I was out with a friend named Shannon. Me being the geek that I am, I thought it would be a good idea to take Shannon to a comic book store. So I did. Off we went to uptown Waterloo, to my favourite comic book store in the whole universe, Carry On Books.
The owner, Andy, warmly welcomed us and immediately started trying to sell me some Star Trek goods. I said, “Not today, Andy. Do you have anything Kiss?”
He did. He had this Kiss 24kt gold-plated framed Destroyer CD. It was $250. But he was willing to sell it to me for $200 if I paid cash.
Sure, why not. Sold.
Shannon and I ran down to the cash machine, and I eagerly inserted my card. Selected the dollar amount. Waited. And waited. And waited. The machine spat out my card, and a statement saying I’d taken the money out. But no money emerged from the machine!
I stood there for a moment before saying, “Shannon, is it just me, or did no money come out?”
I was ripped off by a cash machine!
I repeated the transaction, this time getting the money, but my bank account was lighter by twice the amount!
Shit!
I went back to Andy’s store, told him the tale, bought the Kiss plaque, and went into the bank to get my missing money back. Turns out I would have to wait for them to cash out that night and see if they balanced. And I wasn’t going to be in town! I was headed to the cottage later that day. I had to wait the weekend through before finding out the fate of my hard-earned dollars.
Thankfully, when I called the bank on the Monday, they had found an overage and refunded my money. But for that entire weekend, I had worried that I paid $400 for this Kiss plaque!
CODA: And today, the plaque is still worth…just $200 on eBay. Oh well. An investment, it wasn’t. But it does look cool on my wall. Thankfully I also kept the box, these things are often only worth their full value with the box intact.
Our original computerized inventory system forced us to manually type in every album title ourselves. Out of sheer boredom, often we’d shake it up a bit. For example, just for laughs, we’d often input Alanis Morissette’s album Jagged Little Pill in the system as Jagged Little Pillow. Or whatever.
When we saw this Celine Dion Christmas album come in, somebody came up with a clever custom title for our system. Remember that Marilyn Manson album, Smells Like Children? Take a look at the Celine Dion album cover. You’ll understand why we used to call this one Smells Like Presents!
And the award for most embarrassing goes to…Puff Daddy!
The year: 1998
The place: My store
The guilty party: Me
Remember that shitty 1998 movie, Godzilla? It’s OK if you didn’t. There are movie executives and Matthew Brodericks worldwide that want to forget it, too.
The soundtrack was OK though. “A320” is a non-album Foo Fighters track, and one of the first to feature Taylor Hawkins on drums. “No Shelter” is a rare Rage Against The Machine track. Ben Folds Five and Green Day contributed. I’m sure most of these bands would rather forget the movie itself.
The lead single, though, was a song called “Come With Me”, by Puff Daddy. You may remember this one, a remake of “Kashmir” but with ol’ Puffy himself providing new, enlightened lyrics.
You said to trust you, you’d never hurt me Now, I’m disgusted, since then adjusted Certainly, you fooled me, ridiculed me Left me hangin’, now shit’s boomerangin’
Anyway. The song features Jimmy Page and Tom Morello too, which is really too bad, because that put it in my obsessive-compulsive collector’s sights.
Then I saw the CD single come in
Track list:
Album version
Morello Mix (cool, right? basically, more guitar squonk)
Radio album version (?)
Live version (???)
Live version? Yeah. Although I’m sad to say that Jimmy Page performed live with Puffy more than once, this one is from Saturday Night Live. I don’t know who the drummer was, but he ain’t no Bonham (John or Jason), that much is clear. Jimmy Page does play on it, but I really hate when mid-song, Puffy proclaims, “I think I wanna dance!”
I don’t remember what I paid for this single, probably $3 with my discount. Forgivable? I hope you think so. But I have a lot of ‘splaining to do any time somebody sees it in my collection.
Then another different single showed up! It has two more tracks:
Extended radio edit
Radio versi0n II
Don’t ask me the difference except the swear words are replaced by Godzilla roaring on the radio versions. I ended up getting this one for free. I turned down the guy who was selling it, because it did look like a cheap promo (no booklet, for example, and the crappy track list), but he left it behind. And that’s how I ended up with two copies of a Puff Daddy single.
I like my CD collection to be displayed for all to see. I’m (mostly) proud of it. I ain’t so proud of this, even with the presence of Page and Morello. It’s always hard to explain and justify to guests, who never fail to notice it.
Therefore, the award for most embarrassing CD of all time goes to ME, for “Come With Me”, by Puff Daddy, not one version but two!
We had a staff Halloween party in the late 1990’s. T-Rev had this cool “alien head” — he got it back in ’97 or ’98 from a convenience store. It had alien head suckers inside. He asked the guy at the store, “how much for the alien head?” The guy answered, “If you buy all the suckers in it, you can have it.” So he did.
The candy was awful by the way. I did my share, trying to help him consume it all.
But he got this alien head out of it, and with it, made a cool alien costume. And for the Halloween party that year, I wore the costume.
We had one girl at the store who had a phobia of aliens. I’d never heard of that before. We found it amusing, so after she got to the party, I came up the stairs wearing the alien costume. Well, she was just terrified. We thought it would be funny, but it wasn’t funny. If I could go back and change that, I would. It was a dick move on our part.
I don’t know the story behind the alien phobia, but back then I didn’t believe in aliens. I subscribed to Carl Sagan’s theories. I was a big fan of his book The Demon Haunted World. I simply didn’t think there was any evidence for alien visitation, nor did I think it was possible. Speed of light and all that.
Since that time I’ve read a lot of books. Stanton T. Friedman was the most convincing. A nuclear physicist has credentials that are difficult to dismiss, and he makes convincing cases. I’ve also read Whitley Strieber, Jenny Randles, and many others. I’ve come to the undeniable conclusion that some UFO sightings are real. Most are hoaxes. I’m not interested in those.
But what the hell does this have to do with music?
Aliens and UFO’s have provided subject matter for numerous classic rock and metal songs. Sammy Hagar’s a believer, and he’s incorporated that into some of his lyrics. Mick Mars is a hardcore believer. Blue Oyster Cult’s “Take Me Away” is a great example. Fu Manchu’s “King of the Road”. There’s many more.
In my years of collecting though, I have never found a better set of lyrics on the subject than side 1 of Bruce Dickinson’s excellent Tyranny of Souls album. Kevin, an employee, picked me up a copy at HMV Toronto back when they still sold Japanese imports. That was the cool thing about working in a record store. We helped each other out.
Bruce Dickinson is clearly a believer. I suspect he’s read his share of Von Daniken. Witness the lyrics to “Mars Within”:
Mankind returns to the stars But sometimes, the stars return to mankind… Didn’t you come this way before, a million years ago?
Although there’s also a reference to Professor Bernard Quatermass in the same piece, it’s easy to associate these lines with Von Daniken’s theories on ancient aliens.
But there’s so much more on the same album. “Abduction”:
Are you the truth to sit in judgement on my sins Evil laser gadgets come to penetrate my skin
The next song, “Soul Intruders”, is more abstract but contains clear space references about the “solar wind” and “cosmic streams of time”. But one really cool lyric is “Kill Devil Hill” which combines these themes with the Wright Brothers and first flight. Everyone knows Bruce is a pilot and is interested in the history of aviation. The Kill Devil Hills, near Kitty Hawk in North Carolina, is where the Wrights were the first to achieve heavier than air powered flight. But the lyrics hint at more:
Blood brothers of angels, now hear us We earthbound your offspring, don’t fear us God willing, we’ll raise up, be near you So open your arms now and take us
To me, Bruce is referring to the aliens as the “blood brothers of angels”, and mankind as its offspring. This too is a common theme in UFO lore. Some believe that, at minimum, aliens have manipulated our DNA and directly interfered with our evolution. There’s no proof of course, but that’s not my point. I’m just looking at the lyrics and their inspirations.
The final song of these sci-fi themes on the album is “Navigate the Seas of the Sun”. Bruce even paraphrases Albert Einstein:
If God is throwing dice, And Einstein doesn’t mind the chance We’ll navigate the seas of the sun
Einstein once said, “As I have said so many times, God doesn’t play dice with the world.” Einstein was talking about quantum mechanics and its seemingly random predictions. But what Bruce seems to be saying is, if Einstein’s wrong about the universe, then there’s a chance we can break the speed of light and journey to the stars.
Later on in the same song, Bruce changes up the wordplay:
If Einstein’s throwing dice, and God, he doesn’t mind the chance We’ll navigate the seas of the sun
I love this.
The song is loaded with all sorts of beautiful sci-fi wordplay. The song is clearly about leaving Earth behind:
So we go and will not return To navigate the seas of the sun Our children will go on and on To navigate the seas of the sun
This conjures up the image of multi-generational ships that may be necessary to colonize other worlds. The song in general brings to mind the Arthur C. Clark novel The Songs of Distant Earth. Eventually, our sun will use up all its fuel. This is inevitable. It’s physics. If humanity is to survive (if we even last that long) we will have no choice but to find another world to live on. Earth will be fried to a cinder when it goes nova and turns into a red giant.
We can’t go on tomorrow Living death by gravity Couldn’t stand it anymore We’ll sail our ships to distant shores
Death by gravity is another theme that Clarke explored in his books. He felt that we could extend our lives by leaving this cradle and living in zero gravity. Now we know that living in zero gravity deteriorates our bones, possibly to the point of no return. So should we go on to explore the stars, this is an obstacle that must be overcome.
I’m grateful to Kevin for supplying the Japanese version of Tyranny of Souls, but I’m really, really sorry to the girl that we scared with the alien costume! With the benefit of hindsight, I wouldn’t have done it if I knew then what I believe today.
During a trip to Encore Records in Kitchener, Ontario, I found some pretty cool stuff among their used discs. I used to work with the guy behind the counter, Chris — trained him in fact. We had a chance to catch up and discuss the difficulties of being a collector. Piles and piles of discs, an expanding collection and lack of space for it. Filing systems. How easy it is to get behind in your filing. Good to know there are still kindred spirits out there.
Thanks for the discs Chris, and without further delay…
1. VAN HALEN – In Concert
This double CD is at least partially taken from Live Without A Net, the old Van Halen home video. That’s cool to me — some of those versions, like “Love Walks In”, were the originals that I was first familiar with. It’s weird today hearing Sammy Hagar play guitar solos on Van Halen songs, but that’s how I first heard them. $9 used.
2. HELIX – Wild In The Streets (Rock Candy remaster)
PROS: These hard-to-find (in Canada) Rock Candy reissues have great liner notes and pictures. CONS: It lacks the lyric sheet from my old Capitol Records version. This one was expensive ($14 used) but the great Heavy Metal OverloRd tells me they are well worth it.
3. FISH – “Credo” CD single
Limited edition, #5945. Cool? Yeah, but how many copies did they make of a Fish single? Anyway, this has two non-album cuts, a 7″ remix of the title track and a song called “Poet’s Moon”. “Credo” itself is a great song from Internal Exile. Great cover art by Mark Wilkinson! $6 used.
4. IRON MAIDEN – Virtual XI with limited edition lenticular cover
This was a limited edition (expensive in Canada) that had a 3D cover similar to the current Kiss Monster CD. I tried to get an idea of this in the photos. Look at Eddie’s finger in relation to the boy’s headphones. You can see it’s not in the same place in the two photos. It’s much cooler in person. Now, I know Aaron is probably going to give me shit for buying a Blaze Bayley album — any Blaze Bayley album — twice. But it’s more about the Maiden collection than Blaze. This is one I’d wanted back in the day but completely forgotten about. $10 used.
REPORT CARD
Encore Records, 54 Queen St. South, Kitchener ON, (519) 744-1370
Encore is as good as as any of the stores that Aaron and I reported on in Toronto. Sure, I’m biased in that I did train the guy behind the counter, and it was great having a conversation with somebody who understands my point of view vis-à-vis collecting. But their selection is second-to-none in this town (rock, indi, roots, jazz, blues, vinyl), with fair prices, and excellent quality. Not one blemish on any of the discs that I purchased. As an added note I found a number of Guided By Voices singles for Aaron (some stealthily pictured below) — although he is apparently banned from purchasing them at this time, until he wins the lottery!
RECORD STORE TALES Part 147: Cassettes Part III – Aaron’s Tale
I first met Aaron in 1996, when I was given my own store to manage. Aaron came in, and as he’s mentioned in his previous guest shots under his pen name Statham, he likes to befriend the local Record Store Guy. That is an excellent way to get the inside scoop on cool new arrivals. But Aaron isn’t a shallow person and this is a friendship that has lasted since then, across many provinces and many years.
Aaron also made sure it was a give and take relationship. I made sure he got good discs at a good price, and he repaid me in kind. But before he made me discs…he made me a cassette.
Foamfoot was a cover band side project featuring Chris Robinson and Marc Ford from the Black Crowes. Back then, Aaron was my Crowes guru. He knew everything, and was eager to share. He made me this cassette, live at the Troubadour. The exact date seems to be a matter of conjecture. Aaron wrote 11/??/94 on the J-card spine. The link above states the show is both 1/08/1994 AND November 1994. So, either a mistake or Chris Robinson is capable of time travel as well as rock n’ roll. Another site states the January date as the correct one.
The setlist features a heady mix of The Band, the Dead, CSNY and many more. Needless to say this is now a legendary concert, and I had the chance to hear it way back in the day of the tape traders!
The concert is now widely available online, making the cassette redundant. Except as a momento of a friendship and good times a long time ago. I’d never part with it for that reason alone. Aaron even provided his own liner notes — that’s David Crosby guesting on “Long Time Gone”.
Plus, if you take a look inside the J-card, you can see what Aaron was listening to before he recorded Foamfoot over this cassette! Apparently Iggy Pop, Gene, Limblifter, Deep Blue Something, Bad Religion and Aimee Mann among others!
Thanks Aaron, I’m glad I found this again.
And this concludes my trip down the memory lane of cassettes from the record store days. Hope you enjoyed!
RECORD STORE TALES Part 146: Cassettes Part II – The Indi Years
Back in the days of the record store and M.E.A.T Magazine, I was into every indi band I could get my hands on. M.E.A.T released a series of discs, four volumes total, called Raw M.E.A.T, showcasing the best in up and coming unsigned Canadian bands. In addition, their magazine featured numerous ads from dozens of bands hawking their demo tapes. Harem Scarem, who later went on to get signed by WEA and had great success in Japan, was one. Unfortunately I never got their demo tape. Just missed it.
One band that I was heavily into was called Russian Blue, from Toronto. They were edgy hard rock. 1/4 Guns N’ Roses, 1/4 Zeppelin, 1/4 Coverdale, and 1/4 their own style. Digging their two demo tapes up (both dated 1991) I was surprised how good this band was. Not only were they good musicians with a truly great singer in Jo E. Donner, but some of the songs were exceptional. They later changed their name to Deadmoon and finally Feel, before finally releasing their own alterna-rock CD called This. (Feel This, get it?) I was seriously into this CD during my first year at the store, as it combined the hard rock vocals that I loved from the past with a current grungier sound. I gave it significant store play, since it was a current hip sound.
Two of their songs that made it onto the Raw M.E.A.T discs were standouts: “Once A Madman” and “Mama’s Love”. But ripping these tapes to disc, I re-discovered two more. The unfortunately titled “Likkin’ Dog” was a great hard rock groover. By the second tape, they were incorporating more experimental alternative sounds (ahead of their game back in 1991) and a track like “Bleed” showcases an angry riffy side.
Donner later formed a band called Ledgend with ex-Slik Toxik drummer Neal Busby, but I don’t know what happened to them after that.
Attitude were a glam rock band from Toronto who scored some video play with their song “Break The Walls Down”. Their cassette looked pro all the way, printed on heavy card stock and even featuring a separate lyric sheet. Their weakness was in the lead vocals department. By 1994 they had abandoned the hard rock stylings and gone for a thrash alternative hybrid and changed their named to Jesus Christ. Probably not a smart move. The CD (released on the major label A&M) looked terribly low budget with awful indi cover art. I recall trying to sell this in our store for 99 cents. (I unfortunately paid $20 for it brand new when it was first released in 1994! Little did I know that we would later see dozens of copies thanks liquidators. They were impossible to sell, even though it boasted a throat-wrenching cover of “Ace of Spades”.)
Lastly, Gypsy Jayne were a very talented group from Oakville Ontario. They released a song under the generic name Wildside on a Raw M.E.A.T CD first. Then they changed their name and put out a cassette. This cassette got a lot of car play back in the record store days, and when we had a tape deck in the store I even gave it some store play. Gypsy Jayne were very much in the mold of Illusions-era Guns N’ Roses. Not terribly original, but their ace in the hole was their classically trained guitarist Johannes Linstead. His talent speaks for itself today, as a nominee for a Juno award and winner of several other prestigious awards. He has several flamenco albums out today, but to me I’ll always remember him as the shredder in Gypsy Jayne, playing alongside the Axl Rose clone Andy Law. (The Gypsy Jayne cassette, Alive and Wandering, has an early flamenco piece called “Romanza”!)
The songwriting on this cassette is really excellent for what it is. Every song is different, but memorable, catchy, and with a distinct direction. If they had come out a year or two earlier, they could have been as big as L.A. Guns, Cinderella, or any of those bands.
Unfortunately, this cassette was well loved and well worn, and is barely listenable today. Hey Johannes…any chance of a reissue?
RECORD STORE TALES Part 145: Cassettes Part I – T-Rev’s Tapes
I’m sure this comes as no surprise, but back in the day, us Record Store Dudes were expert mix tape makers. I’ve been making mix tapes since I got my first dual cassette deck, back in 1985. It was a Sanyo. Thanks mom & dad.
I made all sorts of mix tapes. I made mixes of whatever tunes I was into at the time. I made mix tapes for girls that I liked, sneaking in the odd commercial Judas Priest tune like “Parental Guidance” in order to sway them to the dark side. I made greatest hits tapes. I distinctly remember an Ace Frehley greatest hits tape I made, 90 minutes. The first 5 songs were classic Kiss hits that he sang. The next 5 were from his first solo album. Then on side two, 5 songs from Frehley’s Comet and 5 from Second Sighting. I also made a Kiss hits tape from the post-Double Platinum period, basically all the singles from Dynasty through to Asylum.
When I first met T-Rev almost a decade later (1994), I had met a kindred spirit. He was doing the same thing! He made hits mixes for Guns N’ Roses. The Four Horsemen. Van Halen. And so on and so forth. But in a lot of ways, he had taken it to the next level.
Trevor had an artistic ability above and beyond me, he was really really good at art. That’s why we used to get him to make all our store signage. So it probably should have been no surprise to me that he put equal effort into his cover art. He did a beautiful job on the Guns and Van Halen mixes!
Somehow these ended up in my possession. I don’t even remember how anymore, but here they are. It looks to me like not only did T-Rev did awesome cover art, but he numbered all his mixes and must have had a numerical filing system. The Guns mix appears to be a Part II, and is #34 in his library. Van Halen must have followed shortly behind at #38. I also ended up with an early mix of his, number #14, called What De Hell!!
I’m really glad that I found these! It brings back a lot of memories of the early days at the record store. There was no such thing as blank CD’s yet, and even if there was, T-Rev didn’t have a computer to burn one on yet. Tapes were our canvas, and they even had a longer running time than a CD. 90 minutes was our standard, but you could even go as high as 100 without losing too much sound quality.
Not that there was much sound quality!
Thanks for loaning these to me T-Rev! If you still have something to play them on, I’ll send ’em back to ya if you want them!
Ahh, December. Christmas! Traditionally, it’s a time when people used to come in, by the masses, looking for whatever that season’s one hit wonder was. I was just thinking today about this goof that’s out right now, this Psy person. I was thinking about how people are probably buying his song like there’s no tomorrow this season. Then in the new year, when his 15 minutes are up, he’ll be in every bargain bin across the nation.
A similar thing happened in 1999. You might remember a one hit flash in the pan called Lou Bega. A little number called “Mambo #5”.
I had the unfortunate experience of having to hear his album over and over that season. Y’see, it’s not just the general public that was going for that one hit wonder crap, there were also a couple record store people too. (For shame!) I won’t say who subjected us to this album, numerous times, but she knows who she is.
It’s because of her that I know there’s also another song on Lou Bega’s album called “1+2=2”, which is basically the exact same song as “Mambo #5”, just with different words.
As is always the case, in the new year, we couldn’t give that sucker away. As it sat collecting dust on our shelves, one of our customers put it succinctly:
“Lou Bega? Huh huh huh…more like Lou Beggin’ for Change!”
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