Every once in a while, Jen’s disabilities don’t entirely suck. We get the best parking spots when we go out, which admittedly isn’t often these days. She was also eligible for the Covid vaccine due to her high-risk health category. In a twist of fortune, as her caregiver, that made me eligible too. I was very concerned about “line jumping” so we called and confirmed multiple times that I was allowed to get the shot.
Ironically, we were scheduled to get our ‘rona shot at the old Rona location in Cambridge.
It used to be a huge warehouse, and now it is a huge clinic. Very organised, with multiple checkpoints, and ample workers to guide you. We asked plenty of questions and they were all answered. For me, the whole process took less than 30 minutes. Screening, registering, sitting with a doctor, getting the shot, waiting for any sign of reaction, and then finally release and followup appointment. Jen took an extra 15 minutes due to the complexities of her health, but we were out the door in 50 minutes total.
The sitting area for the wait after the shot was vast, with many chairs, all separated by a good distance. It was kind of funny, seeing all these chairs facing the same direction as if waiting for a show that would never come. Here there were workers to answer questions too.
“No movie?” I asked jokingly.
“No movie, no bands,” she answered. “We should get bands,” she continued. “I know lots of bands who would love the chance to play here.”
I laughed and said “Well maybe in a couple months they’ll jazz it up.”
Our shots (Pfizer for those curious) were administered by doctors, and I peppered mine with questions. I was concerned about side effects, although neither of my parents felt any.
“Younger people have much stronger immune systems,” he explained. “Theirs get revving up much stronger. When you feel the side effects, that is your body creating those antibodies. So the side effects are actually a good sign. They should taper off after a day.” I couldn’t have asked for a better experience.
Well, except for the live bands — maybe that lady was onto something!
Have any questions about the shape I’m in? Just ask!
My mom used to teach ceramics classes in the basement. Our basement was split into two rooms — a finished rec room, and an unfinished work space. There were craft tables and chairs and I liked to use it for building model cars and airplanes. My mom had a kiln in there for her classes and everything. On Saturday morning were the “kid classes” when my sister and her friends would paint ceramic teddy bears and balloons and God knows what else. During the week, the neighbourhood adults and other friends came over to create.
The “rec room” area was more for us. That’s where the big TV and VCR were. That’s where I watched, recorded, and re-watched my Pepsi Power Hours. Naturally the two adjacent areas sometimes clashed. I had to “turn it down” from time to time.
I generally tried to avoid other people especially when they were close to my space. We didn’t cross paths much, but on Power Hour days, I would race home from school and be waiting in the basement to hit record, as all the ceramic students were filing out.
I’m territorial but not confrontational. More passive aggressive. I know my mom had these hardcore Catholic friends across the street. I couldn’t stand them. They wouldn’t let their kids play with GI Joes, because they carried guns. Yet they were allowed to play with Transformers, because the kids were smart enough not to tell mom and dad they carried guns. They used to come to the ceramic classes and having them near my precious personal space irritated me more than anything else. “Hate” is a strong word, but I really disliked them. I knew they hated heavy metal music (the parents at least). And I know in my passive aggressive way, I liked to leave my heavy metal stuff visibly on display in my space.
Rock and roll is about defiance, isn’t it? It was very rock and roll of me to leave albums and magazines down there for them to see.
I loved buying new magazines all the time, and not just rock. Sometimes it was WWF Magazine, and occasionally I’d buy something like Starlog. The rock rags were the backbone of my collection, but every once in a while, I’d buy MAD. If MAD was sold out, I’d buy Cracked. Who didn’t love MAD and Cracked magazines? I used to have a pile of favourites. The March 1991 New Kids on the Block MAD was treasured; it came with an entire sheet of anti-New Kids stamps. Another classic was my October 1984 issue of Cracked, a Michael Jackson issue. I wish I’d have kept them, but I say that about a lot of things.
It probably wasn’t an accident when I left out, in plain view, my copy of MAD number 288. July 1989. The special Heavy Metal issue. On the front: Alfred E. Newman in a suit of armor, flanked by Tommy Lee, Axl Rose, and a guy who looks like a cross between Don Dokken and Stevie Ray Vaughan. But I didn’t leave it out with the front cover showing. I left it out with the back in plain view.
The back cover was a “fake front” to a faux magazine called “Metal Sludge”, a clear satire of Metal Edge. The top right corner featured a fat guy named “Damien Lucifer”, lead singer of “Antichrist”. On his cheek, a pentagram is drawn. He wears red devil horns and proclaims that “Heavy metal music is not about Satan!”
On another panel, a picture of Poison with a caption about “our confusion over sexual identity”.
There is a contest for the chance to be trampled at a Motley Crue concert. The panel below that is about Anthrax getting deloused by Tipper Gore. Another advertises a “life size poster of Gene Simmons’ tongue – special six page fold out”.
Eventually, it happened: one my mom’s students saw the magazine and was offended enough to tell her that I was reading something “satanic”. I have my suspicions who it was. (My mom remembers none of this at all.) Mom did her due diligence and asked me about this “satanic” magazine that had been seen in the basement. I laughed at how ignorant that person had to be to think my MAD Magazine was a real rock book! It seemed so obvious by that picture of Simmons’ “tongue”! (Six page foldout, don’t forget!)
I couldn’t wait to tell my best friend Bob about this. After all, it proved everything I thought was true about those neighbours. How self-righteous, how nosy, how sanctimonious, and how ignorant. As far as I was concerned, I had won a battle between heavy metal and the religious right. And I did it with a MAD Magazine.
Dr. Dave Haslam is the drummer for Max the Axe. A swell guy, but also a bit difficult to get to follow simple instructions. I asked him for a Top 11 of 2020 and he didn’t get it in on time. Dr. Dave doesn’t do deadlines. However it’s a good list, so we’re re-framing it today as a treatise on some good things that happened in a pretty shitty year. Perspective 2020: with Dr. Dave. Eleven good things that happened in 2020. A Nigel Tufnel Top Ten!
Blue Oyster Cult – The Symbol Remains
There’s life in them yet, with enough variety and new blood to maintain interest. It compares particularly well to Ozzy and AC/DC. The former needs to just go away, while the latter has, let’s face it, become the absolute epitome of Dad Rock: safe, comfortable, predictable, and boring as FUCK. BOC still has its tongue planted firmly in cheek, though whose cheek it is remains in question.
Wayfarer – A Romance With Violence
One of the best things about black metal in this century is how it can incorporate different styles, and it was only a matter of time before someone spliced it with a Morricone-spaghetti western feel. Weird heavy stuff coming from Colorado these days.
Solstafir – Endless Twilight of Codependent Love
Iceland ain’t all Bjork and Sigur Ros. Their black metal scene is led by these lads who have been dialing-up the post-rock on recent albums. Black metal at its best is (barely) controlled fury, but this is not what you’re getting here; rather, it’s like the aftermath of that: the veteran barbarian, grown wistful in retirement, drinking his mead and reflecting on past conquests.
Paradise Lost – Obsidian
Their late-career groove continues with another consistent slab of darkly melodic metal with well-timed nods to their earlier stylistic detours.
Killer Be Killed – Reluctant Hero
Supergroups don’t always stick around long enough to make a second album, and it’s great that these guys did. Troy Sanders (Mastodon), Max Cavalera (Sepultura, Soulfly), Greg Puciato (Dillinger Escape Plan) and Ben Koller (Converge) combine for an album that is both heavy and catchy. They use the three different vocalists really well, and the heaviness is a solid blend of the bands they come from. “From a Crowded Wound” might be the core of the album, but the title-track might be my song of the year; supposedly about losing a parent to Alzheimer’s, it’s reminiscent of “Hurt” (yes, that one), before Puciato takes the second half of the song by the neck to a triumphant denouement. If there is a better response to the shitshow of 2020, I don’t know of it.
Pallbearer – Forgotten Days
Less immediate than the one before, this album took some distracted listening in my car for it to truly sink in. Though all of the plastic in the dashboard looked and sounded like it was going to disintegrate, I found myself actually singing along to it: me, who’s all about the holy trinity of guitar, bass, and drums. When doom lets the likes of Boston and Kansas shine through, good things happen.
Hum – Inlets
Even more surprising than the BOC album was this. Like Failure five years ago, another promising band from the 90s that didn’t take off like they should have released new stuff. Shoegazy with thick, stonerish-riffage and sharp hooks. STILL waiting for the goddamn cd, though. Grrrrr.
Winterfylleth – The Reckoning Dawn
Still some of the catchiest black metal out there. After an entirely acoustic album, this sees them roaring back with some of their thrashiest riffage.
Deftones – Ohms
Everything likeable about them is represented on this album. Plenty of atmosphere, groove, and riffs. A flat-out masterpiece of sonic craftsmanship from start to finish, and one of the best-produced albums I’ve heard in a long time.
The Ocean – Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic/Cenozoic
Germany’s heaviest nerds complete two-album concept about the extinction of the dinosaurs and the rise of mammalian life on Earth. With one foot in the ISIS/Cult of Luna school of post-metal and the other in the hypnotic prog-metal of Tool, this is like catnip for me. A baked-up headphone album for sure.
Elder– Omens
It’s not enough that Reflections of a Floating World is a top-ten 21st century album for me, but they had to go and do this, too. Fuckers. “Halcyon” rides a similar vibe as the krautrocky “Sonntag” from the previous album, but does so better, with more depth and commitment. It’s fitting that the weakest part of the previous album becomes the nucleus for maybe the strongest song this time out (and it’s weird that they again hit me hardest with the fourth song of the album). My top 3 this year are more-or-less interchangeable, depending on my mood, but I don’t think I’m ever not in the mood for these guys. It just doesn’t happen.
What’s on the teevee?
Lots of television was consumed this year, and I’ll admit it – The Mandalorian was better than I thought it would be. But it’s still just popcorn, compared to which The Expanse is prime rib, with all the fixins, with a side of even more prime rib. Star Trek:Discovery was somewhere in the middle, though I found season 3 uneven: my emotional g-spot likes more subtle manipulation, and season 3 all-too-often went straight for the aggressive fisting. Ouchie! Also of note was Britannia, which was both dark and goofy while still being committed to the overall vision. Definitely a British thing. The Boys was simply The Boys, and that’s what we all want, of course. Lovecraft Country was a very interesting spin on the Cthulu mythos in a Jim Crow-era America. Cursed was okay but pretty forgettable, and The Witcher was fun enough, I guess. The biggest single disappointment was learning that there will only be one more season of The Expanse after this, the fifth. They haven’t caught up with the books yet, and I highly doubt there will be a Game of Thrones shitting of the bed, but I just can’t accept that we’re nearing the home-stretch.
Allan Runstedtler was looking at my tape collection. This was something kids did. Every kid had a few tapes. Maybe they even had a nice tape case to put them in. I started the year 1985 with only one tape case. It held 30.
Allan reached for my Quiet Riot.
“Condition Critical? What’s that? I only know ‘Situation Critical’ by Platinum Blonde.” said Al.
I was never one of the cool ones.
There was this kid from school named Kevin Kirby. One day I was in his neighbourhood and he introduced me to a friend of his. Kevin asked me to tell him what my favourite band was. I answered “Quiet Riot” and they both laughed. I still liked Quiet Riot? They were so 1983.
Not much time had passed, but Quiet Riot were already toast. I felt cool for all of 3 months when Quiet Riot were big. Metal Health was my first hard rock album. I loved that album. I still love that album. I was the anomaly. All my classmates (the few that liked Quiet Riot in the first place) had moved on. Platinum Blonde were huge. And rightfully so. Standing in the Dark was a great album. Their followup Alien Shores was also successful, going to #3 in Canada. Platinum Blonde, however, were not for me. They were not a hard rock band. I didn’t even consider them to be a rock band. I labelled Platinum Blonde with the same label I used on everything I didn’t like. These loathsome artists were all dubbed “wavers”. There was no greater insult to me than “waver”. You were either a rocker or a waver. There was nothing else in my eyes more wretched than “New Wave” music.
Quiet Riot were not wavers, they were rockers. They had songs like “Party All Night” and “Mama Weer All Crazee Now”. But they had made a “Critical” blunder. They followed Metal Health with an inferior carbon copy in Condition Critical. It was a collection of leftovers and it was obvious. It even included a Slade cover like the prior album. It still went platinum. But Metal Health sold six times that. It was seen as a critical and commercial failure. Dubrow earned Quiet Riot no favours when he decided to trash other bands in the press. That stunt misfired, gloriously so.
No wonder Allan had never heard of Condition Critical. I tried to get him into some of my music. I showed him the video for “Death Valley Driver” by Rainbow, which I thought was really cool. He wasn’t as impressed as I was.
Going back a bit, I received Condition Critical for Easter of 1985. Almost a year after its release. I can remember a conversation with my mom about what kind of gifts I would like, and I answered “the new Quiet Riot, because I want to have all the albums by a band.” Hah! I had no idea, none whatsoever, that Metal Health was their third, not first. In Japan, Quiet Riot and Quiet Riot II were released in the late 70s. These featured the late Ozzy Osbourne guitar wizard Randy Rhoads on lead guitar, but I had yet to learn all these important details. I wanted to have Condition Critical so I could have a “complete” Quiet Riot collection. Something I’m still attempting to have.
Easter of ’85 was spent in Ottawa with my mom’s Uncle Gar and Aunt Miriam. We all stayed in their house. They were amazing people. Uncle Gar was injured in the war, but always had a smile on his face. He didn’t like my growing hair or my rock music, but I think he was happy that I turned out OK in the end. I stayed in a little spare bedroom. I brought my Sanyo ghetto blaster and my parent’s old Lloyds headphones.
I hit “play” on Quiet Riot not expecting to like every song, and I didn’t. I enjoyed the two singles, “Party All Night” and “Mama Weer All Crazee Now”. I thought the lead track, “Sign of the Times”, as as strong as the first album. But I didn’t think much of “Scream and Shout”, “Bad Boy” or “(We Were) Born to Rock”. And the ballad? I was not a ballad kid, and I thought “Winners Take All” was even worse than “Thunderbird”!
I’ve softened on the ballads since (pun intended), but it’s true that this is just an album of soundalikes. It’s not outstanding. I knew I’d have to give it a bunch more listens, but even then I knew a “sequel” when I saw one. Similar. More of the same of what you like. But not as good.
I kept giving them chances, though. I had to. They were the first band I wanted “all” the albums from. When my buddy George told me that Quiet Riot were back with an awesome new song called “The Wild and the Young”, my excitement was restored. “Kevin Dubrow even looks like Paul Stanley in the music video,” he told me. Cool!
There are bands I have given up on and never looked back. Yet I keep buying Quiet Riot, loyally, album after album. If they release another, I’ll buy that too. And it’s all because of what I told my mom when she asked me what I wanted for Easter. “The new Quiet Riot,” I answered, “because I want to have all the albums by a band.”
It didn’t come as a surprise when the province of Ontario went back into the “grey zone” again last week. But sad to say, when I asked myself “How will this change my daily routine?,” I had to admit that it wouldn’t. Easter wasn’t that different from last year. I did some live streaming, I did some listening, I did some writing.
Actually I did a lot of listening and writing. Andy Curran (Coney Hatch, Soho 69, Caramel) will be on the show this Friday April 9. The guy is fount of rock knowledge so this will be quite a tour-de-force, and I have been doing my research. I’ve been listening to Coney Hatch and solo Andy, on repeat. I have three Rock Candy remasters here with valuable liner notes and bonus tracks. I’ve been reading. Deke will be in seventh heaven getting to talk to one of his heroes. It’s going to be a lot of fun, and that’s one reason I do this. It’s fun.
Friday afternoon I went over to my parents’ house to pick up some mail. Mail theft became a serious issue last year so now I have my mail delivered elsewhere to be collected. In the mail were two Star Trek movies that I haven’t seen in a long time. Two years ago, I made the mistake of donating all my Star Trek DVDs while doing a big purge. I said “No big deal, I’ll just buy a Blu-ray set.” But none of the Blu-ray sets had the features I wanted from the DVDs. I have been slowly buying them back, and this weekend I got to star Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
It has been literal years since seeing The Voyage Home, or “the one with the whales”. Perhaps a decade. What a perfect film, at least as perfect as any movie with time travel conundrums can be. I smiled and chuckled the whole way through.
As for Khan, I know I streamed it somewhere fairly recently, but it has been just as many years since I watched the extended director’s cut. It only adds up to a few minutes here and there, but it was all fresh and new to me. The restored scenes help clarify the identity of young Peter Preston, who dies in the first attack. “He stayed at his post, when the trainees ran!” mourned Mr. Scott. A restored line reveals Peter Preston is Scott’s nephew. “My sister’s youngest,” he says. “Crazy to get to space.” Lines such as this add value to the already perfect film. Others do not. Additional exposition was probably cut because it wasn’t necessary. I did like one in which Kirk explains to Spock who David Marcus is. “That young man is my son”, says Kirk. The only reply necessary from Spock: “Fascinating.”
So I had fun. I made lots of time to play some music. I listened to Paul Stanley’s Soul Station, and I’m trying to find a way to be objective about reviewing it. I like it a lot. But if anybody else with a better voice put out a similar record, would I give it the time of day? Unlikely. So there is a certain hypocrisy there that I must address before I attempt to review it. But I will. I genuinely like the album. But I like it on the same level that I like the Peter Criss solo albums: as a reasonable facsimile of the real article. A forgery through the lens of somebody I already like and am familiar with. Easier to digest.
Tonight: Easter dinner courtesy of Golf’s Steakhouse, via the generosity of my mom who always spoiled us. Friday night’s live stream was Easter themed, and viewers were shocked at how spoiled we were as kids. We got great Easter gifts while other kids got a chocolate bunny. My sister and I didn’t question it, we just went with it!
Thanks mom for dinner tonight. I ordered a porterhouse. It’ll be here in 10 minutes.
RECORD STORE TALES #890: Top Ten Most Annoying Things About Listening Stations
Although it seems like dystopian fiction now, there was once a time when if you wanted to sample an album before you bought it, the best way was going to a store and asking to listen to it.
I imagine even today, people walk up to the counter at Ye Olde Record Store and ask to hear something before they buy it. I am certain the demand is not like it once was. We used to have six individual listening stations. Granted, we were lucky if three or four worked at any given time, but when we first opened, we had six brand new players. And they were busy. On a Saturday, all six would be in use at once. With a couple more people lined up waiting to jump in when one was vacated.
Here’s how it worked. Pay attention, because some people just didn’t get it.
It’s actually pretty simple. You just look around the store, grab a few CDs you want to listen to, and bring the cases to me to load them up. All the discs were kept safely behind the counter. All I had to do was load them up, and lay them out for you to hear.
All our players were five disc changers. I would load up the first five of your selections, and lay down the cases on the counter. “This is the order they are in the player.” Then I would give them a quick run-through on the remote control. Play, skip, stop, skip disc…I would ask them to ignore the rest of the buttons.
Annoying Thing #1: People who don’t listen.
“Sir! This player isn’t working.”
Because you ignored my instructions and hit the “program” button. Now you’re in program mode. Let’s get out of that, and just press play this time.
Annoying Thing #2: People who help themselves.
There was nothing more startling than finding a customer behind the counter with you! These people think the listening stations are like self-serve gas stations. They’d go behind the counter and start looking for the CDs to load up themselves. I’m really not sure what possesses people to think they can do that. There’s a counter. It has a front and a back. We used to have a divider chain, but it ripped out years before.
Annoying Thing #3: Using the remote to open the tray.
You don’t need to open the tray. You’re not helping by hitting the “open” button. More than once, I was picking discs that were stored beneath the CD players. I stood up, and “CRASH!” Right into the now-open tray of a CD player. Thanks for that. I’ve definitely had them open up on me while I was walking past, too.
Annoying Thing #4: Audiophiles.
Quoting a prior chapter:
“These headphones suck. I can’t hear the nuances in the music.” That was a real complaint. Since there wasn’t much I could do about it, I explained that the listening stations were there just so you could hear a song and decide if you liked it or not. Not much thought was given to hearing the nuances. But this guy insisted he couldn’t tell if he liked a song without the “nuances”, so no sale was made.
Yes the headphones sucked, mostly from years of use. Another issue is that all the headphones were run through a little tiny volume box that was custom made for us. This volume control was the real problem. Knobs went staticky, came right off… Maybe it wasn’t the audiophiles that were the problem, maybe it was the shitty volume knobs.
Annoying Thing #5: Gross remote controls.
I think I cleaned those things every day. I don’t know what people are walking around with on their hands, but those remotes got disgusting. The listening stations were always solidly disinfected from headphones to remotes, but they somehow felt…gross to the touch.
Annoying Thing #6: “Is there a way to plug in two headphones? My friend wants to listen.”
No! Stop asking! Yes, it would be “cool” if we could do it. The single-output volume boxes were bad enough. Imagine putting two in there.
Annoying Thing #7: Singers.
Yes, sometimes, people sang along. It wasn’t frequent. Other customers would turn and look. Usually you’d just ignore it. Only twice did I have to cut someone off for singing too loud. Once was two girls singing “This shit is bananas!” along with Gwen Stefani. Another was an angry kid who, quite frankly, was starting to scare me.
Annoying Thing #8: Kids treated them like toys.
Young kids get bored in music stores. Trust me on this. Some liked to climb on top of the stools, grab the remote control, and…you guessed it…open and close the trays. They’d just mash their fingers on a remote and yell “HOW DOES THIS WOOOOORK?”
I wish I was making this stuff up, I really was.
Sometimes, mom or dad would ask me to put on a kids’ CD for them to listen to, to keep them occupied. That I was happy to do. As long as they didn’t play with the remotes, or God forbid, put them in their mouths.
Annoying Thing #9: High maintenance listeners.
Sometimes you had to help people skip tracks. You could even show them on the remote where the button is, and they’d still need help. “Which disc am I listening to now?” Well, it says disc 2 on the display, and I put the cases down here in order, so that would be Garth Brooks. “Well it doesn’t sound like him!” And that’s because you picked his Chris Gaines album.
Annoying Thing #10: No limits.
You could come to the counter with 25 discs, and I had no choice but to let you listen to them all if you wanted to. And you could take as much time doing so as you liked. Some gentlemen (often fans of jazz or electronica or both, but always men) spent an entire morning glued to a listening station. They only moved to go and look for more discs to listen to.
I won’t lie to you, listening station service was hard work when you have a guy like that in the store while you’re busy. It takes time to retrieve all those CDs from behind the counter. It takes time to file them back when you’re done. And then I still have to re-file the cases out for display. For you it’s one easy step — just pick the discs you want to listen to. For me, it’s three steps. Get the CD from its specific location, put the CD back when you’re done, and re-file the case.
Some customers thought they were being helpful by re-filing the cases for me. All that did was create more difficulty, because now I had to look each one up in the computer to see where the CD itself is supposed to go. And that wasn’t always easy. You know, sometimes there are CDs out there with nothing to identify the artist or title. At all. And after serving the guy 25 discs, you’re not gonna remember what it was.
There are other miscellaneous things that used to bug me. People who would treat you like a servant. Working as a listening station jockey for an afternoon was a pretty thankless job. Of course there are exceptions. The exceptions aren’t the memories that stick in your head for 25 years!
I’ve always had trouble letting go. Even though rock music was my true obsession, there was some overlap. Even into grade nine, I still bought GI Joe comics and figures. It was always hard letting go of an obsession. My “favourite things”, in order of discovery were:
Star Wars until its natural end in 1983-84.
GI Joe/Transformers from 1984 to 1986-87.
Rock music from 1984 to present.
WWF Wrestling from 1985 to 1990.
You can see how the evolution of this worked. A GI Joe figure was in the same scale as Star Wars, but with far more articulation well suited to an older kid. The first wave of figures even featured real-world accurate weapons. They were a natural step for a kid still wanting that action figure experience, but geared for someone older. Transformers went hand in hand, since Marvel were producing a comic line to go for each. Transformers resembled the die-cast cars that older kids (and adults) collected and displayed.
I discovered heavy metal music on December 26, 1984. A few months later, wrestling appeared on my radar with the very first Wrestlemania. A lot of those guys looked like rock stars, with crazy costumes, long hair and male bravado.
As my interests shifted and evolved, so did my collections. The Star Wars toys were put into storage in the crawl space. I was given tape boxes, Christmas after Christmas, to store my growing music collection. A typical Christmas would see me receiving some new tapes and action figures. I’d sit in my bedroom reading GI Joe comics while rocking out to Long Way to Heaven by Helix. I was a weird kid but I liked what I liked and didn’t much care.
The Joe characters diversified along with me. In 1984 they got a little more outlandish with the introduction of Zartan and the Dreadnoks. Zartan, the master of disguise, was a deluxe action figure whose skin colour turned blue in direct sunlight. This gimmick only worked outdoors, which meant we played with Zartan outside in the summer while giving him a rest in the winter. His backup didn’t arrive on toy shelves until 1985. They were three bikers named the Dreadnoks: Buzzer, the Brit with a ponytail and a chainsaw, the mohawked Ripper, and the flamethrower Torch who had a bit of a Lemmy beard going on. Their Mad Max inspired outfits would have allowed them to fit into a rock band quite easily, if only they came with musical instruments instead of weapons. They’d make a cool punk trio.
The Dreadnoks expanded their lineup the following year. On explosives came Monkeywrench, bearded and obsessed with Guy Fawkes. Then in a deluxe set came the vehicle driver Thrasher, and his definitely Mad Max inspired Thunder Machine car. Made of bits and pieces of scrap, it hit the same post-apocalyptic notes as the other Dreadnoks, as well as rock bands like Motley Crue, Kiss, and Armored Saint. Thrasher had a punk rock streak of green in his hair. And now they were a quintet. They were literally begging for me to make them custom musical instruments.
There were always wooden match sticks in the house, so I used them for guitar necks, drum stands, drumsticks, and a microphone. Cardboard boxes were cut up to make the bodies of guitars and a few drums and cymbals. Black electrical tape held them all together. And so the Dreadnoks became a five piece band, and I put them on display in my bedroom on a shelf with my Kiss cassettes.
If only I had a picture of my Dreadnok band. Not everybody had a camera back then. Even if you did, it seemed film was always out! You can imagine what they looked like!
I got into the downloading business later than everyone else. As a Record Store manager, I had zero interest in downloads. I’ve never used Napster and I sided with Lars Ulrich when it came down to it. You might not have cared about Lars’ bottom line, but I cared about mine. Downloading hurt us. And we weren’t a corporate entity, we were just a small indy chain. Eventually in the year 2001, I relented and began using WinMX and Limewire to download rare tracks. I bought so many CDs annually, I figured “why not”? I quickly discovered all the new Guns N’ Roses songs that they played in Rio.
I still remember the first time using WinMX. It was at an old girlfriend’s house and she was showing me how she downloaded music. Hey neighbour was using WinMX too, and gave her a mix CD of all the tracks she had downloaded. I’ll never forget putting on this mix CD, and suddenly from the speakers it’s “Who Let the Dogs Out”! As the song went on, I remarked “I don’t think I’ve ever heard the verses to this song before. Just the chorus.” Do you know how the verses go?
I copied what the girlfriend showed me, downloaded WinMX, and before you know it, I was listening to “The Blues” by Guns N’ Roses.
After everything dried up on WinMX, we both switched to Limewire where I continued downloading the odd rarity. I accumulated a large music folder, and began burning all my new tracks to mix CDs. I have several volumes of mixes all with tracks downloaded during this period. But there were always odds and ends that I never fit onto a mix CD. I thought all those tracks had been lost, but I just dug up an old CD labelled “MP3 downloads”. It is here that I burned the stragglers, and then stuffed the CD in with some photo discs and forgot all about it.
The title “MP3 downloads” is misleading as there are video files here too (none of which work anymore). The downloads are also not exclusively from Limewire, as we’ll get to. Let’s have a look track by track at what mp3 files I still had in my music folder back in 2004.
This CD is only 303 mb (of 656).
First, the video files are a weird variety of stuff I downloaded and intended to keep. I didn’t have cable back then, so “Gene Simmons on MTV Cribs” is one I wanted. Then there’s a file called “Gene’s hair on fire”. Then there’s a file called “some jackass tells a cop to fuck off”. I remember that one. I think I had been searching for Jackass videos, and came across this idiot getting beat by a cop after walking up and giving him the finger. Some Star Wars videos include the Star Wars Kid vs Yoda, a deleted scene from A New Hope, and something called “Episode 3 Leaked Marketing Video”. All the video files appear to be corrupt and won’t play on anything.
Onto the music. I can see there are some tracks here from albums I didn’t own then, but do now. From the compilation CD Spaced by William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, it’s “Mr. Tambourine Man”, “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins”, “I Walk the Line” and “When I Was Seventeen”. These are strictly novelty covers, although Nimoy does give it a good effort. All of these songs were originally released on separate Nimoy and Shatner albums in the late 1960s. Related to these, I also have “Shaft” by Sammy Davis Jr. I have long loved Sammy’s glittery version of the Shaft theme. Who’s the black private dick who’s a sex machine with all the chicks? Sammy Davis Jr. was! The guitar work on this is great slippery fun. I’ll have to get a copy for real.
A fun treat next: A full hour Peter Criss interview show by Eddie Trunk. This is with all the songs and music. Peter was out of Kiss once again, and he spilled the full beans on his whole perspective. Doing the Symphony show with Tommy Thayer, Peter complains “without Ace, it’s not Kiss”. This interview is definitely a keeper. According to the file name, this interview is from May 4, 2004.
Several of the files are really, really low quality Dokken. These are tiny files, they are so poor. Demos of “Back for the Attack”, “We’re Illegal”, “It’s Not Love”, “Unchain the Night”, “Upon Your Lips”, and “Sign of the Times”. A live version of “Paris is Burning”. Remixes of “Nothing Left to Say” and “I Feel”. I could have burned all these to a Dokken rarities CD, but the sound quality is poor, I knew I’d never want to listen to it.
There is also a smattering of rare Leatherwolf, including some live stuff. Some were downloads from their social media pages at the time. “Tension” is definitely one such official track, an instrumental solo that isn’t on any albums. (You can tell by the file size it’s official, compared to the low quality Limewire downloads.) I also have “Black Knight” live with original singer Michael Olivieri, and a partial instrumental called “The Triple Axe Attack”. I’m not 100% certain what these are, but they don’t seem to have originated on the rare Leatherwolf live album called Wide Open. Best of all the finds are the three official demos they did with singer Jeff Martin: “Burned”, Disconnect” and “Behind the Gun”. Martin did not last, and was replaced by Wade Black of Crimson Glory on the album World Asylum. Fortunately I had already burned these tracks (and “Tension”) to a bonus CD.
There is a smattering of Gene Simmons demos, varying in quality. “Heart Throb” is almost unlistenable. “Howling for Your Love” is OK but I can’t identify if it was later rewritten into something more recognizable. “It’s Gonna Be Alright” is bright and poppy with a drum machine backing Gene. Then there is “Jelly Roll”, a heavier track with a riff like “Tie Your Mother Down”. “Rock and Rolls Royce” is the track that was rewritten into “Love ‘Em and Leave ‘Em” from Rock and Roll Over. “Rotten to the Core” was recycled way later on 2009’s Sonic Boom as “Hot and Cold”. Like the Dokken tracks, I never burned these to CD because of the poor audio that I knew I wouldn’t want to listen to.
Other miscellaneous rarities here include Faith No More, Motley Crue and Van Halen. Faith No More were known to mess around with covers live, and here I have “Wicked Game” (Chris Isaak) and “We Will Rock You”. Sound quality is awful and neither are full songs, just them messing around on stage. The two unreleased Motley Tracks are “Black Widow” and something just labelled “unreleased track” which is actually “I Will Survive”. Both of these are officially released now so I have no reason to keep them. Onto Van Halen, not everything sounds shite, but “On Fire” is just a few seconds of a demo. “Let’s Get Rockin'” is complete. A good sounding track that later was reworked as “Outta Space” on A Different Kind of Truth. Then I have 90 seconds of the sneak preview single for “It’s About Time” (2004). And then just two seconds of shred on a track labelled “VANHwhee”. So strange!
Other rarities include one Def Leppard treasure called “Burnout”, which was an official download from their site. It was also available on the CD single for “Goodbye” and a Def Leppard boxed set. I also have an audio rip of “Lick My Love Pump” from the movie This Is Spinal Tap. I should really take this and add it to the soundtrack as a bonus track!
I downloaded some miscellaneous songs that I didn’t own the albums for, but intended to get later:
Blue Oyster Cult – “Don’t Fear the Reaper” (I was watching Stephen King’s The Stand that year!)
Budgie – “Breadfan”
Buckethead – “Nottingham Lace” (might be an official download)
Cat Stevens – “The Wind”
Creedence Clearwater Revival – “Down on the Corner” (mislabelled as “Willy and the Poor Boys”)
Fleetwood Mac – “Go Your Own Way”
Iced Earth – “Dracula”
Iced Earth – “Jack”
Kenny Rogers – “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)”
Marty Robbins – “El Paso”
Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper – “Elvis is Everywhere”
The Pursuit of Happiness – “I’m An Adult Now”
The Pursuit of Happiness – “Hard to Laugh”
Of these, there are some I still have not bought and some I have no intention of getting anymore. I do own the B.O.C., Budgie, Cat Stevens, CCR, Kenny Rogers, Marty Robbins, and Fleetwood Mac. I’d still like to get Mojo Nixon to be honest with you!
Finally, there are bits of pieces of funny things that I liked to have hanging around for making mix CDs. Many are from a website that used to have mp3 files of movie quotes, and the rest are from Homestar Runner. Does that take you back to the 2000s? From Homestar, I have “Alright 4 2Night”, “Strongbadia National Anthem”, “Everybody Knows It”, “Ballad of the Sneak”, “Cheat Commandos”, “CGNU Fight Song”, and a computer voice saying “back off baby”! I might have been using that as an MSN Messenger alert sound. Any time someone messaged me, the computer would say “back off baby”! If I didn’t, I should have. From the movie Sexy Beast I grabbed a bunch of Ben Kingsley’s best lines. Saying he’s going to put his cigarette out in somebody’s eye, calling someone “porky pig”, yelling “no!” repeatedly, and announcing he had to take a piss. Because of course.
The last files I found on this CD are strange, but for the sake of a complete and thorough inventory, they are:
no_respect: 24 seconds of the pretty terrible “Rappin'” Rodney Dangerfield song from the 80s.
50_10sec: Actually 11 seconds of the “Smoke on the Water” riff. I can tell it’s Blackmore. Why did I keep this?
MM Jukebox Plus Upgrade: 18 second software ad that obviously got left there by something I downloaded. This is probably the first time in my life that I actually played this track!
cant_holdon: 36 seconds long. This took forever to identify. Lyric searches told me nothing. Then I figured it out by uploading to YouTube and waiting for the copyright block to tell me what it was! “Can’t Hold On / Can’t Let Go” by a band called Thunder, but not the band Thunder that you know today. Probably downloaded by mistake is my guess. Sounds like something you’d hear in an 80s Bruce Willis flick.
I don’t know how interesting this will be for you to read, but I found it entertaining enough to do this complete inventory. I had clearly not tried to listen to all the files before, or I would have weeded at least a few out. It is likely that in 2004 I was getting a new hard drive put in my computer and hastily burned my mp3 files to CD, intending to eventually put them on mix discs like I did with the rest of my mp3 collection.
After a little further digging, I did find that I had burned some of these songs to a mix CD. Not all, but some. You can get an idea here of how I’d make use of weird stuff like this. The rest of the tracks never made it to the mix CD stage, so finding the original mp3 disc is a fun reminder for me of just what I was doing in 2004. And I’m going to keep that Peter Criss interview, and a few other worthwhile things too.! Productive morning spent, and I hope you enjoyed this look at the way we did things a decade and a half ago.
Sometimes I like to imagine myself in my younger self’s shoes. I think about me as a kid, sitting in the basement watching the Pepsi Power Hour on MuchMusic. There I am, staring intently, VCR remote grasped in hand, and set to “Record-Pause”. Waiting for the new music video by Kiss to debut. Hitting that un-pause button to get a good recording as soon as the video began. Could I even have imagined the on-demand nature of YouTube? No, but I like to imagine what I would have thought if I could have seen a glimpse of the future.
I always felt limited by technology, even though I was spoiled enough to have my own stereo, my own Walkman, and access to the family VCR (almost) whenever I wanted. Though I had all this stuff, I couldn’t make it do what I wanted to do without some improvisation. Making a mix tape, for example. If I wanted a live song on a mix tape, I had to fade it in and out. My dual tape deck couldn’t do that. To do a fade, I plugged my Walkman, via a cable in the headphone jack, into the audio inputs of my ghetto blaster. This was done with a Y-connector, and an RCA-to-3.5 mm adaptor cable. Then I used the Walkman’s volume knob to fade the song in and out while the ghetto blaster recorded. It took trial and error and the end recording usually sounded a little hot and crackly. But I didn’t have anything better.
If that highschool kid playing with cables in his bedroom could only have imagined Audacity. Instant fades, exactly as you want them. Precise digital replication. I would have lost my shit. If you had given me Audacity as a kid, I might not have left my bedroom for a week…and not for the reasons a teen usually hides in his bedroom!
I worked long hours on mix tapes back in those days, mainly because you had to make them in real time. And you had to keep it simple too. Making the tape in the first place was the challenge; making it creatively was the icing. But the end results were always…disappointing? Underwhelming? The second generation taped songs never sounded as good as the first. You’d get a little noise, perhaps a pop, between tracks where you started and stopped your recording. Little imperfections. Maybe one track sounds a little slow, one a little fast. Volume levels are inconsistent. All stuff out of your control.
The amount of control I have today over what I create is astounding. Even visually speaking. I don’t make tape cover art anymore, but doing so was a painstaking process involving sharp pencils, rulers, erasers, and scissors. Everything had to be handwritten and hand drawn. Sometimes I might be able to get my dad to photocopy a cover at his work, but usually I had to make my own stuff. I was very limited when it came to to making visuals. Even taking a photograph, it took days or weeks to get your picture back. You had to use the entire roll of film before getting it developed, of course. Now you have a phone that’s a camera and a computer.
Now that’s something that young me definitely couldn’t have imagined: our phones. Even science fiction of the mid-80s didn’t have anything like the phones we have today. Imagine what I could have made with that! It took months and a lot of clunky equipment for Bob Schipper and I to make a single music video in 1989. I can throw together a clip in minutes today, thanks to computers and phones and ubiquitous cameras that ensure I always have raw photos and videos waiting to be edited together.
Computers — now there’s a quantum leap that young me wouldn’t believe. We had a family computer from a very early time, decked out with a dot matrix printer and a monochrome block of a monitor. But it wasn’t connected to anything. We didn’t have the instant access to information. We couldn’t look up a band’s complete discography in a moment on Discogs, much less actually buy those rare items and have them shipped to the front door! Can you imagine how much that would have blown my mind? I had a few hundred bucks in the bank at that age. Well, it would all have been gone if you had given me access to Discogs for an hour in 1986. The ability to actually complete an artist’s music collection today, was something I just could not ever do as a kid. Very few people could.
We did what we could with the resources at hand. We’d save our pennies, and take the bus down to Sam the Record Man. We’d look around for an hour and decide where we would best spend our dollars. “Don’t go to Sam the Record Man and buy something you can get at the mall,” was the motto. That would be a waste of time and bus money!
Bob Schipper made far more trips to Sam’s, usually via bike. But if he acquired a rarity, it was always a given that I could tape it off him. A lot of my first Maiden B-sides were just taped copies of records he found at Sam’s.
What I was doing in those early formative years was absorbing rock’s past. Collecting the albums, discovering the bands, learning the member’s names through the magazines and interviews. But what if I could have seen the future of all this? What would I have thought of things like a six-man Iron Maiden lineup with three lead guitar players? I think tunes like “The Wicker Man” would have blown me away as an evolution without losing what made Maiden great.
I wonder what I would have thought of the Kiss tour with the original members back in makeup? I know I would have been disappointed that they never made a proper studio album together. One thing I appreciated as a kid was that Kiss put out something new every year. Today, Kiss only put out an album when there’s a solar eclipse on planet Jendell. I think the success of that reunion tour would have made the younger me feel validated for my Kiss love, but I know I would have been unhappy about the lack of new material. However, if I could have heard albums like Sonic Boom and Monster, I also know I’d have been happy that Kiss dropped the keyboards, brought Gene back to prominence, and had all four members singing. That would have impressed me.
I’m still working on my time travel powers, and I’m also wary of doing anything that could change the future. Since The Avengers: Endgame taught us that you can’t change your past’s future’s future (or something like that), I’m going to continue to work on the technology. If I can show my past self some of these amazing technological advances, I might…I don’t know! Buy first print Kiss LPs and keep them in the shrink wrap? I haven’t fully through this through, but trust me — it’s going to be awesome.
It’s funny. Though my music playback setup today is completely different from my first, even today there’s still one thing they have in common: both setups featured hand-me-down audio components from my parents. And I hope one of those components continues working forever.
In Getting More Tale #796: Improvisation, I explained that we kids of the 80s didn’t have the luxury to buy whatever stereo equipment we wanted. We had to make due with what we had, and improvise. And that’s exactly what we did. When I first started collecting music, I owned it on two formats only: LP and cassette. The classic duo. Compact discs existed only in Japan. We hadn’t even heard of them. All that existed in our world were the vinyl record and the compact cassette. That’s all I needed to be able to play.
Around 1985, my parents realized they weren’t going to be listening to records or 8-track tapes anymore. The living room needed to be renovated and there was no more room for that giant Lloyd’s stereo system. The 8-track player didn’t work anymore, but it was a single unit combined with a radio receiver and amplifier, which still worked fine. The Lloyd’s record player could still plug into it and play normally. I snapped them up. Only George Balasz and myself were lucky enough to have record players in our bedrooms. Everybody else on the street had to use their parents’ systems.
Don’t get me wrong: it didn’t sound great. I took my parents’ hand-me-downs and plugged them into my Panasonic ghetto blaster, which essentially was both my tape deck and speakers. Not ideal, but good enough for a 13 year old. I recall the sound was rather tinny. But it worked after a spell. If my mom wanted me to tape her old Roy Orbison LPs, I could do that. (Spoiler: my mom really abused her LPs.)
I used that setup for many years. The Lloyd’s receiver lasted seven more. It finally blew a circuit in early ’92. A few weeks later, I replaced it with a small, affordable preamp. It didn’t have a lot of power, but it enabled me to continue listening to records. Of course, that old Lloyd’s turntable wasn’t in the best shape anymore. The needle had never been changed, and I had really abused that thing, playing records backwards and trying to make funky sounds. It was cool though, because it had four speeds: 16, 33, 45, and 78. I didn’t own any 16’s or 78’s. But I could play them. And I kept it for well over a decade. I only replaced it when I did a complete stereo system overhaul in the late 90s. T-Rev and I went to Steve’s TV, and I picked out new everything. Canadian made PSB speakers, a new Technics dual tape component, a Technics receiver to go with it, and a brand new Technics turntable. Good enough for me, who had been living with a Frankenstein system his whole life.
The only thing I didn’t need to buy was a CD player. And this is the last piece of hand-me-down tech incorporated into my still-current system. (I actually have two systems today: my 7.1 setup in the main room with blu-ray, and my stereo “man cave” with all my analog stuff.)
I call this CD player “the Tank”. It is a 30 year old Sony five-disc changer and I more or less confiscated it from them when I moved out. Once they had a DVD player, I didn’t think they needed a CD player anymore, so I made the executive decision to liberate it. It wasn’t exactly a covert operation. The Sony had been in my bedroom setup for a while. I liked a numbers of its features. It had a fader! I could fade tracks in and fade out, which was perfect for recording live albums. The timer was also a nice extra — you could use it to monitor the time remaining on a track, or even album. This was great for tape-making. It was also painlessly easy to program. So I stole the Sony! When I moved out, I just said “I’m taking this CD player.” Mom grumbled a bit, but…here it is. I successfully abducted my parents’ CD player with no casualties.
I’m glad I did. Though the five-disc gimmick doesn’t work so smoothly anymore, the Tank can play any CD I throw at it. That might not sound like a big deal, but it is. You’d be surprised how many CDs you’ll have problems playing in your computer today. Some players, and many computers, still won’t play weird stuff like DualDiscs. I have an old DualDisc by The Cult that will not play properly in any computer ever invented by mankind. Even regular CDs can be weird. I have a Cinderella disc (multiple copies even) that no computer from PC to Apple will play correctly.
So I need the Tank. Just recently, I was listening to a fantastic live album by King’s X given to me by Superdekes. The last song (an acoustic version of “Over My Head”) refused to rip to my PC. I booted up the laptop and ran into the same problem, same spot. I didn’t need to try a third computer to know that this would be futile. Only the Tank could play my King’s X. I examined the CD up close for damage and saw nothing. (Good thing too as copies today run just shy of $100!) Deke sent me a good disc (and thank you once more for that!), but CDs can be fickle.
No issue with the Tank. I powered up the Sony, inserted the King’s X and played the song through. No issues! I got a good recording of it in Audacity and exported the audio into the King’s X album folder. Seamless!
Thanks mom and dad for giving me, and in some cases, allowing me to steal your stuff. I kept it all working — I even still have the remote!
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