At the the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, the Armistice was signed, ending the fighting in the Great War. At least, they called it the Great War, or “The War to End All Wars”. Today we just call it World War I, because even greater horrors followed.
My grandfather “Sam” (Crawford) fought in World War II, helping bring an end to the evil of Hitler and Nazi Germany. I think my grandfather would be disgusted today to see Nazis being referred to as “very fine people”. What did he fight for, if we are to casually welcome that evil back to the streets?
“Gar” and “Sam” Winter
We can never forget the sacrifices those soldiers made. My grandfather survived and came home to raise a family with my grandmother. His brother wasn’t so lucky. He lived, but was injured in the trenches and he never walked right again.
I tend to think of the veterans and the soldiers of the present year round. My wife goes out of her way to thank veterans any time she sees one in uniform. I think of them every time I am free to write whatever I want to, in this great land of Canada. Had the Nazis won, there would be no freedom here. On November 11, at 11am, we have a moment of silence to honour all the soldiers from every war in which they fought and died for our freedom. That is an important tradition to keep. But I think we should think of them more often.
“Sam”
My grandfather rarely told war stories around the kids, but I do remember one night when he told my dad about looking up and seeing a Panzer tank coming. “I shit my pants,” he said and I think he was being truthful. Imagine those young guys — kids, really — in a country far from home, running from a tank. The bravery is awesome. I can’t even imagine.
My grandfather died (cancer) when I was too young to appreciate what he did. I knew he fought, and I got to watch him lay a wreath at the cenotaph every November 11. I didn’t understand the significance of what it means to be a soldier until I was older. If I were a little older, I would have tried to get him to tell me about it.
Bryan Adams’ 1987 album Into the Fire has the best song about Remembrance Day that I know. This very special track was made into an emotional music video. In 2014, The Trews came out with something almost as good: a song called “Highway of Heroes”. The Highway of Heroes is an actual highway (the 401), given this nickname for the stretch of road on which the bodies of fallen soldiers are brought home. The Trews’ song is a touching tribute.
Check out these two songs and remember why you’re even able to listen to them. Because of the Heroes.
RECORD STORE TALES #1200: Birthdays, Castles and Cornfields
My goal when making drone videos is never to invade privacy, only to make cool videos of the things around me. Ever since 2022, Jen and I have been driving past this cool “castle” in the middle of nowhere. We have stopped to take pictures because it is such a whimsical looking place. I have long wanted to do a drone video of the castle we once called Deke’s Palace.
I woke up around 5:30 AM on my birthday. I chatted with friends and enjoyed a birthday steak for breakfast. I thought about driving somewhere to make a drone video. Around 8:00 I decided to wake up Jen and make a run into town. I packed up my Potensic drone and made our way up to the castle. We waited for three cars to pass, and then I was airborne. I saw no vehicles for the entire flight, but I did soar close enough to the castle to see its ramparts, battlements, and three turrets. I also hovered over a winding river, and zoomed low over a cornfield.
I always like to try to accomplish something new creatively when I can, and this counts as a brand new location. I am very happy with the resultant video.
After my flight, we went into the essential hobby store Leisure World, and I treated myself to a birthday gift.
Simply a wonderful birthday, enjoyed in the best place in the world.
RECORD STORE TALES #1166: A Storage Solution for Certain Promo CD Singles
I managed a CD store for 10 years. Storage was always a commodity to me, then and now. As a young guy living in a small bedroom in his parents’ house, I was running out of CD space fast. Every slot counted. An opportunity to save some slots, by replacing a 2 CD “fat” case with a slim one, was always valuable.
There are occasional promo CD singles that were cheap on packaging because, well, it was a free handout CD given to radio stations or stores to play. Front covers were optional. Sometimes, singles such as these were valuable to me, for the inclusion of edit versions or other mixes that may not have been on commercially available singles or albums.
There was one storage solution I came up with to save space in my collection, and logically file these singles in an interesting way. Have a look at the short video below.
I know we don’t get to talk much anymore. I think the last time I saw you was at a funeral. We both have our own lives now. You have four kids to raise, and I have a Jen to take care of and cherish. While we have separate journeys now, I will always remember and treasure our shared origins. We were the lucky few to grow up on a very special street in a neighbourhood like no other.
Some of my earliest memories are of us playing in the front yard. You were two years older but at that young age it hardly mattered. All that mattered were our adventures. It started with dinky cars, Lego and plastic swords. Do you remember building little garages for our cars? I do. You showed me how. A few twigs stuck into the ground covered with a grass roof, and we had multi-car garages right in the front lawn.
You taught me how to improvise our fun. With cardboard boxes, we constructed a Cloud City for my Star Wars guys to play around in. Do you remember showing me how to make little sliding pocket doors? Or how about that board game we came up with on our own? It was huge! How many of my mom’s shoeboxes did we cut up to make that? We used my Army Men for the pieces. We constructed traps for them, that could you trigger with the pull of a thread. Mom eventually said “No more shoeboxes!”
I could go on, and on, and on about how we created our own worlds to live in. The drawings, a huge binder of which I still have! We designed our own video game. We wanted to submit it to Atari. Then, when my family got a computer, we discovered a new world: word processing! No more pen and paper; now we could really come up with stories. The program was called IBM Writer’s Assistant and we pushed the limits of what we could achieve. We co-wrote the Adventures of Comet-tron, though it was your idea. I even sold copies of our “book” at a garage sale. 25 cents each, and there were two issues!
Building obstacle courses in the back yard. Improvising audio equipment with little more than a few wires and black electrical tape. Riding our bikes, exploring the trails. Renting horror movies and pausing to see fake rubber props. Writing down the rules to our own invented version of street volleyball. These are all things I did with my best friend. If I didn’t have you, do you think “Double Bounce Volleyball” ever would have been conceived, much less documented with actual rules? Chances are high that the only reason I owned a volleyball was because you had one first.
It’s funny that you studied architecture later in life, because I remember us sitting down with pencils and designing our future houses. In our blueprints, we still lived on the same street. We bulldozed all the other houses, and added on to our own (things like swimming pools and helipads and secret tunnels and overhead bridges). We put new houses for our families to live in, while our original homes were connected by an enclosed bridge so we could hang out without even having to go out!
As your interests changed, so did mine. Where you led I was eager to follow. Music was next. Do you realize how lucky I was to have you and other older kids around the neighbourhood? While my classmates were listening to music they’d be embarrassed by in six months, you guys had discovered Van Halen.
Do you remember our front porch listening sessions? One of us would plug in the stereo, and somebody else would bring over the Van Halen.
“Van Halen!?” said my dad as he came home from work. “Sounds like some kind of tropical disease!”
And so began the long tradition of my dad creating memorable quotes about rock bands. Wouldn’t have happened without you. Your dad had some good ones too.
“Is there something wrong with that man?” he mocked when Bruce Dickinson was screaming the high notes.
Classic! Absolutely classic. You were not only there for it, but you were the guy who supplied the music for them to mock!
What I’m getting at here is this. I need to really let you know how much you shaped my life, and how much I looked up to you. I wanted to be you. For years I was your mini-me. You were smart, you were cool, you were big and strong and creative and everything I wanted to be. I had nobody like you at my school. Why did you have to go to a different school? How life would have been different if you were able to stand up for me during the dark times.
I’ll never forget one thing you did for me. It was grade six. My bully Steve went at me really hard that year. He made me cry in class. It’s not a good feeling, crying publicly with 30 of your peers. All I could think is how badly I wished you were there to stop him. Stop all of them. Then one day, you did make an appearance. Our schools had March break during two different weeks. During your March break, you got on your bike and paid me a visit during recess. None of those kids had ever seen you before. Maybe they thought you were my imaginary friend. Not any more! Steve actually fell flat down on his back when he saw how much bigger you were. The memory still makes me smile.
I don’t know if you really understood how bad I had it at school. It was a daily living nightmare. You were the opposite of that. I’d come home, phone you up, and 10 minutes later we’d be in the back yard jumping hurdles made of lawn chairs, and everything was forgotten. You just got me; we shared the exact same sense of humour. Nothing can gravitate two friends together like a shared love of laughing at the same things. You also drew out and nurtured my creative side. Anytime you came up with something cool on your own (which was frequent) you’d share it with me and together we’d expand on it. It was the exact opposite of what I had at school. There, nobody understood me. There, nobody nurtured me. There, nobody laughed with me. Only at me.
You were my hero, man. You were my Wolverine or Iron Man. Funny enough, I got into Marvel comics because that’s what you read! Do you remember reading comics on the patio? Hawkeye was your favourite Avenger back then.
I mean it when I say you were my hero. You were smart and popular and I was just happy to be the sidekick! When I finally made it to highschool, you sneakily got an extra locker next to mine. I felt so cool sharing that illicit locker, like part of an elite club. We had some excellent times in highschool. You bought a black guitar and so for contrast I bought a white one. We never really put the effort in, but we did have fun drawing our logo. “Paragon” was the name you chose for our band. We never really learned to play, but we made a music video. I know you’ll never forget that. Together we spent a week after hours at the school in the editing suite, finishing the video with a very tight deadline. We did it, though. It was hard work. We fought through technical issues and were recognized for our efforts by having our video shown at the local 1989 Charlie Awards. What an honour for us.
I know for a fact that I would not be the person I am today had we not crossed paths 40-some years ago. I think I’d still find ways to be creative, but the things I do today are just extensions of the things we did then. Sequels, reboots, remasterings. I like to think that I’m continuing with the projects we started together. Together we made a music video and two movies. Today, I make several music videos every year! And as hard as it is to believe, I even completely re-edited one of the movies we made 30 years ago. Finishing the work that we started.
It’s OK that you went to college and started your own life. It was always going to be that way. We were never really going to bulldoze the neighbourhood and live in connected houses. Back then, I was never able to express how important you were — and still are. You helped me survive. I knew that all I had to do was endure a week at school. On Saturday it would be us again, you and me, racing cars, flying starships or hosting our own shows. Despite everything I had to go through at school, I always have considered it a good childhood. The best childhood. And that’s because I had you, my best friend. We embarked on truly great adventures, and they far outweigh the damage the other kids could do. When it was you and me, they couldn’t touch me. They weren’t a part of the worlds we were building out of cardboard and Scotch tape. You projected a force field around yourself and nobody would touch you. In turn you were able to shield me with it too. That was a tremendous gift that you can’t understand unless you were the beneficiary.
Do you remember why you chose the name “Paragon” for our band that never was? “Because it means we’re the best,” you said. It was true! We were the best. We were the paragon of friendships with adventures that shaped a lifetime. Thank you for sharing that with me.
Today is our anniversary! In this throwback post from 2019, enjoy some wicked looking steaks.
RECORD STORE TALES #776: (Wag)yu Shook Me All Night Long
For highway driving, nothing quite hits the spot like AC/DC. It feels right. Who Made Who works as a quickie “greatest hits” selection for a quick spin down Highway 401. Mrs. LeBrain and I were heading to the GTA to celebrate 11 years as a married couple. We rocked to “You Shook Me All Night Long” on the dance floor that night, and we were returning to the very same location once more.
Highway 401 is in a perpetual state of construction, but good music helps take the edge off. This was my first drive that way in the new vehicle, and also the first with my latest gadget, a nifty dash cam that is sure to provide lots of content for my YouTube channel in the coming months.
Sorry, quick tangent: Phil Rudd is the “man”, but Simon Wright doesn’t get enough credit for his time on the AC/DC drum stool. AC/DC isn’t an easy beat to get the feel for, and every AC/DC drummer has their own approach. The 1980s were a period of hard-hitters and Simon Wright was the perfect drummer for that era. His precision is absolute on “Who Made Who” and it just sounds right. Compare the original to Chris Slade’s interpretation on AC/DC Live. That’s all I have to say about that.
We arrived at the hotel mid-afternoon and I settled into the jacuzzi pretty quickly. I wanted to do a funny gangsta style photo in the hot tub with me holding a couple of American dollar bills. I was thinking about when Floyd Mayweather threw the $1s at Conor McGregor. And holy shit did Facebook react.
“Dude you look like if Kuato from Total Recall was successfully removed from his twin, grew up, lived a long and depressing life and got really excited when someone gave him 2 bucks to sh!t in the local YMCA jacuzzi.”
Two things: Yes, I had pants on. And yes, that “gang sign” is the Vulcan salute. Relax. Let a man enjoy his jacuzzi, publicly on social media like damn 20 year old. Are you not entertained?!
We did some shopping. Because, like an idiot, I forgot to bring a nice pair of shoes for dinner, I had to get a new pair just for this one night. Then we met up with Jen’s best friend Lara for lunch. Did some more shopping. I wanted to go to stores that we don’t have at home. There isn’t much of that, just the same old chains. We did hit one up cool store, where I bought something called “Jean Guy”, but we couldn’t find any cool music or toy stores. At least I got my shoes!
So where were we headed? In ’08 when we got married it was the Pavilion Royale, but now it is a high end restaurant called 17 Steakhouse & Bar. It’s very different on the inside, but recognizable. There was the dance floor, where I once spun to “You Shook Me All Night Long”. But we chose 17 for more than sentimental reasons. The main draw was the real Japanese A5 wagyu. And that’s what this chapter is really about.
I’ve never had real wagyu in my life and American wagyu was not going to do it. You only live once. Carpe diem. Go big or go home. It’s only money. All that bullshit. I’d done my research, I knew what I was getting my wallet into. I’d been planning it over a year.
We started with a simple but delicious field green salad, with incredible goat cheese. The smoothest goat cheese I’ve ever tasted. Only when we finished the salads did they began firing our steaks. None of that “here comes your main dish before you’ve finished your starter” nonsense. Jennifer chose the US prime T-bone, medium rare, and let me tell you, that alone could have been the best steak I’ve ever tasted. It was 25 oz, so more than enough to share. So tender! With cripsy, tasty fat.
Jen’s steak could easily have been the most tender I’ve ever tried, if not for my Japanese A5 wagyu. Market price was $30 per oz. I chose an 8 oz striploin, medium rare. You should always get a wagyu steak cooked to medium rare. I was electric with tense anticipation. The steaks arrived, cooked precisely to order.
I gently cut a thin slice, which came off like butter. There was a lovely char on the outside, a crisp splash of flat, and then the most tender meat you can imagine. It was seasoned simply and perfectly, the saltiness enhancing that beefy umami. On the tongue, it was like butter with only the slightest sensation of a meaty texture. I probably didn’t even have to chew.
It’s a very rich piece of meat, far more than I anticipated. I’d estimate that I finished about 3/4 of my meal, leaving a $60 chunk of wagyu in my takeout bag. And that chunk of leftover wagyu was the best lunch I ever had the following day.
For sides, we ordered the fingerling potatoes roasted in duck fat and thyme, the asparagus with hollandaise, and the scalloped potatoes au gratin. Of those three, the asparagus was the clear winner, with the potatoes au gratin in second place. Only I liked the fingerling potatoes; Jen didn’t care for them, leaving her batting average with any form of duck to be zero.
We had an incredible dessert of cheesecake, Crème brûlée and whipped cream which was supernaturally good. Everything was.
Having had probably the most expensive steak I’ll ever buy, was it worth it? If you are a steak lover, then yes, it is worth it. And I love steaks. A little goes a long way, but every steak lover should try real Japanese wagyu once. It’s unlike anything I’ve had before and it is easily categorised as a true delicacy. Having said that, should we return to 17 Steakhouse in a year, I don’t know that I would order it again, and that is only because there are other interesting features on their menu that I would like to try. The 36 oz tomahawk would be a sight to behold, though I couldn’t eat it all myself. I would also like to try the Porterhouse, the lobster bisque, and beef tartare.
Yes, the wagyu was worth it, and I can still taste and feel its texture on my palette. It won’t be for everyone except in small doses. They have a 4 oz minimum order, and I suggest that may the perfect size to experiment with.
17 Steakhouse & Bar gets 5/5, and so does the wagyu.
We started with AC/DC so we’ll finish with AC/DC. Who made wagyu? 17 Steakhouse did, and it was hell’s bells! I couldn’t wait to sink the pink steak in my mouth. It’ll shake your foundations just like it shook mine. It’s a little bit of a ride on, down the 401, but worth the drive. Hell ain’t a bad place to be(ef)!* For those about to rock, I wagyu.
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.
RECORD STORE TALES #881: The Return of the Record Store Tales
A minor announcement, but an announcement nonetheless! As of this chapter, for all of my stories going forward, I have decided to retire the name Getting More Tale. I am returning to the original moniker of Record Store Tales.
It’s really always intended to be considered one body of work.
One of the most important parts of the original Record Store Tales was the “ending” — quitting the store in Part 320. That series of events was one I was really anxious to tell, so when the time felt right, I got it done and wrapped Record Store Tales up in a lil’ bow. I then broadened the scope of my stories with the “sequel” series Getting More Tale (title suggested by Aaron of the KMA).
Getting More Tale has often dipped back into the Record Store days for subject matter, as well as childhood, and the 15 years since I quit. I’ve also told stories about technology and historic records. The sky was the limit when I changed the name to Getting More Tale…but I have always identified as a “Record Store guy”. Even if it has been 15 years since I last worked behind a counter…once a Record Store guy, always a Record Store guy.
The 12 years I spent in the store were 12 of the defining years of my life, from the highest highs to the lowest lows. But to quote a song, “It’s My Life” and calling the whole she-bang “Record Store Tales” feels right. Even if roughly half the stories have nothing to do with working in a store, “you are what you is”. Today I may be a guy who works in the steel industry, but I will always be a guy who managed a Record Store, and proud of it!
So there you have it; the lines shall no longer be blurred. The ongoing story of Mike LeBrain, former Record Store manager, obsessive music collector and all-around open book, shall henceforce be known once more as the Record Store Tales.*
The content is not changing one iota. I have the next 10 chapters locked and loaded, with subject matter covering the whole gamut. Childhood musical flashbacks, working behind the counter in the glory years, school daze, old tech, bad dates, toys, and maybe even some controversy. I continue to be excited to bring you stories that you seem to enjoy! It has been been over six years since I “wrapped up” Record Store Tales. There was backlash to the ending. But that only emboldened me. My writing has improved ten-fold since. I’m proud to fly the flag of Record Store Tales again.
Thanks for reading all these years! It has been an organic experience and for nine years you have been an integral part of it. Let’s go forward, shall we?
To be continued….
* I won’t be going back and re-naming anything, I will just be carrying on the numbering system will the title Record Store Tales.
One of my favourite ways to spend a Saturday morning was down in the basement drawing pictures while listening to heavy metal music with my best buddy Bob. Most likely, we were watching one of my VHS tapes of the Pepsi Power Hour while doodling away with our pencils. It was the best of times, with the best of friends, and the absolute best kind of music.
In the early to mid 1980s, MuchMusic was only available on pay TV. We had it, but Bob Schipper did not. Therefore he only had two pathways to the Pepsi Power Hour:
Wait for the one or two weeks per year when pay TV was free for sneak preview.
I tape the videos, and share my finds with him on Saturday mornings.
It was an amazing way to bond as kids. He brought with him his paper and pencils, and we would get down to business while watching music videos.
In the summer, we moved activities to the front or back porches, with a ghetto blaster playing Kiss or Iron Maiden as we sketched. In fact, the story really begins on the back porch. The very same back porch on which we schooled George Balasz about Accept. Bob had mastered the art of drawing muscled warriors in cool poses. His very first was a master of escape whom he dubbed “Motor Head”. In his first appearance, he seems doomed, hanging from a noose. But a closer look reveals him casually smoking a cigarette and holding a pair of nun-chucks for his imminent escape. Note the frayed rope. He was in no danger – he was biding his time!
Having mastered this first character, it was time to expand on the concept. Bob drew many different designs and body types. Giants, archers, characters with cybernetic limbs…the field was wide open, but heavy metal music was always an influence.
Bob’s second sketch was a man in a metal Quiet Riot mask he named “Killer”. Killer was one of Bob’s favourites. As his drawing abilities grew, he expanded upon Killer. Next, he designed a custom car and robotic pet for the character. I liked the way he used metal plates and rivets for detail.
Bob taught me the secrets of drawing these heroic figures, and I began to create my own warriors. The characters we were sketching resembled Mad Max marauders, crossed with heavy metal tropes. Really, all of that metal stuff was inspired by the post-apocalyptic fiction genre that was all the rage in the early 80s. Nobody did it better than Mad Max, and many of our characters wore masks like Lord Humungous. Others had bandaged faces, like Eddie in some of the Powerslave-era Iron Maiden artwork. Some wielded ninja-like weapons, since ninja movies were also all the rage at the time.
We called our characters “Death Team”.
Bob’s backstory concept of Death Team was a school gang, with a strong influence from martial arts movies. The idea was that the gang evolves into a government-sanctioned fighting force. That meant no limits. The cars and trucks that we drew were armoured and kitted out. Very much inspired by M.A.S.K., Mad Max, and other shows of the time. If there was something cool on the screen, we would try to draw it and add our own twists. What I brought to the table was my interest in GI Joe comics, and the military side of fiction. The ninjas were the common ground between Death Team and GI Joe, and many of my characters had weapons and outfits inspired by the comics. I started giving my characters code names and bios, just like GI Joe, and gave them the inverted star sigil.
At this point during the earliest Death Team drawings, my sister and I had our big musical schism. That means that up until 1985, she was into the same music I was. Well…not W.A.S.P. But she liked Quiet Riot, Motley Crue and Iron Maiden. Then something happened, and she went into what I called “New Wave”. Pointer Sisters, Corey Hart, Tina Turner. To counter our heavy metal Death Team, she created her own squad called the Wavers. She drew her own team members: “Waver” and “The Wave”. Needless to say, Death Team would have crushed the Wavers in combat.
Bob and I sketched solo, during the week. Then we’d gather on the weekends to share our work. We’d inspire each other and keep drawing more. Those are the Saturday morning Power Hour sessions I remember so fondly.
One weekend, Bob came over excited that he had learned to draw “a really cool bike”. He arrived at my door with his new character “Bike Ninja”. We helped each other name our characters, but that one didn’t need anything fancier than simply “Bike Ninja”. His boots had outward-facing spikes, and his left hand was replaced by a robotic claw with a laser in it.
“That might make it hard for him to ride his bike,” I offered up.
“Nahh!” said Bob. “He’s a ninja!”
My mom noticed that many of the characters were smoking cigarettes. She asked why that was. Bob started putting cigarettes in some of their mouths (even the ones wearing masks) to make them look cooler, so I followed suit. That was the rock and roll influence, as many of our rock star heroes like Eddie Van Halen were constantly smoking. We had no interest in it, but the visual followed into our art.
Bob’s art was much better and more original than mine. I improved over time. By 1987 I had finally drawn one I was really proud of, a character all about street justice and inspired by Dee Snider from Twisted Sister. In fact this character was meant to be the real Dee Snider, joining our team to save Earth. The concept was stolen from Sgt. Slaughter, the WWF wrestler who joined the fictional GI Joe team. If that could happen, then Dee Snider could join Death Team!
As Bob and I built our little world of characters on paper, we realized our gang needed someone to fight. Bob was watching the Silver Hawks cartoon before school in the mornings, and took influence from some of the creatures seen on early morning TV. We decided on a force of alien invaders as our adversaries, and a wide variety we did draw.
Bob was really the visual guy though; his drawings were so far ahead of mine. I was more a conceptual guy. I came up with the character bios and some of the overarching story. It was hard bridging the street gang origins together with the alien invasion concept, but I wrote an origin. Together, Bob and I wanted Death Team to be a Canadian team (with some American and overseas volunteers). We wrote them as a down-on-their-luck school gang who lived together on the rough side of town, wherever that was. They actually began as two rival gangs who combined their forces together. We wrote the first pages together and then I finished writing the story. The guys were so tough, that they were swiftly recruited by the Canadian government as a unit of street enforcers. The Death Team was born!
I decided that the leader of the alien invasion was to be a human. Perhaps inspired by Xur in The Last Starfighter, the alien leader was a former Death Team computer wizard who made contact with the aliens by sending a signal through a black hole. He then defected and joined them, determined to conquer the Earth for his own. We even named our alien alliance the “Xor Aliens”.
Bob was really good at drawing aliens, though most had human bodies with alien heads, hands and feet. Some were covered with hair. He was good at drawing big round mouths with a circular row of teeth. I thought that was a cool visual. Many of ours were aquatic. Planet Xor must have had a lot of oceans.
When I look back at these drawings, I see a difference between Bob and I. It’s quality vs. quantity. His are better while mine are plentiful. Some of mine were little more than outlines with no shading or depth. Plenty of mine are rip-offs. He was coming up his own ideas. The thing we have in common, easily seen in these sketches, is how much fun we had!
The pinnacle of of our fun was realized one afternoon when we decided to commit Death Tape to an audio adventure. One side of a 60 minute tape contains us acting out our favourite characters, in a series of adventures. This is all done to the backing tracks of great hard rock tunes. It opens with “In the Beginning” and “Shout at the Devil” by the mighty Motley Crue. This meant we used two ghetto blasters in making this tape. One to record, and one to play the backing music while we acted out the scenes. Quiet Riot’s “Slick Black Cadillac” and “Caught in the Crossfire” by April Wine were the songs used for the other scenes. I just remember having so much fun doing it. It didn’t matter if the tape is unlistenable. My face was red from laughing so hard that day.
All this Death Team stuff goes hand-in-hand with the earliest days of my discovery of metal. You can see the influences bleeding through. Characters named “Motor Head” and “Killer” and “Helix” and “Crazee” and “Iron Maiden”. We weren’t terribly original, but we were terrifically entertained. Entertained by ourselves! All we needed was some paper, some sharp pencils, and a good song. I can still hear the tunes playing, whether it was W.A.S.P. or Motley Crue or Iron Maiden themselves. The tunes were critical. The team could not have existed with the tunes, and the tunes were only more fun to listen to while drawing pictures of the team.
Later on in school, when I was much better at art, I tried my hand at doing a sequel team, called “DT 2”. I played the music, and tried to recreate the magic by sitting down and drawing some updated ninjas. Without my friend it was a futile exercise. Death Team cannot exist without three things:
GETTING MORE TALE #879: Advertising & the Pennysaver
The Record Store didn’t do oodles of advertising. We had a limited budget. We usually ran ads in the Pennysaver, a free weekly ad paper. Their rep with us was a super ducky guy named Dana McMullen. He was a sharp dresser with a talent for layout. We got along immediately because he was a Queensryche fan. It was always amusing to me how you could run into fellow rock fans almost anywhere. Dana didn’t look like a metal head. His hair and suits were meticulous. But he loved his Queensryche. We were both pretty fond of 1994’s Promised Land.
We opened the store that I first managed in 1996. It was a dry period for Queensryche, but then in ’97 came Hear in the Now Frontier. I was disappointed with it, and told Dana as much, but he bought it like any loyal fan would. He was a good guy.
Dana left the Pennysaver shortly after, and we had a new rep. I can’t remember her name, just that she always called me “Dude”, which I hated. (The part of working retail that isn’t in the manual is that you have to get used to people calling you “Dude”, “Chief”, and “Bud”.) Advertising with the new rep wasn’t as smooth as it was with Dana. I remember she messed up some important details on a few of our ads. One day she was meeting with the Boss Man about these mistakes and she left in tears. Yikes! I didn’t get a “See ya Dude!” from her that day.
I know from making in-store signage that the Boss was hard to please. In 1994, I was green and just started. The first display I ever made, he hated. It was a simple enough job. We got free posters from the record companies all the time, but the Boss didn’t want plain old posters taped to the walls. He wanted them framed. One night he left me with the job to frame some of the free posters we got. The only issue was that the large posters didn’t fit the medium sized frames, so you had to chop them up and make them fit. He assigned me to frame a Jann Arden poster for her second album Living Under June. It was such a huge image of Jann that I couldn’t just trim the edges and make it fit. It was a vertical poster but he wanted the frame horizontal. I had to chop it into pieces and have the picture of Jann on one side and the name and album title on the other. The boss hated it and made sure I knew it. He couldn’t tell me what he wanted it to look like, just that what I made wasn’t it. Fortunately we hired T-Rev shortly after and he was much more artistically inclined. I was relieved of my sign making duties.
I’m sure when he looks at my site now, the Boss must still think my graphic skills still suck because they haven’t changed much!
We expanded to radio ads. I hated our jingle, but I remember early conversations with the radio people that could have taken us in another direction. Although he had a tiny office in the back, it wasn’t really good for meetings, so the Boss would have a lot of his meetings in the store. I was there when one radio guru pitched his ad concept.
“It’s Beavis and Butt-head see, and they go, ‘Hey Butt-Head, heh heh, where should we sell these awesome used CDs?’”
The boss wasn’t into that one. “I think Beavis and Butt-Head are a little passé,” he asserted.
He might have been right, but I didn’t agree with that; the Beavis and Butt-Head movie was only a year old. Their voices were recognizable. The Boss just didn’t like them. My only contention was that I could do better Beavis and Butt-Head voices than the radio guru. We didn’t need him!
While I didn’t always enjoy having these meetings going on in my workspace, and having to work around these people, it was fun listening in. Sometimes the Boss would ask afterwards what I thought of the pitch.
Later on, after we started expanding and (in my opinion) losing our path a bit, the Boss hired an expensive marketing expert. I didn’t care for her ideas. I remember he sent us one of her proposals and it just lost me. We were supposed to read it and offer our feedback. I thought we were a music store, and here’s this marketing proposal with all these empty buzzwords in it. Words like “synergy”. It felt like a huge disconnect between upper management and working on the floor. The business was simple – we bought CDs from the public, and we sold them back to the public. Now we’re spending money on marketing while I have to wait weeks just to get paid my mileage cheques.
Having said all this, take it with a grain of salt. He’s still in business and this year will be celebrating his 30th anniversary. He must be doing something right.
On multiple occasions I’ve said the best years working at the Record Store were the early years. 1994, 1995, into 1996…I’d never been happier working hard, and maybe never will be again. There was no corporate head office, no regional managers, and minimal pre-fab signage that all looked the same. It was just a few of us, die hard music fans, and a Record Store. We were in the process of building empires!
The boss was always looking to expand our CD inventory. Rarities of any kind were hard to find in Kitchener. Be they singles, Japanese imports, or live bootlegs, they were hard to come by. Periodically, let’s say once every couple months, the boss would drive to Toronto to pick up our weekly inventory orders from Records on Wheels. R.O.W. didn’t carry anything particularly rare, just the major label hits that we needed. Occasionally the boss would stop at other retailers in Toronto to pick up live bootlegs. Nirvana, R.E.M., Pearl Jam, Nine Inch Nails, Guns N’ Roses, whatever was popular. There were a couple stores in Toronto that had massive amounts of bootleg CDs. He’d bring them back here and sell them for around $40. Nobody in Kitchener had access to that kind of stock. They weren’t cheap and we didn’t make any profit off them, but they sure made us look better. A lot better. It gave us a chance to catch up a little bit with Sam’s and Encore in the “cool” stakes.
We also tried some more obscure distributors. One of them carried UK, US and Japanese imports. But again they were expensive and we had to hope they’d sell. These distributors were really unreliable. Long backorders were a problem, and there was no guarantee we’d get what we ordered. We sometimes got lucky. Nirvana’s Hormoaning was in demand, and we did get a few of those.
I’ll never forget this one Nirvana kid who wanted Hormoaning so bad. He didn’t have enough cash so he kept trading in discs until he had enough credit to cover it. You had to trade in a lot of CDs to cover $40 plus tax. But he got his Hormoaning. Until he had to trade that one in, too. And he did.
There was another guy (he kind of looked like a little troll doll), and he worked up at Carry On Comics in Waterloo. I think his brother was friends with the owner, and that’s why he started coming in. He had his eyes set on an R.E.M. bootleg, specifically because it had a song called “Where’s Captain Kirk?”. It was one of R.E.M.’s non-album singles, a cover of a band called Spizzenergi.
I was beamed aboard the Starship Enterprise, What I felt what I saw was a total surprise, I looked around and wondered can this be, Or is this the start of my insanity. Oh but its true, As we went warp factor 2, And I met all of the crew, Where’s Captain Kirk?
The comic book guy salivated over that CD until he finally had enough cash to buy it. I didn’t think he was serious. He used to talk about buying this vintage Millenium Falcon toy and hanging it from his ceiling. He was serious this time!
I managed to snag a couple live bootlegs. No discounts on these! Nine Inch Nails – Woodstock ’94, and Guns N’ Roses Covering ‘Em were both favourites of mine. Money well spent and still in the collection today. The boss hated that we took some of his good Toronto stock. He was selling them virtually at cost, so that’s why we had to pay full price. But he really, really did not appreciate when T-Rev and I bought stuff like that. Here he was, stocking them to make our store look cooler…but in swoops T-Rev and metal Mike! Maybe he should have charged more for them, across the board. Where else in town were you going to find them?
On one of those early Toronto runs, the boss was one of the first victims of the Ontario NDP government’s photo radar project. In order to curb speeding, the NDP launched the 400-series highway photo radar. The boss was caught speeding on the 401 and found a nice photo and fine in his mailbox. It was from one of the trips back from R.O.W. The project was only semi-successful. Drivers experimented with methods of covering up their license plates from photo radar cameras, and over 5000 photos were deemed useless. The incoming Mike Harris government campaigned on getting rid of photo radar, and they did immediately after taking office. The great experiment was over, but the boss was one of the drivers dinged. All he was trying to do was bring us some rock and roll! But it was the first and only photo radar picture I saw back then.
Damn government always cutting into our profits!
Behind the scenes, he was building empires. He announced that he wanted us to buy even more stock from the public. Trade-in CDs were big business but we were now going to be buying for two stores. Or more.
mikeladano.com 