Another short one from the Power 30 with Teresa Roncon. At Phase One studios, a quick visit with Russ Dwarf (Killer Dwarfs), Dee Cernille (Sven Gali) and Gord Prior (Blu Bones). At the time Sven were in the middle of touring with Def Leppard, and the Dwarfs were “takin’ ‘er easy for the summer”, but the new album mentioned by Russ never came to be.
You can see what I have been saying all this time, about the Power 30 having shorter content than the superior Power Hour. Sure, there were technically more minutes of metal per week, but not the kind of extended content that I’ve brought you recently, such as The Axemen Cometh and Waltzing With Helix.
Toronto’s Slash Puppet are back in the speakers, with a new “best of” CD called Studs & Gems, featuring classics and unreleased material! To pre-order your copy, contact MIF Entertainment ASAP, as this is a limited edition. Studs & Gems includes favourites like “When the Whip Comes Down”, “Slow Down” and the amazing ballad “Eyes of a Child”, one of the most intensely emotional ballads you’ll ever hear. Studs & Gems also includes the unreleased “Stranger Danger”, a live track previously unheard elsewhere. Finding original copies of their first two releases can be an expensive prospect, so Studs & Gems makes it easy to get some of these unsung classic songs.
For the occasion I’ve dug up this VHS tape of Teresa Roncon of the Power 30 talking to Mif, Dave and Franklin of Slash Puppet. It was summer of ’93 and the band were going the independent route. Teresa questions them on the pros and cons, and their musical influences. Wisdom is offered and bands are praised. Brief, but terrific interview with the band!
Studs & Gems track listing:
When the Whip Comes Down Rippin’ On a Wishbone Eyes of a Child Evil Woman Hard on Love Stop Tellin’ Me Lies Hitch a Ride (On a Train) Slow Down Squeeze It In Overload Stranger Danger (Live)
Not the only version online, but probably the best version for Helix fans! This is longer with more live footage (“The Storm”) and it also includes the opening MuchMusic “A True Story” sketch, depicting the moment that the Much studios got the invite to join the band in Vienna from Helix “roadlife specilist” Kenny Heague. All this version is missing is some of the interview with Sacred Reich, but for Helix fans, this is the one to watch.
“Waltzing With Helix” aired on the Pepsi Power Hour in early 1991. It depicts five days of life in the road with Helix in Hungary and Austria, opening for Sacred Reich and Ian Gillan. Supporting the excellent Back For Another Taste LP, this special includes loads of great live music, and chats with all the hilarious Helix boys.
New in the lineup was American guitarist Denny Balicki, and “Waltzing With Helix” was his introduction to fans nationwide. Drummer Fritz Hinz, bassist Daryl Gray, and singer Brian Vollmer are entertaining fellows to watch as they tour countryside and cathedrals. Late guitarist Paul Hackman gets the honour of interviewing both Ian Gillan and Sacred Reich.
Yes, this includes an Ian Gillan interview and some live footage of his band (including guitarist Steve Morris) playing “Black Night” and “Demon’s Eye”!
Food, culture, turnips, street music, beer, bus breakdowns, laughs, sandwiches and sweaty rock and roll!
On a personal note it’s really heartwarming to see Brian Knight, a kid from our neighbourhood who I went to highschool with, and later went on to roadie with Helix, standing right next to my hero Ian Gillan. What a cool thing to happen. Brian Knight died earlier this year. I still have his original Kenner Star Wars Slave I toy in perfect condition. I paid him $5 for it.
Special thanks to Jennifer Ladano for telling me to write this story down!
RECORD STORE TALES #951: Set Your VCR! It’s 1986 and KISS Meets The Phantom Is On Tonight!
When thinking back about my earliest rock and roll discoveries, it’s important to recall the order in which I got the albums, or first heard the tunes. It seems like I had always known “Rock N’ Roll all Nite”, but since my first Kiss albums were Alive! and Hotter Than Hell, those were the songs I knew best. And I barely knew them! I got my first Kiss in September of ’85. But I was learning slowly. Eventually I’d get Asylum, and gradually tape Kiss albums from my neighbour George.
Something else happened that exposed me to Kiss in a new way, that I sometimes forget about. It was the first time I saw Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park.
Everybody knew about Kiss Meets the Phantom, but few of us were old enough to have seen it. When it showed up in the TV guide one week, on some Buffalo station, it seemed like every kid with access to a VCR set it to record. It was being shown at something like 1:00 in the morning on a Sunday.
Upon waking, I got my sister up early and we raced downstairs to watch. We did not have time to watch the whole thing that morning. It was winter, possibly the tail end of Christmas holidays, and we were off to the lake for one day. We watched some, went to the lake, had lunch at the Embassy, and came home to finish the movie.
I noticed there were far more ads to fast forward through on late night TV than during the day!
Actual ads from the actual tape of the actual night.
My sister recalls liking Kiss Meets the Phantom; my memories are quite different. I was bored to tears any time Kiss wasn’t on screen, and you had to wait through, like, an hour (with ads) for Kiss to arrive at the bloody park! I didn’t know who this Anthony Zerbe fellow was, but at age 13 I considered him possibly the worst actor I had ever seen.
It was my first time seeing Peter Criss on video and not just still photos, and I was surprised at his voice. I told everyone, “Peter Criss sounds like Aquaman.” I had the show right, but the character wrong. Michael Bell did the voice of Peter Criss in Kiss Meets the Phantom, and Wonder Twin Zan in the cartoon Superfriends. Legend has it that this was because Peter didn’t show up to loop his lines in post-production. Whatever the case, it led to a different urban legends: that Peter Criss had given up rock and roll, and taken up a lucrative career as a cartoon voice actor!
I thought Gene’s distorted voice was tiresome after a while, and Paul seemed the coolest. My sister liked that Kiss were like superheroes with powers. On the other hand, I didn’t like that. If Paul Stanley couldn’t shoot a laser beam out of his eye in real life, I didn’t understand why he would in this movie. They were still Kiss, still playing the same Kiss songs, but also super-powered. My rigid brain couldn’t reconcile the two.
As for the music, the movie contains several songs that I heard for the very first time that day. “Beth” (acoustic, no less), “Shout It Out Loud”, “God of Thunder” and “I Stole Your Love”. (“Rip and Destroy” doesn’t count.) Now, because I didn’t know these songs, and there were no captions, I had to guess at the titles. “Shout It Out Loud” was the easy one. But these were the live versions taken from Alive II, fast and reckless. Not to mention we were hearing it on a TV with mono speaker; state of the art for the time, but not for proper music listening. So that’s why, for that day at least, I thought “God of Thunder” was “Not a Doctor”, and “I Stole Your Love” was something that sounded like “I Ho-Jo-Ho”.
The process of discovering Kiss was so memorable because it’s so fun. The superhero character aspect appealed to my sister and there’s no denying that it had something to do with why I loved Kiss too. But hearing the songs and albums for the first time can only happen once. And I can clearly remember a tinge of sadness when I finally acquired Rock and Roll Over, the last original Kiss album I needed to finish my collection. I was starkly aware that I was having this experience for the last time: hearing a classic Kiss album, guessing who was singing the songs by the title alone, and discovering hidden favourites. As I learned when Crazy Nights came out, hearing a new Kiss album was simply not the same as discovering the classics!
Kiss Meets the Phantom was a struggle to sit through then, but fortunately I saw it at an age when Kiss still seemed larger than life. Objectively, it is a pretty terrible film, best enjoyed as a trainwreck. The best parts are the concert scenes, which was the closest I got to seeing Kiss live at age 13. It was my first exposure to some really important songs even if I wondered why Gene was singing about being “Not a Doctor”!
Big props to the panel tonight: Eric “Uncle Meat” Litwiller, Rob “Chucky” Daniels and Erik “Velvet Voice” Woods! Any time we cover movies, I am the luckiest host in the world to be able to lean on Rob and Erik. I truly believe these two guys are some of the top experts on movie soundtracks in the world. By extension, they also know movies like the backs of their hands. This was a truly great show because we had three amazing guests on the panel. Me, all I could do was tell amusing anecdotes! (Watch the show and find out what my buddy Bob and I “learned” about women’s clothing from the movie Christine.
This is a show you’ll want to watch from start to finish. The discussion far exceeded just a simple “top 5” list, with plenty of interesting runners-up scattered through the broadcast. Go get a beverage and get ready to be inspired to watch a whole bunch of horror movies this weekend!
The LeBrain Train: 2000 Words or More with Mike and the Meat Man
Episode 85 – Cinco De List-O: Top 5 Horror Films
Topic courtesy of the Meat Man! It’s Halloween so perfect timing for another movie list: horror movies! And any time we’re talking movies, we better have Rob Daniels and Erik Woods on board!
It’s a really simple subject so we don’t need a lot of explanation here. To read up on my history with horror films, check out Record Store Tales #496: The Horror. It may spoil a couple of my picks so be forewarned!
November 5 7:00 PM E.S.T.: We are joined by the awesome Dan Fila, drummer of Sven Gali and Varga! Freeze, don’t move, this show is gonna be Under the Influence! Co-hosted by John “2loud2old” Snow.
I also have an appearance on Tim’s Vinyl Confessions coming up, and will be be on 107.5 Dave Rocks, with Jessie David and my pick for The Essential Alice Cooper, on October 31!
Always nice to repost a seasonal classic. Enjoy this Halloween tale.
RECORD STORE TALES Part 241: Halloween, KISS style!
Our annual inventory count fell on October 31. For five years straight, I never got to dress up, hand out candy, or do anything fun on Halloween because I was too busy counting discs and CD towers! However in the early days, this wasn’t the case. Halloween 1996 was actually a pretty good one.
Like most malls, ours had a few Halloween contests. T-Rev entered the store in the Pumpkin Carving category. He and I came up with the plan to do a Kiss pumpkin. T-Rev, the store owner’s brother, and myself gathered in my mom’s workshop in the basement. My mom had plenty of paint, and I was good at drawing the Kiss makeup designs. T-Rev had the idea to make the pumpkin Gene Simmons, and figured out how to make a pumpkin tongue stick out. I must say he did an amazing job.
The first step was to spray paint the pumpkin white. One of the guys did the cutting. Then, I drew the Demon design with a black magic marker. We thought the nose needed to be more three-dimensional, so I cut it out a bit. Together, we began colouring in Gene’s makeup. We needed something to define the eyes of Gene, and T-Rev thought of using pumpkin seeds. We added a wig, and voila!
T-Rev propped Gene up on the magazine stand outside the store. Immediately we started getting compliments, and the response was pretty unanimous: We had done the best job in the entire mall.
Unfortunately, the judges didn’t base their ratings on who had done the best job. They were only marking the results, whether the store employees did the pumpkins themselves or not! A store that hired a professional carver won first place. We came in second. There was no prize for second. T-Rev and I considered that to be cheating. Cheatie-cheatertons.
The contest was over, and not too soon: the pumpkin had begun to rot, as pumpkins do. That didn’t stop a customer from coming in on November 1st and offering him $10 for it. T-Rev accepted his gracious offer, even though the thing would be turning horrific in a day or two. A fool and his money, right T-Rev?
By 1997, the store had moved out of the mall. This was our last pumpkin carving contest, but at least we had the satisfaction of winning the popular vote. As far as I’m concerned, we went out on top. My personal consolation prize was later on, Halloween 2006. By this time I had moved on to United Rentals. They took Halloween very, very seriously at United Rentals! I dressed up as Paul Stanley, and this time, I finally won first prize!
JETHRO TULL – The Very Best of Jethro Tull(2001 Chrysalis)
Every fan had their first Jethro Tull purchase. Mine was 20 years ago, with their newly released Very Best of Jethro Tull. Why not? I was working at the Record Store when a used-but-mint copy dropped in my lap for only $8 (staff discount). It was only right of me to ensure it got a good home.
Unlike some “hits” compilations, this one didn’t strike with clusters of songs I wanted to focus on in the future. Other compilations can do that. For example I decided to hone in on the Brian Robertson Motorhead album immediately after hearing a double best-of. With The Very Best of Jethro Tull, I liked it all equally. I just wanted to get them all, with no particular priority. It all sounded great to me.
The album is non-chronological and contains some edit versions. “Thick As A Brick” is cut down from 44 minutes to just three — makes sense. They chose the first three minutes, which are ojectively the best known. Other edits are the single versions of “Too Old To Rock ‘n’ Roll: Too Young to Die” and “Minstrel in the Gallery”, while “Heavy Horses” gets a new edit bringing it from nine minutes to a more single-like three. The songs span the 1968 debut This Was to 1995’s Roots to Branches. Several albums are not represented at all, such as Benefit, A Passion Play, A, Stormwatch, Under Wraps, Rock Island, Catfish Rising, and J-Tull.com. Justifiable? That’s up to personal taste. Several non-album singles are included instead, such as the well known “Living In the Past” and the wicked string-laden “Sweet Dream”.
The album has an excellent flow, only interrupted with the synth-y “Steel Monkey” from 1987’s Grammy-winning Crest of a Knave. Preceded by the savage “Locomotive Breath” and followed by the tender picking of “Thick as a Brick”, it doesn’t fit in except as a speedbump. If I may be so bold, I believe “Steel Monkey” was included simply because it would be odd not to include something off that controversial Grammy winner.
While I enjoyed all the songs, the one that stood out particularly strong was “Bourée”. I never heard Bach swing like that before! The diversity of this CD, spanning all styles of rock from progressive to blues to folksy. Yes, the flute can rock and Ian Anderson is the Eddie Van Halen of the instrument.
Another true treasure from the VHS Archives. When the Pepsi Power Hour ran this guitar-centric special in early 1988, my best friend Bob and I watched it religiously. We drank up, though didn’t fully understand, every word from Rik Emmett. The former Triumph guitarist was (and is) one of our favourites. His knowledge is encyclopedic. Laurie quizzes Rik on a number of the top rated electric guitar players of the time.
Rik demonstrates his favourite passages, and discusses with host Laurie Brown the following axemen in order:
Tony Iommi
Jimmy Page
Joe Satriani
Steve Vai
Kirk Hammett
Jimi Hendrix
Angus Young
Eddie Van Halen
Yngwie J. Malmsteen
and, of course, Rik Emmett
Other topics to stay tuned for in this wide-ranging discussion:
Lefties (like Rik)
The 1988 Zeppelin reunion (Atlantic 40th Anniversary)
Gerry McGhee and Stevie Skreebs of Brighton Rock dropped by the Power Hour with Michael Williams in early ’89 to showcase their new music video, “Hangin’ High N’ Dry”. World premiere! The brand new album Take A Deep Breath was in stores and the band were on tour. The affable group were questioned about such topics as:
Playing football with Steve Harris
Recording Take A Deep Breath with Jack Richardson
Lightening up or getting the sound they wanted?
Brighton Rock double live?
Why Stevie scratched the big VH logo on the hood of his first car25
Cool “Outlaw” T-shirt giveaway
The Boston Bruins
“Live” vs “studio” videos
The unreleased X-rated version of “Hangin’ High N’ Dry”
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