water.  But the Sooners had come.

“Sooners” is how my dad refers to the people who show up to go to the beach for day.  I wondered what “Sooners” meant so I looked it up.  He must have got it from one of his cowboy movies.  Sooner:  “a person settling on land in the early West before its official opening to settlement in order to gain the prior claim allowed by law to the first settler after official opening.”

I don’t see how that applies to the beachgoers, but the name stuck.

Anyway there were a bunch of Sooners at the beach.  There was Man-Bun and his two girlfriends, and a family of seven who parked their bikes right in front of our place.  I know my dad would have had a fit.  The bikes were well out of the way, but it’s no fun trying to back your car out of the driveway with any kind of obstruction, so I get it.

The Sooners weren’t as bad as the renters.  They had a huge dog — the size of a small pony — that kept going after Jen any time we walked down the path to the beach on our own property.  They’d scold the dog but not put him on a leash.  I say “him” because his name was clearly Frank.  Who names their dog Frank?  Seriously.

I don’t know who held the party that night.  The salvos of US-grade fireworks began when I was sleeping.  Jen says they were still going off at 1 am.  I say “US-grade” fireworks because I know the difference.  There are the kind you can buy in the convenience stores here, and there are the ones you can’t.  This was the stuff you can’t.  On and on and on it went.  It seemed to be coming from the renters’ place.  When I went down to the beach the following morning, their firepit was still smouldering.  Late night party fire?

What could I do?  I woke up and blasted Aerosmith.  I played them while packing the car, on the car system, doors open.  I hope you like Toys in the Attic.

Sooners and renters aside, summer has gotten off to a tremendous start.  Maybe next time, I’ll play all new albums and make some new memories.  It doesn’t particularly matter — the setting is conducive to to anything you want to listen to.  And now that I can bring my entire music collection with me in my pocket, I am limited only by my own whims.

I am a lucky guy.

#906: Since You’ve Been Gone

Dear Uncle Don Don,

A year ago today we got the message that you were gone.   My first thought was “at least he is not in pain anymore.”  I didn’t like that you had to suffer so much.  I’ve seen enough cancer in this life.

My next thought was for Grandma, and Mom, and Aunt.  They still miss you and talk about you.  Aunt says that it will be weird coming home to Waterloo without you around.  She says she used to like having her morning coffee when only the two of you were awake.  I can picture you guys sitting there quietly talking, and maybe even laughing a little.  That’s how I want to picture it, anyway.

I have a bunch of your CDs with me.  I really liked Jackyl.  I was surprised to find it in your collection.  Looking at your discs here, I have so many questions.  Why Jane’s Addiction?  Why the second Garbage album, and not the first?  Somebody here went to painstaking care to make you a mix CD, but why did she include “Who Let the Dogs Out”?  I’d really like to know your thoughts on that one!

Since you’ve been gone, I followed my dreams and started a YouTube show.  I chat with friends about music and I interview rock stars.  So far I’ve talked to two former members of Helix — a band we used to discuss in the old days.  You knew them long before I did.  Now here I am talking to them.  You were a part of my history with that band.  We also did an entire episode on Led Zeppelin.  That was another band you liked long before I discovered them.  You thought it was cool when I started picking up these old bands you had in your school days.  Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, Deep Purple.

I still don’t like sports.  There’s something we never agreed on.  Even being married to Jen and watching all this hockey, baseball and football, I still don’t like sports.  I understand them a little better.  I could converse with you about hockey now.  It wouldn’t be the topic of my choosing, but I could do it.

We spent last summer quarantined between here and the cottage.  You used to love that place.  Long hair, no shirt, cutoff jean shorts.  One summer you were there for about three weeks straight.  I hope you would like what Kathryn has done with it.  She’s kept everything intact.  It’s not as manly as it was in your day, but everything is still there.  It’s a lot quieter.  We all got older!

If it wasn’t for this damned virus, we had an idea for a tribute last summer.  Maybe we can do it this summer, or next summer.  I wanted to buy a turntable for the lake, and play some of your old records in the back yard like you used to.  I kept putting it off, and putting it off, because we can’t socialize.  It’s been a weird year, man!  Grandma really wants a hug.  I’ll give her a big one soon, don’t worry.

Speaking of worry, she used to worry about you so much.  Though we all miss you, at least she’s not worrying about you anymore.  I know she’ll appreciate it when we can finally get together as a family again.  Tell Uncle Don stories in the living room.  Cutoff shorts in the summer, badminton raquet in one hand and a Labbatt’s in the other!  Right?

I don’t drink beer, but I think if you were here right now, healthy and young again, I’d have a beer with you.  I’d think I’d like that.

#905: Growing Up With Video

“Live videos > fake live videos any day of the week.” – Harrison the Mad Metal Man

RECORD STORE TALES #905:  Growing Up With Video

Music videos of the 80s could, in theory, be broken down into three major categories:

  1. Conceptual videos.  Sometimes with a storyline intercut.  Occasionally the musicians got to act.  Other examples have no musicians at all.  (Iron Maiden’s “Can I Play With Madness”.)  Conceptual were majority of music videos — usually combining the conceptual part with the band performing on some kind of stage.  Not to be confused with…
  2. Stage videos.  Or, as Harrison calls then, “fake live videos”. Lipsynching the hits, on a stage, sometimes in front of a crowd, with no conceptual content.  Sometimes these were simply live concert videos dubbed over with the album tracks.  “Thrills in the Night” by Kiss, for example.
  3. True live videos.  Many Van Halen videos we grew up with, from “Unchained” to “Best of Both Worlds”, were live in concert — audio and video both.  In some cases you could not buy these live tracks on any kind of release.

Of course there are more categories and sub-categories, just less significant.  Some videos are entirely animated, which is more common today.  We also have something new — the lyric video.

I can remember the sixth grade.  Mrs. Peterson’s class.  Van Halen’s 1984 was out and Quiet Riot were burning up the charts.  These were pretty much the only bands I heard of.  I hadn’t seen the music videos and I didn’t even know what Quiet Riot looked like.  The only pictures I had ever seen of Quiet Riot were the buttons that the masked guy is wearing on his vest on the front cover of the cassette version of Metal Health.  I squinted hard, but the Kevin DuBrow I imagined on that button looked nothing like the real deal.

The teacher was getting us started on simple surveys.  To make it fun, she took a survey of all the most popular music in the class.  Each kid got to name one favourite artist.  I named Quiet Riot, and Kevin Kirby named Van Halen.  Michael Jackson and Duran Duran were the top two.

As the discussion proceeded, many of the kids mentioned that they liked the music videos.  Michael Jackson was at his peak, and he was the pioneer of the modern music video.  Other artists like Culture Club made an impact with their image, which came across best on video.  The teacher was curious about all this, so the class explained what a music video was.  Something dawned on the teacher, and she exclaimed, “So to be a music star today, you not only have to be able to sing, but you also have to be able to act!”

No, and yes.  You didn’t have to “act” per se, but you did have to be able to present yourself and play to a camera.  David Lee Roth was not an according-to-Hoyle actor.  Some would say he’s also not a singer, but he is a master at playing for the camera.  Staring deep into the lens, gazing with the come-hither look, just so.  Doing easily what other rock stars couldn’t, or didn’t want to.

So yes Mrs. Peterson, in a sense, to be a star in 1984, you had to be able to “act”.  Video didn’t kill the radio star but it sure took a bite out of them.

Kids used to catch the videos on various cable shows.  There was one called The Great Record Album Collection on WUTV that I sometimes caught before dinner.  The Canadian movie channels (Superchannel, First Choice) would run music videos in the dead minutes after the credits rolled, to the top off the hour.  Until MuchMusic came along, we Canadian kids didn’t have a one-stop-shop to watch all our music videos.  Fortunately, having MuchMusic coincided with getting our first VCR.

Once we became seasoned in the way of the music video, we developed clear favourites.  12 and 13 year olds didn’t have a lot of money.  We also had never attended a concert.  Therefore, live videos with music that wasn’t what we were getting on the album were rarely favourites.  We preferred the “fake live”, as Harrison the Mad Metal Man calls them.  Then our immature ears could hear the songs clearly, and that would help us decide if were going to spend our nickles on a new tape.

Best of all though were the conceptual videos.  Some were not good (just ask Billy Squier), but some really captured our imaginations.  In Record Store Tales Part 206:  Rock Video Night, we discussed some of my favourite clips to show to younger folks who weren’t there in the 80s.  They were all conceptual clips.  Many of them involved a band on a mission of some kind.  There were so many of that kind.  Thor had “Knock ‘Em Down”, Queensryche had “Queen of the Reich”, and Armored Saint had “Can U Deliver”.  These videos featured, at least partially, a band on a quest.  They also featured scantily clad women, and lots of “fake live” footage.

But the “fake live” footage often featured cool angles and close-ups.  That meant we could examine the finer details of the outfits and guitars.  You couldn’t just look up pictures of your favourite stars on the internet back in 1986.  “I want hair like that!” Bob said about Eric Brittingham from Cinderalla.  “That would look cool in red!”  Meanwhile, I wanted Rob Halford’s leather jacket from the “Turbo” video.  Of all these videos, we liked the Iron Maiden clip for “Wasted Years” best, which we watched in slow motion, pausing to identify every single Eddie.  There were many we had never seen before.

We just weren’t as interested in purely live videos back then.  For example, MuchMusic had two versions of Judas Priest’s “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin'”:  the original and the live one from Priest! Live.  After the live video came out, that’s the one they primarily played.  It was disappointing because if I was going to only hear Priest on TV once that week, I preferred the original.  Frankly, we didn’t buy a lot of live albums as kids.  When we collected bands, we would try to get all the albums including the live ones.  But when we wanted to buy one tape from a band, we didn’t go for live ones.  Some live albums we heard scared us off from the format.  The Song Remains the Same wasn’t the kind of thing we had patience for.

That all changed for me in highschool.  I wanted to buy a Triumph album.  It would be my first.  On recommendation from a kid in my history class, I picked Stages.  And it was like a lightbulb went off in my head.  Virtually every song was awesome!  In fact the only track that wasn’t was a studio track!  And then I had the joy of making those live versions my first Triumph loves.  When I got the studio renditions, they seems thinner and colder by comparison.  I never had that experience before.

I wonder if any of this will be interesting to anyone at all.  Videos are irrelevant today as far as heavy metal goes.  Today, we are not interested in the same things we were in our youths.  We don’t care what the singer is wearing or what the drummer did to his hair.  We care more about how the band is sounding, and how the crowd is responding.  A new music video by a metal band is not as interesting as pro-shot live footage from Wacken.  We want to listen carefully for backing tapes, we want to see the band gel on stage, and we want to cheer along when it’s good.

It is incredibly fortunate to have grown up in the 80s, when videos were in their prime, and still be rocking today when all that stuff is available at our fingertips any time we need a blast of nostalgia.  Younger readers will never know the tense excitement of hitting “record-pause” on a VCR and waiting for the premier of the newest video by Maiden, Priest, or Def Leppard.  Seeing the carefully edited stage moves paired with salon-fresh hair.  It was a glorious time even if was completely ridiculous.

#904: 2000 Dates

A sequel to #616:  None of My Exes Live in Texas (But One Lives in Thunder Bay)
and #903: Online Dating in the Brave New World

 

RECORD STORE TALES #904: 2000 Dates

When I think back on the year 2000, I realize, holy shit:  I went on a lot of dates that year.  Most of them were first dates; things generally weren’t working out for me.  When I look back,  I can’t believe how many there were.  I’ve already talked about “Hamilton #1”, “Toronto”, “Hamilton #2” (in detail!) and briefly “Kingston”.  But there were more.  Many more.  Some names are forgotten; the rest are redacted.  The cities and places are clear in my memory.

“Kingston” was cute and I fell for her hard over the telephone.  I remember finding it cool that she wore mismatched socks on purpose.  Some people teased me for that.  But she was quirky and had great taste in music.  She was a musician; a really good one too.  She came up to visit me one weekend.  We met in the parking lot of the Cambridge Record Store as it was right off the highway.  We drove from there to the cottage where we spent the night.  She brought her acoustic guitar and played some of her original tunes for me.  She also brought her copy of Pink Floyd’s The Wall.  The next day we came back to Waterloo for a Record Store party.  You can see why I liked her.

I was supposed to visit her in Kingston next.  The day of departure, there was a massive accident on highway 401.  I was stuck in it for hours and ultimately had to turn back home.  Things fizzled out from there.  She was planning on going to school in Thunder Bay, and while I said “no problem, I can do long distance relationships,” it was not meant to be.  Kingston is four hours away by car.  Thunder Bay takes a whole day, unless you fly.  It wasn’t going to work and I reluctantly had to let her go.  She already knew there was no future to it; I was the holdout.

I wasn’t over her yet, but immediately I jumped into dating once more.  It was a new girl every two weeks.  I was on the rebound.

“Guelph 1” was nice.  She was a student, who had long black synthetic dreadlocks.  The most memorable thing about her was that she was legally blind.  Maybe that was one reason why she went out with me!  She could see, she could get around, but her vision was impaired enough that she was classified as blind.   This meant that she actually got in to movies for free.  She had to sit in the very front row to see anything, but that was OK by me.

We went to see The Cell, starring Jennifer Lopez, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Vince Vaughn.  It was shit, but good enough for a date movie.   We actually went out a second time, after she had relocated to Hamilton.  But she wasn’t into me and there wasn’t much chemistry aside from a couple pleasant dates.

That’s not be confused with “Hamilton #3”.  I distinctly remember going to have coffee in Hamilton with a girl I never saw again.  I can’t recall any other details about her.  She had short black hair?  I think she brought a friend with her?  I got somewhat lost on my way back home (as I usually did when visiting Hamilton) but managed to turn myself around this time without having to call for directions.

“Toronto #2” was more memorable.  I felt a little weird that I was meeting her in the same parking lot as “Kingston”, but she didn’t need to know that.   We wanted to get a bite to eat, so we headed over to East Side Mario’s in the mall next door.

“Make sure we get a smoking table,” she said.

To her surprise, I answered “No such thing here!”

“Whaaaat?” she exclaimed.

Unbeknownst to her, the region had implemented an indoor smoking ban on January 1 2000.  They don’t pay attention to Kitchener news in Toronto, so she had no idea.  Not happy!  That was our only date.  The indoor smoking ban was a trial run, and it was soon enforced everywhere else.  There was a lot of complaining then, and a temporary dip in revenues at bingo halls.  Just like with Covid lockdowns today, many establishments fought the ban and were served up hefty fines.  Things bounced back eventually.

Not me though.  I was still rebounding.  Around the same time as  “Toronto #2” came “London”.  That was my first drive-in movie in 15 years.  The setting was more memorable than the movie, which was the Kevin Bacon turd called Hollow Man.  All I can really remember is the windows fogging up – and we weren’t even doing anything.

Then came “Mississauga”.  This is the one I felt worst about.  Most of the other dates were just dates.  We went out, we hung out, we went home.  “Mississauga” met me at the local Chapters store and we went book shopping.  Then, I believe, we went to see a movie.  I can’t remember exactly because the night ended with us making out in the back seat of my car.  Although I felt cool as hell at the time for having finally made out with a girl in the back seat of a car, afterwards I felt shitty.  She went home, and we never saw each other again.  I didn’t like that.  I was really confused, working my way through all these feelings.  But it was a mutual thing.  She didn’t call me, and I didn’t call her.

“Guelph #2” was the second last date of the year 2000.  Also a student.  Nice enough girl; we went out a couple times.  I think the moment I bailed was when she messaged me one weekend telling about this other guy she was hanging out with.  I had no problem with her seeing another guy.  We had just gone on a couple dates, we weren’t exclusive or anything like that.  It was the nature of this one specific message that scared me away.

“I’m here with a guy and his penis is stuck in a bottle!” she said.

All the best of luck to ya!  I didn’t have any follow-up questions.

At the same time, I had just met “Kitchener #1”.  The year was coming to an end.  I was 28.  I was tired.  I had done all the rebounding a man could do.  I was ready, but the first date didn’t work out as well as I hoped.  We went to the Boathouse and had lunch.  Afterwards she sent me an email titled “Let’s Hang”.  She just wanted to be friends.  I was OK with that because I did like her, and I thought, “Being friends is OK.  Nothing wrong with that.  I would like more friends.”

Right around the time some dude in Guelph was struggling to remove his penis from a bottle, “Kitchener” was having second thoughts.  We got along really well, and had continued to hang out as she wanted to.  A few weeks after that first date at the Boathouse, she had a change of heart.  She asked if I was still interested and I was.

And so, as the year 2000 ended (and with it the millennium), so did my misadventures in dating!  “Kitchener” and I stuck together for two years which was the longest relationship I ever had at that point.  We had good times.  She became like a member of the family.  In fact she still has Christmases with our family today, even though we split in 2003.  When I finally met my true soulmate Jennifer, my ex attended my wedding.  I liked that we were able to do that.  And now, my dating days are truly over!

 

 

 

#903: Online Dating in the Brave New World (2000)

Attention:  Mike’s mom.  You don’t need to read this one.  Skip it please.

RECORD STORE TALES #903: Online Dating in the Brave New World (2000)

It was the year 2000 and the world seemed new to me again.  Iron Maiden had a fresh reunion album on the horizon, ushering in a long-awaited rebirth of classic heavy metal.  The snow was melting, and spring was in the air.  Things were going really, really well.  Especially at the Record Store.  My store had a “head office” (actually a broom closet) in its back room.  That’s why the upper management was always breathing down my neck.  But I had heard through the grapevine (actually Tom) that head office was moving to a new location across town.  They never told me, but Tom did.  I was elated.  Things were looking way up.

I also had what at the time I called “the best first date I’d ever been on”.  I even washed my car before driving to Hamilton to see her.  That’s how my parents knew something was up!  Her name was Terra and she fancied herself a photographer.  Strangely her apartment was filled with photos of herself.  That should have served as a warning.  T-Rev also dated a girl who was obsessed with photos of herself, and that didn’t work.  His story was told in a song by local band The Candidates called “Who’s Your Daddy Now?”  “Sold your soul for a photograph, I tore it up and had the last laugh.  Who’s your daddy now? He ain’t got nothin’ on me!”

But I had to take my chances.  The first date went so well that I called up T-Rev on my cell phone and told him I thought I met “the one”.

I did confide in T-Rev one thing that was unusual about Terra.  She didn’t drink or do any drugs, which I liked.  I rarely drank and had never touched a drug.  What was unusual was that Terra was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous.  In my mind, trying to ease my concerns, I said “that means neither of us drink or do drugs – so that’s a good thing.”  I wouldn’t be heading out to bars with her, or anything like that.  I had to give her a chance for date #2.

She thought it would be fun to catch a sunrise together.  She lived in Hamilton so it would take me an hour to get there before the sun came.  I had never watched the sunrise with a girl before, so I was on board.  The people at the Record Store thought I had a screw loose.

“You’re going to drive to Hamilton at 5:00 in the morning, to watch a sunrise?” asked one of the supervisors.  They didn’t get why I thought it was such a cool idea.  It sounded romantic to me and I’d never done anything like that before.

I called Terra up the night before our sunrise date and she had suddenly changed her tune.  “That’s reeeaally early,” she complained about her own idea.

So that idea was off.  Instead I came down in the afternoon.  We hung out and watched MuchMusic.  Britney Spears had just come out with “Oops! I Did It Again” and I can remember watching that video in her apartment.  “I want a PVC bodysuit!” said Terra.  I just wanted to do anything but sit around watching MuchMusic.  After a few hours of watching Static X, Disturbed and other staples of the era, I headed home.

Date #3 was the weird one.  She had an AA meeting that night and didn’t want to miss it.  I offered to drop her off on my way home, and that turned into her inviting me to the meeting.  Going to it was one of the most regrettable decisions I’ve ever made in my life.

I didn’t know what I was doing.  I did not realize it was a “closed meeting” or what that meant.  I don’t know why she thought bringing me along was a good idea.  I was curious, and I liked Terra.  I trusted her that this was OK.

The AA meeting was in the basement of a nice church.  We all sat in a circle.  “When it comes your turn to talk, just pass,” said Terra.  So I did.  Instead I listened to stories that, quite frankly, I never should have heard.  Me being there was an invasion of the group’s privacy and I felt uncomfortable immediately.  I wanted out that door.  I waited for an appropriate break.

When the group leader broke the meeting into smaller groups, I said to Terra, “I have to go, I’m not comfortable, I’m really sorry.”  She said it was OK and that we would leave together.  We briefly spoke to the group leader.  His name was Mike too.  “We have groups for beginners too, if you feel you’d like to come back and talk about whatever is going on.”  This made me feel even worse.  I was masquerading as someone I was not, for the sake of sitting next to a girl in this room.  I thanked him and we left together.

I decided that would be our last date.

Which is why I am still surprised I went on date #4.  Mother’s Day weekend 2000.

The phone rang on the Friday night.  “What are you doing this weekend?  Do you want to come and hang out at my mom’s place in Huntsville?”

I silenced the alarm bells going off in my head.  The suddenness of the invite was strange but if she was introducing me to her mom, that sounded alright.  I packed a small bag and headed to Hamilton to pick her up.  A few hours later we were in Huntsville.  We went to a bar where her friends were.  There was a covers band playing.  I found a spot to watch.  They played “War Pigs”.  I was happy.  But where was Terra?  She left me there watching this band while she hung out with her friends.  Outside, one of them passed her a joint and she had a haul.  On the way back to her mom’s place, she said “I really shouldn’t have smoked that joint,” and I was shaking my head wondering what the hell I was thinking.

Her mom was really nice and made me feel very welcome.  They had a beautiful place up in Huntsville.  Huge, with a guest house in the back where I slept.  But by the end of the weekend, her mom was giving her shit for hanging out with her friends instead of the guy who brought her to Huntsville.  I felt the same way.  The whole weekend was her hanging out with friends, and me tagging along.  We never did anything just the two of us.  I felt good that her mom at least recognized there was something fucked up about it.  They had a big argument in the kitchen while I sat in the living room with one of her friends, not speaking, just staring at the newspaper.

I raced back to Kitchener barely in time for Mother’s Day dinner.  This time I really did mean it:  that was the last date.  That was the end of it.  No more.  I never saw her again.  I could tell when I’ve been hosed.  She promised me $50 in gas money that I knew I was never going to see.  I shot off an email mentioning the $50 debt, and that was our last communication.

Iron Maiden came out with a brand new single called “The Wicker Man” which served as my cheer-up.  I bought the CDs and the vinyl and immersed myself in new music.  I always turned back to music when stuff went sour with a girl.  In this case, one of my favourite bands were triumphantly returning with their strongest lineup.  Three lead guitars.  I couldn’t wait to hear it.  Terra was the past, but the “Wicker Man” was the future!  I felt that jolt of energy again.  The life-giving electricity of rock and roll.

Valuable lessons learned here.  Not many of my friends can say that they’ve been to an AA meeting.  I’ve been there and I know it’s not a place for outsiders.  A learning experience and not one I’ll repeat.

 

To be continued….

 

#902.5: Spoogecakes 2 – Electric Boogaloo

Today’s chapter of Record Store Tales is a direct sequel to Part 35.5:  Spoogecakes!

 

RECORD STORE TALES #902.5: Spoogecakes 2 – Electric Boogaloo

LeBrain HQ has eyes and ears everywhere!   We are like Hydra:  cut off one head and two shall takes its place.

If you recall, when I launched this site in 2012, I had one anonymous hater.  Really nasty, too.  You can read the comments yourself.  This came right out of the blue.  The identity of the hater was confirmed by one of her co-workers at the Record Store:  an employee there at a location I once managed.  I had barely begun publishing my stories.  “Grow up or shut up,” went one of the kinder comments.  This only inspired me to keep writing, with more energy and frequency.  Obviously I had struck a nerve!  I actually owe this hater a huge thanks.  The drama she created catapulted me into another level, and the hits have only increased in the years since.  She provided the launchpad, so I do owe her my gratitude.  Craig Fee dubbed her with the nickname “Spoogecakes”, and I ran with that name for the Record Store Tales that followed.  I turned her hatemail into a chapter of the story.  Lemons into lemonade.

Hey, you wanna troll Record Store Tales?  Then Record Store Tales will troll you right back.  Some of my former co-workers there thought it was incredibly nasty of me exploit her vitriolic comments for views the way I did.  (What they thought of her actions — my so-called friends who were groomsmen at my wedding — they didn’t share that with me.)   I hadn’t planned on writing about her at all.  She was a non-entity and completely unimportant to my story.  She wrote herself in, as far as I was concerned.

Fast forward to the present:  she’s still at the Record Store, and just as endearing as ever.  A few months ago, I was just sitting here boppin’ through my day, when I got an email from a source bearing a tidbit of inside gossip.  My source revealed that Spoogey has been promoted to a manager of some kind, and isn’t the kind you’d want to work for.  I have obscured certain text to protect the identity of the informant, but the bones of their message are below.

“[Spoogecakes] is training someone, and that person has to leave home at 4 AM to get to the store, to suit [Spoogey’s] needs.”

Good luck with training someone after they’ve spent five hours on a bus.  Hope that worked out for ya.  Stuff like that never happened when I was training.  I drove people to and from training if I had to.  (Ask Shane.)

The training in question involves a box of used CDs that we would use to practice buying techniques.  How to check the discs for quality, how to check inventory, and how to price them.   The process of this training was previously detailed in Part 94:  Staffing.  (You can also watch a demonstration of me doing this in a live stream from last year.)  In all my time at the store, I never made anyone get up at 4 AM for this.  The story continues:

“In retaliation, the trainee wanted to leave a surprise for [Spoogey] in the box of used discs.  I got the impression it was a used sex toy.  The plan was for her to find it in the box with the other used items.”

My source said that the gist of the conversation was that “no one likes [Spoogey]. The manager of the store was in disbelief of her antics.”  The source also suggested that the conversation would have been a lot worse and more graphic if there were not customers in the store.

Some things never change!

#902: The Adventures of “B” Man

A pretty messed up prequel to #631: The Locker Door

 

RECORD STORE TALES #902: The Print Shop The Adventures of “B” Man

In the mid 1980s through to the 90s, my dad had an old client named Skully.  He was a computer guy.  Every so often, he would gave my dad a list of games and programs he could copy for us.  If we sent him a pack of floppy discs with a checked-off list, in a few weeks he’d come back to us with all the games we wanted.  Classic Concentration, Alleycat, King’s Quest, Into the Eagle’s Nest, Digger, and so many more games with names long forgotten.  All on 5 1⁄4” floppy discs — double sided, double density.

One of the programs we checked off from Skully’s list was a program called The Print Shop.  And strangely enough, it was Print Shop that had a personal impact bigger than any of the games.  In fact it was one of the most widely pirated Commodore 64 programs of 1985, although we had the IBM PC version.

We mostly used it to make birthday and Christmas cards.  It was great for that, all pre-formatted and everything.  You could use pictures from its own library.  Stuff like birthday cakes, turkeys, Easter bunnies, and so on.  Or, you could painstakingly make your own graphics, block by block.  In fact we used Print Shop all through the mid to late 80s.  It had a poster feature and a banner printer.  We used that to print a “DEMOLITION” banner when we went to see WWF wrestling at the Aud.

My sister, Bob Schipper and myself learned how to use The Print Shop to make blocky pictures.  The first experiments involved modifying pre-existing graphics. That was a good way to learn. The Easter bunny fell first to our mischievous ways. Bob changed his smile to a scowl, and we changed his happy wave to a middle finger! Of course we did. I was 12 and he was 14.

The next thing I obviously had to do was figure out the  logo.

With some trial and error, I drew a pretty good recreation of the legendary Kiss double lightning bolt.  I proudly printed it out in poster mode. But what else should be on the poster? I was fascinated with the Kiss discography and had memorized every album and year. So I painstakingly typed out each line of text to go beneath the logo. KISS (1974) HOTTER THAN HELL (1974) DRESSED TO KILL (1975)… all the way to ASYLUM (1985).

I taped that “poster” to my wall. I was so proud of it!

Wanna know something funny? In 1987, I updated it. CRAZY NIGHTS (1987) had to be added! It took some work trying to make everything fit. I knew if Kiss continued to release new albums, I wouldn’t be able to make space forever! SMASHES, THRASHES & HITS (1988) was the last album I could squeeze onto to my humble Kiss poster before I gave up. I didn’t have a lot of things to put up on my walls, and I didn’t like to cut up my rock magazines. A printout from The Print Shop just had to do!

When the time came to start highschool in the fall of ’86, Bob helped me prepare some locker artwork. I had a Gene Simmons poster — the one of Gene from the Asylum era with his tongue stuck in the bass strings. We also thought the Easter bunny giving the finger would be a cool addition to the locker, as long as the teachers didn’t make me take it down! But what should it say? Bob and I discussed numerous sayings, shooting them down one after the other. Somehow, he came up with “The End Of Rock Is The End Of Life!” and I went with it.  “OK!”  Up it went in my very first locker. That way the girls will know I’m serious about the music. I’m in it for the music; it says so right on the poster with the Easter bunny giving the finger!

I know what you’re thinking at this point.

“What a loser!” you say. “But what the hell is ‘B Man’ and what are his adventures?”

 

This is really embarrassing. But what the hell.

That autumn (’86) I remember one of us somehow caught a bee, and pulled off its head. OK, I said it. I don’t know who it was. But we thought it was pretty cool, and Bob had an idea. He drew a little muscle-y body, and we taped the bee’s head to the paper right over it. “I AM ‘B’ MAN!” wrote Bob in a word bubble.

And once again, I thought it was a good idea to tape it in my locker. Now, I cannot remember if Bob was onside with me on this. He didn’t need “‘B’ Man” in his locker. He already had awesome posters. But I thought, hey. It’s all about getting the attention of the girls, and they’ll love that I removed the head from a bee and taped it to a poster with a drawing of a little muscle body on it. They’ll think A) that I’m good at drawing and B) I’ll protect them from bees. I showed the bees who the boss really was. Me! I was the bee boss.

It comes as no shock that none of my posters did anything to attract girls. A pair of them gave my “The End Of Rock Is The End Of Life!” the old side-eye. I think “‘B’ Man” was too small for them to be disgusted by him. My cluelessness was rivalled only by my awkwardness. I had completely misjudged the female gender. My colossally bad assumption, that because I thought something was cool they would too, was profoundly and predictably incorrect.

And so that’s the irony of the title. There were no adventures of “‘B’ Man”. He wasn’t even shot down in flames. He was a total dud and came down with no fanfare.

Now, to anyone who’s sitting there going “what a psycho! Eww!” We were kids. It was 1986. Virtually every neighbourhood had a group of kids participating in a good ol’ bug burning. It happened. It was for science n’ stuff. We all turned out pretty good.

And so, a seemingly innocent story that began with kids nerding out with primitive printing software, ends with insect mutilation. Bees, no less, the guardians of plant life on this Earth. I guess metal really does pervert the hearts of the young.

#901: 5150 Time Again?

Distilling some stories from the 5150 live stream.

RECORD STORE TALES #901: 5150 Time Again?

Van Halen’s 5150 was their first #1.  It was their first with Sammy Hagar and their first truly divisive album.  As a young kid on a weekly allowance, I had to pick and choose what to buy.  Van Halen’s marketing campaign involved making no new music videos for 5150, only releasing live clips.  Since music videos were 99% of my new music exposure, 5150 didn’t make it high on my priority lists.  Van Halen didn’t want to compete with David Lee Roth, seen as the master of the music video.  Unfortunately this meant kids like me only had live versions to preview.

In particular, the live video for “Why Can’t This Be Love” turned off many of the kids in the neighbourhood.  Scott Peddle remembers not buying the album specifically because of that video.  It was a combination of Sammy’s new haircut and the off-key scatting.  This is all we had to judge the new album by!  I didn’t have any friends who owned 5150.

I ended up getting a second hand cassette off a kid in school named Todd Burnside.  I was sorely disappointed that after paying him five bucks; the front cover to the tape was all ripped.  I had to put it back together with Scotch tape.  I couldn’t figure out why he didn’t bother taking care of his tape.  Then again, Burnside’s nickname in school was “Burnout”.  At least it played well.

Maybe two years after 5150 came out, there were rumblings about Van Halen working on new music.  In the 80s, there was no internet but there was a rumour mill.  You’d read something in a magazine, or hear it on the TV.  For example, there were almost always rumours that Van Halen were on the verge of splitting.  This happened in 1987 when Sammy Hagar released his self-titled solo album (even though said solo album was made with Edward Van Halen himself).  At the same time, there were rumours that they were also working on a brand new Van Halen album.

It wasn’t inconceivable, with our naive little insular world view, that the forthcoming new Van Halen album could leak, and someone could get a hand on a tape.  It seemed possible.  Kids in my neighbourhood had all kinds of rare music on tape that we couldn’t trace back to a source.  Live tracks by Iron Maiden, or even the legendary “Rodeo Song”.   It was taped from one kid to another to another until you didn’t know what generation you had.  This story is about the time I thought the girl I liked got her pretty little hands on the new Van Halen.

The story goes like this.  Her boyfriend taped her a Van Halen cassette, with no titles written down.  Huge pet peave, right?  Such bad habits lead to misunderstandings like this story.  I was friends with her younger brother, and one day I was talking to her on the phone and she mentioned her favourite song by Van Halen.  “I love ‘Contact’,” she said.  “It’s on this tape my boyfriend made.”

“Contact”?  I never heard of that song.  I knew my Van Halen song titles and “Contact” was not one of them.  Not realizing that she had to be making up the title herself because no songs were written down, I concluded she might have her hands on a pirated tape of the new Van Halen.  I wanted to hear it next time I came over.

I told my friends about this possible lead into the next Van Halen album and promised to report back.

I went to visit one afternoon.  They had a pool.  But I wanted to get down to business first.  I brought a blank 60 minute tape with me in case I needed to dub what I was about to hear.  Let’s see this Van Halen tape!

She brought out the tape and I noticed there was nothing written on the cover, so there was absolutely no information available about any of the songs.  But I didn’t need information as soon as she hit “play”.

The familiar cascading keyboard melody echoed from the tinny speakers of her ghetto blaster.  What the hell?!  This song wasn’t called “Contact”!  It was called “Love Walks In”!  How could she not know that?

My disappointment was only assuaged by a dip in the pool, with extra splashing.  I came home empty handed.  No Van Halen, and worse than that…the girl I liked didn’t even know the proper name of “Love Walks In”!  How the hell?

My crush on her dissipated shortly thereafter and I moved on to other interests.  She wasn’t a real Van Halen fan after all.