Thank you Brent Jensen for appearing on the show a second time! Although the conversation veered wildly from Cinderella to Raven and back again, we orbited around Brent’s mahogany box of cassettes. Maybe you had one like it. But was your stuffed alphabetically from Accept to W.A.S.P.? Take a look inside Brent’s tape collection and listen to the amazing stories that unfold.
The chat with Brent commences at 0:23:00 of the stream.
As my One Year Anniversary Show, we are doing a CD giveaway too. Next week we’ll draw a winner from a hat. See bottom for the trivia question and submission form!
The trivia question was: What is the tagline on Brent’s No Sleep ‘Til Sudbury podcast? Watch the episode for some pretty obvious clues and submit your answer in the form below. Really, really, really obvious clues. Really obvious.
A winner will be drawn next week!
NEXT WEEK
Marco the Contrarian joins Uncle Meat and I for the Blackest of Sabbaths, only on a Friday!
The LeBrain Train: 2000 Words or More with Mike Ladano
Episode 55 – The Return of Brent Jensen
** One Year Anniversary Episode **
Brent Jensen is one of my favourite people. His No Sleep ‘Til Sudbury podcast is essential listening. I’m currently working my way through the book No Sleep’Til Sudbury, a story I really identify with. Though Brent is a couple years ahead of me, I really see myself in his story of discovering hard rock and heavy metal in the early 80s. Seeing bands for the first time, the contrived origins and evolution of Motley Crue, cassettes, video tapes…it is a great read. One that has me stroking my beard in deep thought, as I am forced to consider heavy metal history from a different angle.
Derek Williamson will be back as your co-host for what we hope will be another excellent free-form conversation about the subject we all love: music that makes our skin vibrate.
In addition: this will be my one year anniversary show! Ontario went into a state of emergency on March 17, 2020. I went live that Friday. And here we are a year later! To celebrate, I’ll be doing a CD giveaway (details at bottom), and showing clips from the very first show a year ago.
Not only that: Brent is celebrating four years and 200 episodes of No Sleep ‘Til Sudbury, the podcast! He just opened a new Patreon membership too, so we will be talking about that and plenty more. This is an episode you don’t want to miss. You want to catch it live!
We will be asking a skill-testing question about Brent Jensen on the show. Submit your answers in the form below. We will be giving away two sealed CDs: The Cars’ debut (remastered), and a signed copy of Jim Crean’s excellent Insatiable. I will be doing a random draw from a hat next week!
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.
Sometimes I like to imagine myself in my younger self’s shoes. I think about me as a kid, sitting in the basement watching the Pepsi Power Hour on MuchMusic. There I am, staring intently, VCR remote grasped in hand, and set to “Record-Pause”. Waiting for the new music video by Kiss to debut. Hitting that un-pause button to get a good recording as soon as the video began. Could I even have imagined the on-demand nature of YouTube? No, but I like to imagine what I would have thought if I could have seen a glimpse of the future.
I always felt limited by technology, even though I was spoiled enough to have my own stereo, my own Walkman, and access to the family VCR (almost) whenever I wanted. Though I had all this stuff, I couldn’t make it do what I wanted to do without some improvisation. Making a mix tape, for example. If I wanted a live song on a mix tape, I had to fade it in and out. My dual tape deck couldn’t do that. To do a fade, I plugged my Walkman, via a cable in the headphone jack, into the audio inputs of my ghetto blaster. This was done with a Y-connector, and an RCA-to-3.5 mm adaptor cable. Then I used the Walkman’s volume knob to fade the song in and out while the ghetto blaster recorded. It took trial and error and the end recording usually sounded a little hot and crackly. But I didn’t have anything better.
If that highschool kid playing with cables in his bedroom could only have imagined Audacity. Instant fades, exactly as you want them. Precise digital replication. I would have lost my shit. If you had given me Audacity as a kid, I might not have left my bedroom for a week…and not for the reasons a teen usually hides in his bedroom!
I worked long hours on mix tapes back in those days, mainly because you had to make them in real time. And you had to keep it simple too. Making the tape in the first place was the challenge; making it creatively was the icing. But the end results were always…disappointing? Underwhelming? The second generation taped songs never sounded as good as the first. You’d get a little noise, perhaps a pop, between tracks where you started and stopped your recording. Little imperfections. Maybe one track sounds a little slow, one a little fast. Volume levels are inconsistent. All stuff out of your control.
The amount of control I have today over what I create is astounding. Even visually speaking. I don’t make tape cover art anymore, but doing so was a painstaking process involving sharp pencils, rulers, erasers, and scissors. Everything had to be handwritten and hand drawn. Sometimes I might be able to get my dad to photocopy a cover at his work, but usually I had to make my own stuff. I was very limited when it came to to making visuals. Even taking a photograph, it took days or weeks to get your picture back. You had to use the entire roll of film before getting it developed, of course. Now you have a phone that’s a camera and a computer.
Now that’s something that young me definitely couldn’t have imagined: our phones. Even science fiction of the mid-80s didn’t have anything like the phones we have today. Imagine what I could have made with that! It took months and a lot of clunky equipment for Bob Schipper and I to make a single music video in 1989. I can throw together a clip in minutes today, thanks to computers and phones and ubiquitous cameras that ensure I always have raw photos and videos waiting to be edited together.
Computers — now there’s a quantum leap that young me wouldn’t believe. We had a family computer from a very early time, decked out with a dot matrix printer and a monochrome block of a monitor. But it wasn’t connected to anything. We didn’t have the instant access to information. We couldn’t look up a band’s complete discography in a moment on Discogs, much less actually buy those rare items and have them shipped to the front door! Can you imagine how much that would have blown my mind? I had a few hundred bucks in the bank at that age. Well, it would all have been gone if you had given me access to Discogs for an hour in 1986. The ability to actually complete an artist’s music collection today, was something I just could not ever do as a kid. Very few people could.
We did what we could with the resources at hand. We’d save our pennies, and take the bus down to Sam the Record Man. We’d look around for an hour and decide where we would best spend our dollars. “Don’t go to Sam the Record Man and buy something you can get at the mall,” was the motto. That would be a waste of time and bus money!
Bob Schipper made far more trips to Sam’s, usually via bike. But if he acquired a rarity, it was always a given that I could tape it off him. A lot of my first Maiden B-sides were just taped copies of records he found at Sam’s.
What I was doing in those early formative years was absorbing rock’s past. Collecting the albums, discovering the bands, learning the member’s names through the magazines and interviews. But what if I could have seen the future of all this? What would I have thought of things like a six-man Iron Maiden lineup with three lead guitar players? I think tunes like “The Wicker Man” would have blown me away as an evolution without losing what made Maiden great.
I wonder what I would have thought of the Kiss tour with the original members back in makeup? I know I would have been disappointed that they never made a proper studio album together. One thing I appreciated as a kid was that Kiss put out something new every year. Today, Kiss only put out an album when there’s a solar eclipse on planet Jendell. I think the success of that reunion tour would have made the younger me feel validated for my Kiss love, but I know I would have been unhappy about the lack of new material. However, if I could have heard albums like Sonic Boom and Monster, I also know I’d have been happy that Kiss dropped the keyboards, brought Gene back to prominence, and had all four members singing. That would have impressed me.
I’m still working on my time travel powers, and I’m also wary of doing anything that could change the future. Since The Avengers: Endgame taught us that you can’t change your past’s future’s future (or something like that), I’m going to continue to work on the technology. If I can show my past self some of these amazing technological advances, I might…I don’t know! Buy first print Kiss LPs and keep them in the shrink wrap? I haven’t fully through this through, but trust me — it’s going to be awesome.
Wednesday night – March 17 2021 – I will be guesting on Start To Continue with their regulars including Kevin (Buried On Mars)! Tune it at the link below, 8:00 PM E.S.T. It’s their Vinyl Collection Live Chat 44, but I’ll be showing off CDs. New arrivals here at LeBrain HQ including discs from Japan, Germany, and just around the corner.
Tune in Wednesday at 8:00 PM for some musical treasure.
It’s funny. Though my music playback setup today is completely different from my first, even today there’s still one thing they have in common: both setups featured hand-me-down audio components from my parents. And I hope one of those components continues working forever.
In Getting More Tale #796: Improvisation, I explained that we kids of the 80s didn’t have the luxury to buy whatever stereo equipment we wanted. We had to make due with what we had, and improvise. And that’s exactly what we did. When I first started collecting music, I owned it on two formats only: LP and cassette. The classic duo. Compact discs existed only in Japan. We hadn’t even heard of them. All that existed in our world were the vinyl record and the compact cassette. That’s all I needed to be able to play.
Around 1985, my parents realized they weren’t going to be listening to records or 8-track tapes anymore. The living room needed to be renovated and there was no more room for that giant Lloyd’s stereo system. The 8-track player didn’t work anymore, but it was a single unit combined with a radio receiver and amplifier, which still worked fine. The Lloyd’s record player could still plug into it and play normally. I snapped them up. Only George Balasz and myself were lucky enough to have record players in our bedrooms. Everybody else on the street had to use their parents’ systems.
Don’t get me wrong: it didn’t sound great. I took my parents’ hand-me-downs and plugged them into my Panasonic ghetto blaster, which essentially was both my tape deck and speakers. Not ideal, but good enough for a 13 year old. I recall the sound was rather tinny. But it worked after a spell. If my mom wanted me to tape her old Roy Orbison LPs, I could do that. (Spoiler: my mom really abused her LPs.)
I used that setup for many years. The Lloyd’s receiver lasted seven more. It finally blew a circuit in early ’92. A few weeks later, I replaced it with a small, affordable preamp. It didn’t have a lot of power, but it enabled me to continue listening to records. Of course, that old Lloyd’s turntable wasn’t in the best shape anymore. The needle had never been changed, and I had really abused that thing, playing records backwards and trying to make funky sounds. It was cool though, because it had four speeds: 16, 33, 45, and 78. I didn’t own any 16’s or 78’s. But I could play them. And I kept it for well over a decade. I only replaced it when I did a complete stereo system overhaul in the late 90s. T-Rev and I went to Steve’s TV, and I picked out new everything. Canadian made PSB speakers, a new Technics dual tape component, a Technics receiver to go with it, and a brand new Technics turntable. Good enough for me, who had been living with a Frankenstein system his whole life.
The only thing I didn’t need to buy was a CD player. And this is the last piece of hand-me-down tech incorporated into my still-current system. (I actually have two systems today: my 7.1 setup in the main room with blu-ray, and my stereo “man cave” with all my analog stuff.)
I call this CD player “the Tank”. It is a 30 year old Sony five-disc changer and I more or less confiscated it from them when I moved out. Once they had a DVD player, I didn’t think they needed a CD player anymore, so I made the executive decision to liberate it. It wasn’t exactly a covert operation. The Sony had been in my bedroom setup for a while. I liked a numbers of its features. It had a fader! I could fade tracks in and fade out, which was perfect for recording live albums. The timer was also a nice extra — you could use it to monitor the time remaining on a track, or even album. This was great for tape-making. It was also painlessly easy to program. So I stole the Sony! When I moved out, I just said “I’m taking this CD player.” Mom grumbled a bit, but…here it is. I successfully abducted my parents’ CD player with no casualties.
I’m glad I did. Though the five-disc gimmick doesn’t work so smoothly anymore, the Tank can play any CD I throw at it. That might not sound like a big deal, but it is. You’d be surprised how many CDs you’ll have problems playing in your computer today. Some players, and many computers, still won’t play weird stuff like DualDiscs. I have an old DualDisc by The Cult that will not play properly in any computer ever invented by mankind. Even regular CDs can be weird. I have a Cinderella disc (multiple copies even) that no computer from PC to Apple will play correctly.
So I need the Tank. Just recently, I was listening to a fantastic live album by King’s X given to me by Superdekes. The last song (an acoustic version of “Over My Head”) refused to rip to my PC. I booted up the laptop and ran into the same problem, same spot. I didn’t need to try a third computer to know that this would be futile. Only the Tank could play my King’s X. I examined the CD up close for damage and saw nothing. (Good thing too as copies today run just shy of $100!) Deke sent me a good disc (and thank you once more for that!), but CDs can be fickle.
No issue with the Tank. I powered up the Sony, inserted the King’s X and played the song through. No issues! I got a good recording of it in Audacity and exported the audio into the King’s X album folder. Seamless!
Thanks mom and dad for giving me, and in some cases, allowing me to steal your stuff. I kept it all working — I even still have the remote!
You only had a few choices of rock magazines at the convenience stores near us. Most prominent were Hit Parader, Rip, and Metal Edge. Over the years, I bought plenty of Metal Edge. Black and white pages thick with interviews and lists, punctuated by locker-ready full colour photos. Metal Edge were cool because they gave the time of day to all varieties of bands. They focused primarily on whatever-you-wanna-call-it: “hard rock”, or “glam” or “hair metal”. If you needed a fix of Sebastian Bach, Metal Edge delivered. But they covered just about everybody, into the grunge and alterna-metal years. At the center of it all was editor Gerri Miller.
Everybody who bought heavy metal magazines knew a few key names. Gerri Miller was the only female among them. We knew her face and jet black hair from the photos.
What little I knew about Gerri Miller came from her magazine. The product that she made, that we consumed every page of. She put out a good magazine. I enjoyed the Metal Edge “specials”. They’d collect all their best Bon Jovi, Kiss or Poison content and put out a dedicated magazine, usually to celebrate a new album. It was not much better than going to the cottage for a week-long vacation with a fresh Metal Edge magazine under my arm.
According to the (unrelated) Metal Sludge website, Miller had been battling Lupus for several years, and was recently diagnosed with stage 4 cancer.
What a strange time the dawn of the compact disc was. Even at the end of the 1980s, vast catalogues of music had yet to be released on CD. It was a hit and miss affair, with some early discs sounding wonderful and others sounding like a thin, tinny facsimile of the original vinyl. The longer running time of CD was a bonus that many bands took advantage of, while other heritage groups were considering the ways they could re-release their music on this new format.
Before Jimmy Page took his first crack at remastering the Led Zeppelin catalogue for CD, ZZ Top took a different route.
Now, granted, ZZ Top’s music spans a longer time period than that of many of their rivals. They’re also notable for starting the 1970s as a dirty raw blues and ending the 80s as clean space-age rock. While this took them from one success to an even more massive one, it unfortunately meant that the ZZ Top camp felt it necessary to “update” their music for the CD age. Make the catalogue sound more on an even keel with Eliminator and Afterburner.
And so the six ZZ Top albums that were so-far unreleased on CD were remixed: First Album, Rio GrandeMud, Tres Hombres, Fandango!, Tejas, and El Loco. Only Degüello was spared, having been released on CD earlier.
Apparently, updating the ZZ Top catalogue for CD was of “overriding concern” for all parties involved. ZZ Top were aware that there were complaints about early CD transfers for classic albums. The goal was “return to the original analog tapes and consider what steps were needed to render the music appropriate to contemporary digital playback equipment without compromising integrity.”
The answer was none. No steps were necessary. The remixes were not what the old fans wanted to hear on their brand new CD players. Rhythm tracks were updated with sequencers, drums treated digitally, and the whole thing came out sterile and flat. Adding echo didn’t add depth. Doing an A/B test with a remix vs. an original track makes you wonder why you even own the ZZ Top Six Pack.* It just…doesn’t sound right. Like a disorienting time displacement.
As of 2013, you can get all the original ZZ Top albums on remastered CD as they should have always sounded.
While it is nice to have six ZZ Top albums on just three CDs, and there is no denying the booklet is hot, you do not need the ZZ Top Six Pack anymore. The charm of the originals is that they are a document of those hot Memphis studios where ZZ Top laid down the original tracks fast and dirty. The remixes sound like a digital mixing board trying to tame a wild animal. Wrong, and unnecessary. “Francine” is actually awful.
The booklet is truly valuable (nonsense justifying the remix aside) and worth a point on its own. The ZZ Top songs in and of themselves are always incredible, so they too are worth a point.
2/5 stars
* It was a gift from Kevin. He also rates it 2/5 stars. I asked him for a quote for this review. All he had to say about the ZZ Top Six Pack was: “I’m glad Mike took this crap off my hands.”
I had a really good funny, hard rockin’ Sunday Screening for you lined up. Then Youtube took down the video Saturday morning. I hate when that happens!
So: Plan B! I’ve been listening to the new album Pray For It by July Talk lately. Their latest video “The News” dropped a couple months ago, and it’s fantastic enough to deserve your Sunday Screening time of 3 minutes and 47 seconds.
July Talk are very hands-on with their videos. Singers Pete Dreimanis and Leah Fay have director credits while Dreimanis is listed as a producer. “The News” is one of their most striking and entertaining clips yet, topical and catchy. Check it out!
if only everything that happened in our dreams were true and nothing bad could ever happen to you when we feel too much we’d just wake up
and all the longing to belong would always be enough
gimme context, without context everything is true
only nothing that happens only happens to you
if the news should ever break our way
will we still hear the truth of someone that’s been left behind
and if truth should ever be unkind
will we still know that everything that’s true is by design
and that everything that’s true is ours to find
i woke up i was the same but all my dreams had died
what fucking happened?
guess everyone who spoke in tongues had lied
in the lobby watched the dawning of a different side
gimme context, without context everything is true
besides nothing that happens only happens to you
if the news should ever break our way
would we still hear the truth of someone that’s been left behind
and if truth should ever be unclear
will we still know that everything that’s fair is hard to hear
and that everything breaks down in love and fear
everything that happens
everything that happens
everything that happens
if the news should ever break our way
will we still hear the truth of someone that’s been left behind
and if truth should ever be unkind
will we still know that everything that’s true is by design
and that everything that’s true’s hard to define
and that everything that’s true is ours to find
Great show tonight with your co-hosts Harrison the Mad Metal Man, Aaron from KeepsMeAlive, and Superdekes! We talked the Nigel Tufnel Top Ten Iron Maiden Covers/Artwork (that’s a mouthful) and it was awesome. We took a close look at: albums, singles, T-shirts, Reaction figures, MacFarlane figures, and the Neca Powerslave Eddie. If you like Iron Maiden, you automatically love their artwork. Ergo, you need to watch this show!
First we unboxed some brand new Reaction Eddie figures. Go to 0:16:50 of the stream.
Then we wished Steve Harris a Happy Birthday, and commenced with the lists! Go to 0:24:00 of the stream.
After the conclusion of the Maiden lists, we had a freeform chat covering Queensryche’s Operation: Mindcrime, and a newly unearthed Black Sabbath track called “Slapback”. Go to 2:22:45 of the stream to check that out.
Thanks for watching, and if you just want to know what Maiden art we picked, check out Aaron’s hand-written list below! See ya next week!
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