Record Store Tales

Part 58.5: S*** My Dad Says

By popular demand: Another quote from my dad!

While watching country music on TV: 

“Is that Shania Twain?  And her brother, Choo-Choo?”

Part 58: Klassic Kwotes VII!

1. “This is going to be worth a lot of money, one day.”  Said in regards to Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind” remake single.  Yeah.  He sold about a zillion of them, which people bought multiple copies of (one to play and one to keep sealed!) and now are in every bargain bin across the continent…usually at 99 cents.

2. Phil Lynott proclaimed that “Tonight there’s gonna be a jailbreak, somewhere in this town.”  One day while listening to this track at work, Neil retorted:  “Somewhere in this town?  Maybe they should start by checking at the jail.”

3. A wave of the hand.  “You don’t need to see my identification.”  This Jedi mind trick was cast upon me (jokingly, I assure you) by a witty young man after I asked him for ID while selling CDs.  Fortunately, I am a Headbanger.  Mind tricks do not work on me!

4. “I’m buying two CD’s.  Do I get a discount?”  Two discs?  Really? 

5. I came home from work one day with a CD sized bag in my hand.  My very frugal father said to me (in “that tone”), “What did you go and waste your money on this time?”  I said, “Dad, it’s the new album by Kiss!”  His classic response:  “Kiss?  Don’t you already have them?”

I don’t know why he’s flapping his arms

6. While we’re on my dad.  During the Pepsi Power Hour, he used to like to stroll into the living room, heads clasped to his ears in mock agony, and say, “What’s wrong with that man on the TV?  He’s screaming like he’s in pain!  Does he have appendicitis?”

7. Finally, my dad has a penchant for mispronouncing the names of things he dislikes.  For example, “Who is this Lady Googoo person I see on TV?”

8. A guy in a green suit carrying a briefcase walked up to the counter.  “I have to go to court tomorrow and I want some music to get me psyched up.  Do you have the Clockwork Orange soundtrack?”  (Same guy who, another time, asked us, “Do you like the drugs?”)

9. Some questions don’t bug you so much, unless the same person asks the same question over and over again.  One guy kept asking me, “Do you have Black Sabbath, 1991?”  I’d tell him that there is no such album.  In fact 1991 was the first year in several that Sabbath failed to release an album.  “Do you have Black Sabbath, 1991?”  No!  Nobody has it, because that’s a made up name!

10. “Hello, it’s Matt’s mother, would Matt be available?”  This perfectly innocent question was asked of one of our new guys, Chris.  Chris responded, “Yeah, he’s outside having a smoke, I’ll go get him.”  Problem:  Matt’s mother did not know he smoked!

Part 57: Top Five Things A Record Store Smells Like

5.  Hopefully the most obvious one.  Farts! At least when the guy code named “Steven Tyler” or I were working.  We ate a lot of fast food.

4. Fast Food.  We were constantly eating Subway, Lick’s, McDonalds, or Burger King depending on location.  Subway was and always shall be my weapon of choice, but it was BK’s Kong sized triple stacker that made the store smell like beef for days.  Strangely, my addiction to fast food only got worse after seeing Super Size Me.

3. B.O.  If wasn’t the customers, every once in a while, we’d get stuck with a stinky employee. 

2. Rancid Coffee.  One employee who shall go unnamed was prone to drink two or three of the damn things a day, and then throwing her coffee (unfinished) into the garbage (bag).  And then not take out the garbage.  Also, any customer carrying a Tim Horton’s cup always left their empties on the counter, or even classier, on the CD shelves.

1. Air Freshener.  Thank you, Glade.

Part 56: Top Five Flops

This isn’t some definitive list or anything like that.  Just five memories that stand out among the others:  my Top Five Flops.

#5. The Rolling Stones – Bridges to Babylon.  I know this album didn’t sit well for a few people, but we just flat out ordered too many.  They started coming in used within days and before too long, we had so many used copies that they were starting to show up in bargain bins.  Never a good sign when you’re the so-called greatest rock and roll band on Earth.

#4. Van Halen – III.  Same deal.  We ordered 50 copies.  I don’t know why.  This one was going to be a flop even before it was released.  Gary Cherone had no marquee value whatsoever in 1998.  We ordered 50, we ended up selling (probably) 5.

#3.  Hole – Live Through This.  Yes, it was huge in 199x, but by the late 90’s, you would have been a fool to pay more than $5.99 for this stinker, such was the frequency of the trade-ins.

#2. Titanic – Soundtrack.  Yeah, yeah, I know.  One of the biggest soundtracks of all time.  Well, as soon as Celine put out her own album with “My Life Will Go On” on it, the trade-ins began.  At one point we were bundling it with DVDs and VHS tapes just to get it out of the store.

#1.  Spin Doctors – Turn It Upside Down.   I recall at one point we had something like 20 copies, used, in stock.  We couldn’t give it away even for $3.99.  I wouldn’t know from listening to it, but I am pretty sure that it sucks.   It sold so infrequently, that I would be willing to bet that there are still copies in the 10-15 year-old-range, sitting there unsold today.

Part 55: Groupies

Hello, all, when we last met, we were talking about a weird record store stalker.  Today, we’re going to be talking about record store groupies.

Now, I dunno about other guys.  I didn’t have too many groupies.  (Spoogecakes does not count as a groupie, as she was not a customer, just a psycho employee.) Some of the girls did.  I remember Ashleigh had a couple admirers that we fondly referred to as “the Trekkies”.  Me, on the other hand…I had Tall One and Short One.

Problem:  If memory serves, Tall One was about 15, and Short One was about 16.  I was about 30.  

But the really weird thing is that Tall One and Short One had both simultaneously shitty, and awesome musical taste.   It was like…Schrödinger’s taste.  In the same transaction, they would purchase both Steve Vai, and the Moffats.  They later graduated on to Kiss.

Second weird thing.  That was a decade ago, and bizarrely through Facebook we re-contacted.  Tall One even came to my pre-wedding garage sale and bought some of my crap!  A lot of my crap, actually.

Everybody used to give me a hard time about Tall One and Short One, because they used to come in all the time, but I couldn’t be mean to them.  Well, I was mean a couple times, I had to tell them to get lost I was busy.  But then other times, they would come in with a huge box of Crispy Creme donuts.  That time, I remember I ate four in a row.

“You ate four in a row?” Short One later said.  “Do you know that each donut is like eating two Big Macs?”

“Uhhh…no?” I said.

“Congratulations, you ate eight Big Macs.  Those were for everybody!  Did you share?”

“Uhhh…a couple.”

So there you go.  I’m sure other record store guys have better groupie stories.  But did they get Cripsy Creme?  Exactly!

Part 54: Stalkers

Flashback: July 1994.

When I first started at the store, my first day, my new boss gave me the orientation.  We were both young, early 20’s.   It went very well.  I was excited.  I’ll never forget one thing he said:

I think you’ll find that it’s hard work, but rewarding and fun work.  You get to listen to music while you work, the discount is really good, and you’ll meet so many girls here.  Trust me, this is the best place to meet them.

That proved not to be the case.

Flash forward:  June 2004.

In the 10 years since, I had not once — not even once! — dated a girl through work.  Granted I’m kind of an idiot when it comes to girls.  Never did know how to talk to them without sounding like the biggest idiot in the world.  Also I somehow pick up a stutter when talking to them.

Anyway, year after year, I stuttered my way through a decade of probably talking like an idiot in front of hundreds of female customers.

One sunny afternoon in June, I was working the late shift.  It was a really nice day, a “windows open” kind of day.

I was working with this guy Matt.  Around 6 or so, I had to step out to pick up some boxes from another location.  Rush, “Summertime Blues” was on the radio, the first time I ever heard it.  When I returned to the store about 45 minutes later, I said, “Matt!  Holy shit man, I just heard the new Rush from their covers album.  It’s amazing man!”

Ignoring me, he said,”Did you see those two blonde girls in the store before you left?”

I said, “Yeah, the two hot ones?”

Matt responded, “Well one was hot, the other looked like the Angry Walrus.  That one left you a note.”

He handed me a piece of yellow paper with a kitten on it.  It just said “Paula” and then a phone number.

“Seriously?” I asked him.

“Seriously.  I wouldn’t make something like this up, man.”

Good enough for me.  The one he referred to as “the so-so one” looked good to me!  The glorious prophecy of my boss has come true!

I called the number on the paper and we agreed to go out for coffee.  I asked her about the note she left, I told her that’s never happened to me before.  She told me she was there with her friend, she noticed me there, but I left before she could hand me the note personally.  So she asked Matt if he could give me her note.

We went out four or five times, but it clearly wasn’t happening.  And that’s where it gets weird.

When she sent me the “Let’s just be friends,” email, she added a double whammy for me.  She told me that the story about seeing me in the store and leaving the note was actually a frabrication.

See, she’d see my profile on some site somewhere, and I must have said that I worked in a record store in the tri-city area.  Rather than get an account and send me a message like a normal person would, she tried something different.

“Well,” she began, “in your profile you said you worked in a CD store.  You said you were from the KW-Cambridge area.  There was a picture of you there, so I figured I could just checking stores until I found you.”  Pardon?  “I’m sorry I lied about just walking in and seeing you there.  Anyway, you’re cool and I’m cool but it’s just not happening, so…”

So…that was mildly creepy and I didn’t feel so bad about it not working out after that!

Part 53: Heavy Negotiations

Sometimes, things just came into the store that no matter the cost, you had to get it. You’ve all seen Pawnstars, right? It could get that way. 99% of transactions were pretty ordinary, but sometimes you’d get a pretty wild score, and you couldn’t back down.

You’d see imports, singles, bootlegs, promos, special editions, bonus tracks, bonus discs, and sometimes damn near complete collections of several artists.  Tom tells the legend of a guy who came in selling a near complete Zappa collection.

There was one guy that I just loved. We’ll call him C. He was addicted to hard rock, heavy metal, and Euro metal. He was a collector and he had numerous Japanese imports. And frequently, he sold us those Japanese imports, of just about anything decent. A few that weren’t so decent, but very very few.  I don’t know where he got the stuff, and I didn’t ask.  None of my business!

Thanks to C, I have a pretty close to complete collection of Japanese Harem Scarem imports, Bruce Dickinson, and Journey. Whoop de do for a lot of you, but these things are mucho expensivo to buy! Why?

In Japan, it is actually cheaper to buy a CD imported from America then their own (superior) domestic product.  So the Japanese counteract this by putting bonus tracks on their domestic product.  Much of time, these are songs specifically exclusive to Japan.

A really good example of a song written and recorded specifically for the Japanese market would be “Tokyo is Burning” from W.A.S.P.‘s K.F.D. album.  Another would be “Himalaya” by Glenn Tipton.  (Ignore that the Himalaya mountains are not in Japan, please, I’m guessing Glenn didn’t know that when he wrote it.)

There are collectors in every city and every town who pay premius prices to get these discs imported here from Japan.  Average prices can run from $35 to $50 for a single disc, much more if you’re talking about multi-disc sets.  The most I ever paid for a single Japanese disc (new) was $80  (Come Hell Or High Water by Deep Purple), and the least I paid (new) was the “Woman From Tokyo” single by the same band.

So back to the point, these discs were worth coin.  And C might actually bring in 4 or 5 at a time.   I recall he brought in 4 Harem Scarem imports at one time, each with bonus tracks.

Now, C wasn’t stupid.  He knew that if he didn’t get what he wanted for the discs, he could try downtown where there were more collectors and afficianos, and fewer hockey moms.  However, he also knew it would be much easier to come to me personally, because I knew what I was doing when it came to imports.

And frequently, since I was usually seeing stuff I wanted for my own collection, I’d be willing to up the ante when needed.  Since I frequented Amazon, I knew exactly what these things were worth.

One of the coolest things he ever brought in was a Helloween Japanese box set, 4 discs.  I’m shooting myself in the foot for not picking it up back then.  I’ll never see it again, I’m sure. 

Often, the Japanese imports were packaged with extra goodies:  stickers, extra booklets, patches, posters.  To find a used Japanese import with these goodies still intact was very rare.  That ups the value as well.  And for the ultimate collector, Japanese discs come with something called an obi-strip.  They are a piece of paper with Japanese writing on it, that goes over the jewel case of the CD.  This is what they look like:  click to embiggen

    Because the obi strip is actually outside the jewel case, it’s hard to keep, and most people end up throwing them away.  Add a couple bucks to the end value of a CD if the obi strip is intact.  See how this goes?

Unfortunatley,  C usually threw out to obi strips, so most of my Japanese imports lack them.  You can easily store the obi strip by putting your CD in a sandwich bag as you can see with my Bon Jovi single. 

One of the drawbacks of dealing with C is that he became used to a certain level of money when he came in.  And, nobody else liked C.  They all hated him.  I heard it had something to do with him chewing gum when he talked.  Never mind the cool-ass shit he brought into the store that nobody else in town could get!  So, negotiations could get heavy.  He knew what his stuff was worth, and if I could have owned it all, I would have!

Another situation where negotiations could get fierce were with large sales.  The largest I ever saw was an estate sale.  I can’t remember how many discs we looked at.  I’m thinking the number is close to 3000, all in one shot.  I think they were in these big gray convention containers that could hold about 400 each.  And there were 7 containers, plus a few boxes.  And in this case, it was good, good shit.  Sometimes, you’d buy a handful of crappy stuff just to get a mountain of good stuff.  Because the seller often wanted them all gone and not to deal with them anymore.   Clear slate.

When going through these big estate sales, you’d often have a pile of awesome jazz titles alone that probably numbered in the hundreds.  Blues, same deal.  Of course you’d also get boxes of crap, but sometimes you’d take it just to get to the blues and jazz titles. 

Inevitably, there were times when you just could not justify asking as much as the customer wanted.  I remember, very unhappily, having to turn down this Rolling Stones CBS years box set, which came with a bonus EP.  The box even had this neat paper tongue.  I just couldn’t give the guy what he wanted and still make any money off the thing.

Another one that sucked to turn down was the Cult Collection 1984-1990 box set. This sucker is hard to find. I just couldn’t give the guy what he wanted.  I wanted it for myself as it was, so I was willing to go even higher than the call of duty allowed.  Alas, it was not to be.  Thankfully, most of those tracks have been released on the Rare Cult boxed set(s), which I have…thanks to C!

Other great box sets I got from C:  Black Sabbath‘s The Black Box.  Bon Jovi’s 100,000,000 Bon Jovi Fans Can’t Be Wrong.  Metalogy, by Judas Priest, complete with limited edition DVD.  A complete Motley Crue Music to Crash Your Car To box set with the poster and stuff still inside.

Sometimes you’d see stuff that, if you don’t grab it, you’ll never see it again.  One of my treasures is an Aussie import of Faith No More‘s Angel Dust with a 4 song bonus disc called Free Concert in the Park.  Snagged it.  Never seen again.  On the Faith No More front, I also picked up a split live bootleg album with King’s X called Kings of the Absurd.  I have the first Tea Party album, which actually came in more than once.  I paid at least $50 for it.  Possibly $100, I don’t remember anymore.  There was at least one album that we could sell for $100, which was Standing in the Dark by Platinum Blonde.  And people would pay it.  I was offered a $100 reward once to find the album, as in, whatever the CD cost if I found it, plus a $100 finder’s fee.  I never did find it, but I later picked up Alien Shores at a cool hole in the wall in Stratford, and gave it to Peter.

Nowadays, just about everything I want is available from my sofa, even if it’s located in Japan. eBay and Amazon have changed everything about finding rare music.  Just a few weeks ago I snagged the Japanese disc of You Wanted the Best, You Got the Best!! by Kiss.  Been hunting for that since 1996.  Never seen it for sale anywhere, and the one I got was mint.  Got it for $40.  Incredibly, a month or so ago, I found one of the last two Maiden singles that I still needed.  I got “Hallowed Be Thy Name (Live)” for $35.  This single, thought at the time to be Dickinson’s swan song with the band, features a cover of Eddie impaling Bruce through the chest!

My advice to aspiring collectors out there:  Pick your #1 favourite band, and start on Wikipedia.  Explore the discography, and see what you’re missing.  Check eBay and see what the pricing is like.  Then hunt until you find one at the right price.  Good luck!

Part 52: Air Guitar

RECORD STORE TALES Part 52:  Air Guitar

I can’t help it.  When a good song comes on, it’s an unconscious reaction:  I start strumming the chords in air guitar…beating the air drums…slappin’ da bass!  (Nobody plays air keyboards.)

Everybody around me was embarrassed to the nines.  But you can’t stop the rock!

I jumped on counters.  I even once jumped down on the floor and did the Angus Young spinny spinny thing.  When there were no customers.  Sometimes I had to jump right off the counter as a guy was coming in.

“Yeah…heh…just playing some air guitar…”

The first time I was ever caught playing air guitar at work, it was actually at my first job at the grocery store.  I was working in the parcel pickup area, and it was March break, about 11 in the morning, and it was dead down there.  So they get you to sweep up the area, clean it up real good.  And we had a tape deck down there.  Well, I started playing air-broom-guitar when one of the assistant managers walked in.  He just smiled.  Probably thought I was half out of my mind.

My air guitar at weddings is now legendary.  It is now tradition that I get down on the dance floor and do the Angus Young spinny-spinny during “You Shook Me All Night Long”.  Last time, I did it in a kilt.  Don’t worry, I didn’t wear the kilt “traditionally”.

Air guitar is an expression of one’s connection to the rock.  If the rock connects, then the air guitars come out.  Next thing you know, you’re doing Van Halen on the countertops, pretending it’s the “Hot For Teacher” video.  It happens!