Robert Lawson is a friend and authorSolidarity Forever: The Art and Soul of Stevie Van Zandt.* He recently posted this hilarious story on social media and I asked if I could use it. It is good to know there are still new Record Store Tales to be told!
RECORD STORE TALES#1199: The Springsteen Fan that Couldn’t Math
Bruce Springsteen recently released the second instalment of his Tracks box sets, called Tracks II: The Lost Albums. It contains seven albums’ worth of unreleased Bruce Springsteen, and has received critical and fan acclaim for the quality of its songs. Robert recently had an interested customer.
CUSTOMER: “How much is the new Springsteen boxed set, like $200?”
R: “Actually double that.”
CUSTOMER: “It’s $600???”
R: …sigh…
* Solidarity Forever is the definitive account of the musical journey of the music legend of Disciples of Soul, Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, and anti-apartheid project Sun City fame, Little Steven Van Zandt. Following Van Zandt’s unforgettable sixty-year (and counting!) career from his beginnings with the Asbury Jukes and Springsteen to leading the Disciples of Soul, from touring, arranging, and producing timeless music to playing an onscreen gangster in The Sopranos and Lilyhammer, Solidarity Forever is packed with a level of detail that will impress devotees and enchant new fans.
Every song, every album, every single, live shows; bootlegs, production credits, covers, activism-everything is covered here and presented alongside fascinating interviews of over forty past and present band members and Van Zandt himself. A stunning work of music journalism and love letter to rock ‘n’ roll, Solidarity Forever delivers Little Steven’s story and the timeless messages of his music like never before.
“This is no time to be fighting each other What we need, what we need is solidarity.”
RECORD STORE TALES #1198: Happy 101st Birthday to Doris Anne Winter
One year ago today, we wished my Grandma Dolly a happy 100th birthday. She was visited by friends, and family from afar. She enjoyed cake and balloons. She legitimately had a good time. She actually had two parties: One for friends and neighbors and one just for close family and friends. She was exhausted by the end of it. Heck I’d be exhausted if I celebrated my birthday over two consecutive days, and I’m half her age.
Grandma is still with us today despite the odds, and will be celebrating 101 years. She doesn’t look the same anymore. The last six months have taken a toll as she has battled time and illness. Something in her just refuses to give in. Back in January, I did a special show with John Clauser as a tribute to my grandma, thinking we’d be losing her imminently. Now it is July.
Today she will just have a few visitors. There won’t be a lot of celebrating happening. She’s just too tired and weak. But she did truck on for another year, hitting another milestone. 101 years. Imagine being there for the roaring twenties, the dirty thirties, the Second World War and the baby boom. Picture living through the rapid advances of the 1950s amd 1960s, when television became the norm and Grandpa worked for Bell telephone, connecting all the neighbours with the latest technology for communication. Grandchildren arrived in the 1970s amd 1980s, and Grandma had a whole new adventure ahead of her, spoiling us. For us, when we were kids, being babysat by Grandma was a treat. She’d let us eat Rice Crispies with lots of sugar.
All this and more. Living through the 1990s when her Grandson learned to drive, and started taking her out on weekends. She’d make dinner for me every Thursday night when I was at school doing night classes. Anthropology 101. I loved that class. I would arrive stuffed full of her famous pork chops in mushroom soup. Onto a new millennium, and finally a global pandemic that closed her in as we tried to keep her safe. She survived two bouts with Covid. Imagine that.
I’m really proud of my Grandma for hanging on as hard as she has. We thought she was gone many times over the past three or four years. I brag about her a lot. A 100 year old is a rare thing, but a 101 year old is even more so. It doesn’t look like an easy existence, being 101 years old, but she lives for our visits. They are the highlight of her week. Fortunately she has lots of visitors. My mom goes to see her several days a week and she has friends visiting on the other days. Where she used to babysit me, now when I visit I sort of babysit her. She asks for the TV to be changed to the baseball game, or she asks for me to find her glasses. She can’t see very well anymore, but she likes the sound of the TV. She still loves her Blue Jays.
You never know what to expect when you go and visit Grandma these days, but I hope she has a good day today.
Happy birthday Grandma. We all love you. We just want you to have a nice day today, and we’ll see you very soon.
RECORD STORE TALES #1197: Moose Sausage & Mental Health
Summer is well on its way. I’ve waited a long time to get here.
I love doing live broadcasts from the cottage. This weekend was going to be packed full, just like our bags and boxes that we loaded in the car for our first trip of July. We hit the road at 4:30 on Thursday. Preparing for Friday’s live episode of 50 Years of Iron Maiden, we played all of Live at Donington on the way to the lake. Not necessarily the best album for a lake drive, but Jen liked it, and it helped me prepare a little bit extra for the show.
Thursday night was peaceful, but hot. There was not much to do but play music on the porch. I cued up Tonight At Toad’s Place by Blotto, and started working on some show-related writing. Dr. Kathryn came over for a quick visit. We gossiped a bit about people we used to know, and after dark I shut it down for the night. Friday was going to be a fun day for us.
I began my Friday morning by cooking up a delicious moose sausage, and editing a new episode of 50 Years of Iron Maiden. I wanted to do minimal editing, just to fix a couple spots with issues, but I ended up having a little more fun with it. At 8 AM we left for the butcher (The Beefway) and bought two steaks, a chicken breast, some lamb chops, and the best bacon I’ve ever cooked in my life. This extra thick cut bacon was so soft and sweet. It led me to an idea.
Canadian breakfast: moose sausage & mayo on a bun, with coffee.
We were going to do roasted potatoes on the BBQ. Jen likes to stuff hers with butter, but I had a different idea. I sliced up some fatty parts of the bacon and stuffed my potato with that. The end result was a delicious potato that tasted like a Smokey Bacon BBQ potato chip. The bacon pieces inside were soft and melted like butter in your mouth. A new masterpiece, but one that I feel I can only do with the exact right bacon. It has to be cut thick with lots of fat. And it worked beautifully.
The lamb, chicken and steaks also turned out really well. I did up some stuffed peppers with cream cheese, green onions and more bacon. The chicken breast ended up being the best one I’d ever made. The Beefway simply have the best food, and I have to admit I’m not too bad a chef myself. I used about half a bottle of BBQ sauce on one chicken breast, but that’s because I wanted it perfectly and completely coated. It came out so juicy and flavorful. Grocery store chicken seems to have a weird preservative taste these days. Not the stuff from the Beefway!
Friday night’s episode of 50 Years of Iron Maiden went really well. It was our first live episode in quite a while, but I am glad that Harrison and I still have the skills. A surprise came that night: a donation! Our very first donation! Viewer Ryan Potter had this to say:
Thanks for this series guys! I’ve been enjoying revisiting these albums and going through my Maiden Collection with each episode.
Thank you Ryan for this first-ever thank-you. If we ever felt like we were not doing as good a job as we want to, Ryan’s comment will remind us that we’re doing just fine.
Friday was a difficult episode, because we had to review four CDs of Iron Maiden: A Real Live One, A Real Dead One, and Live at Donington (2 CDs). There were also two CD singles with an additional three bonus tracks to tackle. It required a lot of listening and a lot of notes, but Harrison and I managed to cover it all between the two of us. A proud night.
Friday night’s broadcast location for 50 Years of Iron Maiden.
But that was just the beginning for our live streaming adventures on the weekend.
Jex Russell, my “other” main co-host for many moons in the past, has been dealing with life lately. He recently had some free time come up, and said to me, “I’m ready. I want to do a live show. I want to tell people where I have been and what I’ve been up to. Let’s call it Ask Jex Anything and we’ll discuss mental health.”
I loved this idea.
We discussed when to go live. I was pushing for 8 AM Saturday morning, based on a past show we did in that time slot together. Mostly though, I didn’t want to do two live shows during prime cottage hours. One was fine. Two would be spending too much time on a screen during the best time of day. Jex was hesitant. What’s the point of an “Ask Jex Anything” episode if there’s nobody watching to ask? I crossed my fingers and set up the broadcast from my favourite spot: fireside. I gathered the firewood and a Canadian flag for an epic backdrop. I waited for 8 AM to come.
I think I had pretty much the best broadcast desk of any music show on YouTube today. You can get Pete Pardo with his wall of CDs behind him, or a “Hair Metal Guru” with loads of memorabilia, but nobody else in music had a backdrop like mine. A roaring fire, a Canadian flag, and nature. A few people walking down the road were wondering why this guy was out at 8 AM, talking on a laptop, at a computer desk in the middle of a beautiful green enclave. Why? Because it’s awesome!
Saturday’s office.
I had confidence that we would do a good show, viewers or no viewers. We always do.
It didn’t take long for the viewers to show up, and for Jex and I to open up, about mental health, music and balance. The questions began pouring in, and I could not keep up with the comments. Some people woke up early just to watch this special episode of Grab A Stack of Rock. Johnny Clauser and Tim Durling joined as surprise guests to share their own stories. Confessions were made, and I told a chapter of my story that I have never revealed before. Not even in Record Store Tales.
I believe that Satuday’s show, Ask Jex Anything: Music and Mental Health, is the most important episode we’ve ever done. Much to Jex’s relief, we had great views. Even exceeding the previous night’s 50 Years of Iron Maiden. We are very, very proud.
It ended up being a very good decision to go live in the morning. Black Sabbath were playing their final concert that afternoon. Everybody would be watching that, had we decided to go live later on. The morning show was a blessing.
From that point on, Saturday was ours to enjoy. It got hot – very hot. Eventually we went into town to get some air conditioning and soda pop. Staying cool was a challenge, and it prevented me from doing too much that day. No writing completed.
Droning on.
I did get to fly my drone a bit. I chose to fly my original drone, the Potensic. It is the better drone for stunt flying, and I made a few great videos. I still have to edit these. I managed to get one uploaded, which is “Nothing At All” by Deep Purple, to the visuals of a Lake Huron sunrise.
Sunday morning was time to pack our bags and head home. My mood crashed that day. It was an uncanny feeling of autumn; of “back to school”, even though it was only July. I could not shake that depressed feeling. We listened to April Wine on the way home because I wanted music that I was less familiar with. “All Over Town” is my new favourite song, but the crash hit me hard.
We tried to cheer me up by ordering in a nice dinner (The Burgers Priest), but failed. I woke up Monday morning unable to get out of bed. I lay there for hours, tired and worn out. I worked from home on Monday. In the old days I would have gone to work and felt worse and worse as the day went on. This time I managed. It is nice to have those options to work from home. It saved my Monday.
A beautiful weekend was had, despite the crash at the end. We’ll be back for my birthday. Close yet far!
RECORD STORE TALES #1195: No Smoking? No Second Date!
Disclaimer: I have never held it against anyone, be it a friend or girlfriend, who smoked. Very rarely, I expressed my distaste for the habit, which was met with angry rebuttals, but I never practised any kind of discrimination based on smoking. I even allowed smoking in my car. We’ll get there, and you’ll understand why when we do.
Working at the Beat Goes On, lots of the employees smoked. The breaks were frequent, but I let it slide. It did bite one of my employees, Matty K, in the ass one day.
Matt’s parents were British, and his mum had the most lovely accent. She called for him one day while he was out having a cigarette.
“I’ll go get him, he’s just outside having a smoke,” I informed her. She thanked me, and I went outside to hand Matt the phone.
After he completed his call with his mother, he told me that she didn’t know he smoked. Until now.
Hah. That’s still funny. I don’t know what happened at home after that, but I can say that it was I that outed him to his mother.
Truth be told, I can’t remember who smoked and who didn’t, but it seemed like all of them smoked with the exception of a few. OK…I admit to one thing. I was always jealous that they got to go outside for a break, a seemingly pleasurable experience, and I didn’t. I felt like pretending to take up the habit just to get breaks when I wanted them, but knew I couldn’t fake it.
T-Rev was a smoker, and I lived with him for six months. I couldn’t have hated smoking that much. I lived in a smoking house. I did have to clean out his ashtrays myself.
In 2000, the Kitchener-Waterloo region banned indoor smoking, in a test project that would be adopted province-wide in 2006. I thought it was a great idea, though some of my co-workers sure didn’t. Bingo halls and bars saw a temporary decline in sales, but the bounce happened quickly. Now it’s so natural to see people smoking outside, we don’t even think of it anymore. In 2000, however, it was new and unique to my region.
And, for some reason, I couldn’t seem to find a local girlfriend. They were all long distance. As an added bonus, most of them didn’t drive. However, I did have one date with a girl from Toronto who drove. I was working at our Cambridge store at that point in the story, which was T-Rev’s store. Meanwhile, T-Rev was in Ajax building a new store. With hindsight it was a pretty messed up way to run your staff. You had a perfectly good store manager in T-Rev, who was familiar with the layout and the clientele, but they shipped him off to a town two hours away to work with his hands. Trevor was made all kinds of promises about how he wouldn’t be working behind a counter anymore, and he’d be building 10 new locations a year. Yet they hedged their bets, and didn’t hire a new manager for his store. Instead they had me manage two at once. I was exhausted, but this girl from Toronto was willing to meet me after work and go out for dinner. She drove! How could I say no to that?
I remember being a little freaked out, that for all I knew, she could be a dude, but I decided that I was just being paranoid.
She was not a dude. She was taller than me, with black hair in a short bob. She was definitely out of my league. She had a black leather jacket. It was spring, and it was still warm outside. We met up in the parking lot of an East Side Mario’s nearby. We did the customary hug and headed to the restaurant.
She turned to me and asked, “Can we get a table in the smoking section?”
“No such thing!” I told her. “Indoor smoking is banned here.”
“WHAT.” I’ll never forget that. Just a totally flat, unimpressed WHAT.
To make up for the lack of indoor smoking, I joined her outside when we wanted a cigarette.
It didn’t help. There was no second date. And I blame the no smoking, despite being out of my element.
Of course, we all know the happy ending to the story. I married a smoker, but Jen eventually quit in 2008. Her dad was very proud of her. She hasn’t had one since.
I’ll tell you a secret that I’ve never shared with anyone before. My parents do not know. This is new information for the world.
When we were dating, I got sick and tired of the frequency of her smoke breaks. I remember putting her through Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, and she smoked every 15 minutes, I kid you not. Every 15 minutes.
Driving to the lake, she wasn’t so bad. She could go 30 minutes. We stretched it to 45, but eventually I got so sick and tired of having to stop for smoke breaks, that I just let her smoke in my car. My new car. My new leased car.
RECORD STORE TALES #1194: You got exactly two words of that right.
I have a soft spot for Ian Gillan and Roger Glover’s Accidentally on Purpose. The Deep Purple Pair had a writing partnership dating all the way back to the 1960s and a band called Episode Six. Before Ian was fired from Deep Purple in 1988, he and Roger emerged from the sessions for The House of Blue Light with an excess of stifled creativity. These lighter, more summery tuned formed the basis for their only duo album. I found it on cassette in the mid-90s, right when I was seriously collecting Deep Purple for the first time.
It’s not rock. There are some songs that do rock a bit, but it’s more like fun pop with roots in rock and prog. There’s saxophone, and loads of programming. Very 1980s. It took a couple listens to adjust to this distinctly non-Purple album, but once certain songs like the floaty “Clouds and Rain” and the funky “Evil Eye” started to hit, they stuck. Programming aside, you’ll hear some cool instrumentation and musicianship on this album. Eventually, I grew to like it. As soon as I found out the CD reissue had three bonus tracks that were not on the cassette, I upgraded, as I often do.
The bonus tracks included a song that would have worked on a corny 80s Beach Boys album, called “Cayman Island”. It also had a sax-heavy cover of “Purple People Eater” which is the definition of guilty pleasure.
Shortly after I bought the CD, a used copy came into stock at the Beat Goes On. It always happened that way. If you bought something new, you’d see a used copy a matter of weeks later. It was eerily inevitable. Of course, when that used copy came in, I threw it into the rotation for store play one afternoon.
A guy walked up to the counter, intrigued by the music.
“What’s this that we’re listening to right now?” he asked.
I was thrilled to have someone ask!
“This is a side project by Ian Gillan and Roger Glover from Deep Purple,” I answered with inner glee, but also some trepidation as I’d personally prefer to keep listening to it!
He responded, “Roger Waters from Pink Floyd?“
What…? No! No! You got just two words of that right: “Roger” and “from”!
He sulked away upon learning it was not Floydian music. No sale that day!
RECORD STORE TALES #1193: Do you believe in Car-ma?
For a couple years now, the neighbour across the hall has been messing with my side view mirror. As if to make a statement about parking too close to his car, he likes to push my side view mirror inwards. Sometimes I would be driving to work in the morning, not realizing I didn’t have the use of my passenger side view mirror. It was infuriating. In our Condo Facebook group, I kindly and then more aggressively requested that whoever was messing with my car, to stop.
There’s a cardinal rule I was raised with and stayed true though adulthood: you don’t touch somebody else’s car. You just don’t.
I’ve never seen this guy actually flip my mirror in, but I have seen him touch my car on purpose before. There is a general consensus that he’s the guy doing it, since he parks on that side of my car.
I’ve considered being vindictive before, and fucking with his side view mirrors right back, but that wouldn’t be winning, would it? It would be hypocritical as to the cardinal rule of not touching other people’s cars.
Fortunately, karma was in my corner. This was the hood of his car on June 10 2025. Nature took its course for me! Sometimes you gotta chalk it up as a win.
RECORD STORE TALES #1192: Close Encounter of the Stinky Kind!
It has been the Spring of Unseasonal Cold! Unable to catch a break this year, Jen and I have spent most of our cottage time indoors with the heat cranked. What a change from years past. The water levels are low, and we have not seen much wildlife. Well, except for a recent close encounter.
We left for the lake on Thursday night, to the soundtrack of Frehley’s Comet. Friday was a day off, and it was spent cooking exotic meat on the barbecue (more on that in a bit). It was also spent flying my new drone. A step up from the Potensic, I now have in my arsenal a Ruko U11MINI 4k. Unfortunately, due to the wind and cold, I only had one flight with it. You can see from the video footage that the camera is far superior. The images and videos are clearer, and level with the horizon. I will be posting a full review soon, and more videos, as I work with the drone and gain more experience.
We ran out propane on Friday night, just after my lamb chops were cooked to a perfect medium rare. The last gasps of flame puffed to an end as the lamb was finished. Of course, with two big beautiful steaks on deck for Saturday night, we had to get more propane. Friday was the day for exotic meat – scallops, moose sausage, and lamb chops. Each one of them turned out perfect. My scallops had an abundance of butter to soak up, seasoned with garlic oil and chunks. The moose sausage was strong but not game-y, and the lamb of course was the highlight. I did those with butter, garlic, oregano and fresh parsley. But Saturday was steak day, the “big” day. We had a porterhouse and a ribeye to grill! Propane would be purchased on Saturday morning.
I woke Jen up around 7:00 AM. Nobody likes hitting the Kincardine McGas bar during the breakfast rush, so we aimed to be there before that. I started warming up the family truckster, Jen got in, and I noticed that I left a Tim’s coffee cup in the car. I grabbed it and quickly ran over to my fireplace to toss it out. It was a cool but beautiful morning, still dim as we waited for the sun to penetrate the clouds.
Just as I approached the fireplace from behind, preparing my aim to launch my cup, I saw movement!
Black and white movement!
I skidded to a halt and aborted the launch of my coffee cup. It landed meters away from the target — which was a blessed thing! Inside the fireplace, nosing around looking for scraps, was a large black and white skunk. I shrieked like a baby and ran. “There’s a skunk in there!!” I shouted to Jen who had no idea why I was running.
I was literally a second away from being sprayed. If I had not halted when I did, that coffee cup would have launched right into the fireplace, hitting and startling the skunk, and thus ruining my weekend and probably the week after.
Close call! They say close only counts in horseshoes? It also counts when barely missing a skunk at 7:00 AM!
RECORD STORE TALES #1191: Top Five Cool Things You May Not Know About Alan Niven
A couple weeks ago, I was asked by John Snow of 2Loud2OldMusic to co-host a big big interview he was offered.
“How would you like to interview Alan Niven with me?” he asked. John hadn’t done a solo interview before, and wouldn’t have minded a backup.
“Alan Niven? The Alan Niven? Yes!” How could I say no? The guy who managed Guns N’ Roses during their peak? The guy who co-wrote some amazing Great White songs, drawing out their best qualities? The guy who has a new book coming out called Sound N’ Fury? Of course!
While nervous, reading Alan’s book left us with loads and loads of questions to ask him. Without spoiling the interview, which will debut next week on The Collection on YouTube, here are the Top Five Cool Things You May Not Know About Alan Niven that I discovered in this interview process.
5. He had the “stones” to demand $1,000,000 from Mick Jagger, for Guns to open for the Rolling Stones on four dates at the Hollywood Bowl. Guns were originally offered half that.
4. He had to physically pull up Jack Russell’s pants, more than once, to keep him from being arrested.
3. He is well read and well spoken. He opens Sound N’ Fury with a quote from Macbeth.
2. There is an absolutely brilliant story about a music video director that later became a mega-smash-hit movie director, and the way Niven unfolded the story and dropped the name was pure epic storytelling. Read the book to get the name.
1. “Nobody died on my watch.” Indeed, of all the self-destructive personalities in the bands he managed, nobody died under his guidance. That is indeed an accomplishment, and to me, the most powerful quote in the book.
Pick up Sound N’ Fury by Alan Niven, wherever fine books are sold.
SOONER [Noun]: “Sooners” is how my dad refers to the people who show up to go to the beach for the 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.”
RECORD STORE TALES #1190: Return of the Sooners
I like to do something new every time I go to the lake, if possible. This time, I didn’t have anything planned. I had two shows to do, but otherwise I wanted to enjoy my time and the surroundings without too much goal-setting.
This time, however, plans took a turn of their own. Allow me to explain.
John Snow invited me to co-host an interview with a big, big name. That interview was scheduled for Thursday afternoon, the 22nd of May. I had planned to go to the cottage on Friday afternoon. However, the big interview got re-scheduled at the last minute, to Monday the 26th. Frustrated, I decided to cheer myself up by going to the lake on Thursday night instead, and working from there on Friday morning. Something unthinkable just five years ago.
The wifi is better at the lake and I have more space. We left town Thursday night and I dutifully worked a cold, rainy Friday morning from the cottage. I wanted to work from the porch, but the cold and rain made this impossible. It is rarely so cold in May, but here we are. We have not had one nice weekend at the lake yet this season!
Even so, working from the lake was awesome: making my bacon mere inches away from my laptop, or being able to step outside and enjoy the (cold) fresh air! But best of all, when the day was over we didn’t have to drive anywhere. We were already there! The bonus time spent at the lake was a game changer.
Friday afternoon was booked off. We went into town to buy some treats, and came back to a Friday afternoon all our own. There was nobody around. Not one cottage on our stretch was occupied that weekend. The peace and quiet was unusual! The last time up, I was worried that the guy across the road was going to blow leaves all through my Friday show. This time there was nobody across the street.
Mid-afternoon, sitting in my armchair, I saw a car across the road. I saw him stop, look out the door, and pull into the neighbour’s driveway.
“Ah crap,” I murmured to myself. “Looks like we won’t be alone after all this weekend.”
A few moments later, I noticed five people standing and sitting around our bench at the beach.
“That wouldn’t be the neighbours,” I said to myself. “They have their own property on the beach. They have never used ours. Who are these people?”
I allowed them a few minutes to take pictures or do whatever they were doing, but they didn’t move on.
Sooners. Goddamn sooners! They were back after a long absence. I hadn’t seen any sooners in two years. I decided to make sure they knew they were on private property, and using my bench!
I put on my hoodie and walked down to the beach. I saw them turn and watch me approach. Five guys. They looked like students to me.
I nodded as I approached my bench. I was curt with them.
“Hey, just going to use my bench. This is my property.” I paused. “See ya.”
They began moving on, but back through the neighbour’s property.
“You can’t go that way,” I alerted them. “That’s private property. You have to use the public walkway.” I pointed to it, a few feet to their left.
“Do you know where there is parking around here?” one of them asked.
“There isn’t any. This is a private road. You have to go park up the side road.”
I watched them leave. After a while, I walked up to the side road to see where they parked. They were nowhere to be found. They had left the subdivision completely. I guess I scared them off.
In the Battle of the Sooners in 2025, the score is now 1-0 for me!
Because of the cold and rain, we didn’t get a lot of outdoors stuff done to report on. However, the weekend was not over, and we did get some drone time and some photos taken, so there will be more to come.
Growing up in an Italian family, we ate a lot of pasta. Usually it was the tried and true spaghetti and meatballs. Even though she’s not Italian, my mom makes a mean lasagna. These were always treats and delights to have for dinner, but as far as pasta went, nothing topped my Aunt Maria’s aglio e olio.
It’s very simple yet requires knowledge and the perfect touch. Aglio e olio is simply spaghetti in olive oil and garlic. It’s usually served with chili flakes and parsley or other herbs. As simple as it gets; no red sauce and no meat. If you do add meat, I recommend medium rare steak or garlic shrimp. It’s up to you; my sister Dr. Kathryn likes hers with mushrooms.
We looked forward to aglio with Aunt every time there was a special occasion. My aunt would often make a meal for the rest of the family, such as a ham, but also make a batch of aglio special for me. We had it for birthdays and we had it for visits. Try as we might, we never could quite get the recipe right at home. The recipe had been passed down from her mother, and she made it better than most restaurants. There were tricks to it, as it turns out, that I had completely missed.
Aunt never added meat to her aglio. She never had to. The garlic was always soft and golden, and the overall gestault of the pasta gave an aura of umami even without meat. You could add kalamata olives if you wanted to keep it vegan but add even more saltiness.
I attempted many variations of this at home, all failures. I tried cheating and using garlic olive oil, or enhancing the pasta with garlic powder. Awful! I added vegetables and cheeses in the effort to bring in more flavour, never matching my aunt’s perfection. I would phone them at their home in Stratford and ask for tips. Obviously something was getting lost in translation, because it always came out bland.
And they said it was the simplest one! Indeed, look at an Italian restaurant’s menu and aglio e olio is always the cheapest of the spaghettis. There’s hardly anything to it.
I thought the secret was to make sure you added some hot, starchy pasta water to the oily mixture of garlic and extra virgin olive oil. Simple enough. What I didn’t really understand until Saturday, May 18 2025 was that I was doing everything right, just not enough.
I was determined to get it right this time. I asked Jen to pick up a nice steak and some spaghetti and I was going to get aglio e olio right for a change. For the first time.
Dutifully she came home with a beautiful strip loin with a nice cap of fat, at 50% off because she knows exactly when during the week the meat goes on sale. I rubbed it with olive coil, sea salt, ground pepper, and a little Montreal steak spice for Jen. She likes it; I can do without except in light moderation. I chopped up a whole bulb of garlic into different sized chunks, for a variety of flavours and textures as you found them on your fork. I smooshed some. It varied.
Using my cast iron pan, I seared that steak on medium high on all four sides, and then let it cook a little longer after turning the heat down. I chopped some parsley and let the steak rest. It was a perfect medium rare, as I’d discover at the end when I finally sliced it. It was also perfectly seasoned.
I set a pot to boil, adding a little olive oil to the water (I understand this helps keep the spaghetti from sticking), and a lot of table salt. Not sea salt; table salt. I didn’t measure, but it was a lot.
“Aglio can’t be too salty;” I reasoned. Every time I made it in the past, I sought ways to up the saltiness, be it with meat or olives. Salting it at the table didn’t work. What I learned was, you have to salt the pasta by salting the water, generously. This is what will give the aglio its flavour later on, enhancing the garlic and finally making its presence known.
Once the water is at a vigorous boil, I throw in a whole package of spaghetti. I cracked the noodles in half and dumped them in the water. I put the lid on and they cooked quickly.
I already had a saucepan full of olive oil going at medium heat. Exactly three minutes after I put the spaghetti in the water, I dumped all my garlic in the olive oil, stirring frequently and ensuring it didn’t burn.
Always taste your spaghetti frequently to make sure it’s not going to be overcooked. That’s the worst. Instead, take the spaghetti out of the water about a minute before it’ll be at the perfect done-ness for you. As soon as I took my first taste of the not-yet-cooked noodles, I knew I was close. I hadn’t tasted that since my aunt made aglio at the cottage. It was so familiar. When the spaghetti was done, I drained it immediately. Key here is to save at least 1/2 cup of that salty, starchy pasta water, because you’re going to immediately transfer all the pasta into the saucepan with the garlic oil. Pour in the 1/2 cup of water and mix everything together in the saucepan, ensuring you coat every strand of spaghetti with that starchy garlic oil. Throw in some chili flakes and parsley. Add Parmesan cheese at the table to taste.
I threw some beautiful steak slices on top and served. My aunt’s recipe had been saved.
You see, my aunt has been suffering from Alzheimer’s for many years now. She can’t cook and wouldn’t be able to tell us the recipe anymore. It would have been lost. I saved it today. Let it be known, that on May 18 2025, I saved the Maria Ladano (Festoso) recipe for aglio e olio. It lives again.
I know that my aunt doesn’t understand what is happening to her right now, but I hope that her spirit would be gladdened to know that I have saved this classic recipe for all time. Here it is. I just wrote it down. It can never go away now.
Thank you Aunt Maria. For all the toy trucks, GI Joes and Transformers and CDs and tapes, the spaghetti was the best gift.
mikeladano.com 