#887: A Glimpse of the Future

RECORD STORE TALES #887: A Glimpse of the Future

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.

LeBrain on Start to Continue 3/17/21

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.

#886: Hand Me Downs

RECORD STORE TALES #886: Hand Me Downs

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!

Rest in Peace Gerri Miller – Metal Edge

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.

Rest in peace Gerri…and fuck cancer.

 

REVIEW: ZZ Top – The ZZ Top Six Pack (1987)

ZZ Top – The ZZ Top Six Pack (1987 Warner)

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 Grande Mud, 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.”  

Sunday Screening: July Talk – “The News”

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

what fucking happened?

The Very Beast Artwork of Iron Maiden on the LeBrain Train!

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!

Fear of the Art: Best Iron Maiden cover artwork on the LeBrain Train

The LeBrain Train:  2000 Words or More with Mike Ladano

Episode 54 – Best Iron Maiden Cover Art

 

Time to chill out with a more laid-back show this Friday!  We’ve had some serious lists, and serious guests in recent weeks.  This week is almost like a vacation.  Join Harrison the Mad Metal Man, Aaron from KeepsMeAlive, and Superdekes with myself here tonight as we share our favourite Iron Maiden artwork.

The art of Derek Riggs, Melvyn Grant, and many talented coversmiths including Hugh Syme will be up for examination tonight.  No disqualifications:  albums, singles, whatever!  As long as one of us likes it, we can list it.  Each of us will have our own rules and criteria.

BONUS:  Iron Maiden ReAction figure unboxing!   While it would be nice to have a complete set, I could only order four.  These Eddies, based on Iron Maiden cover art, will definitely be on topic for this show!

7:00 PM E.S.T.
Facebook:  MikeLeBrain  YouTube:  Mike LeBrain

 


Next week:  The 1 Year Anniversary Show with giveaways and special guest Brent Jensen!

VHS Archives #102: Rob Halford Interview ’91 (The day of his last gig with Priest before quitting!)

19 August, 1991.  Operation Rock and Roll, featuring Alice Cooper, Judas Priest, Motorhead, Metal Church and Dangerous Toys rolled into Toronto.  The last show of the tour.  Unfortunately the day lives on in infamy.  It was the day Rob Halford hit his head (right on the bridge of the nose) on the drum riser, knocking him out cold!  Priest performed “Hell Bent for Leather” as an instrumental while Rob lay unseen in a cloud of artificial fog!  On top of that, and unbeknownst at the time, it was Priest’s very last gig with the Metal God for a decade.

This pre-accident Pepsi Power Hour interview by Michael Williams is interesting because Rob discusses their forthcoming compilation Metal Works a full two years before it was out.  At that point the plan was to try and write a couple new songs for the compilation, and then go back into the studio to record a brand new Priest album some time in 1992.  Needless to say, that did not work out!  As the last show of the Painkiller tour, this day was actually the last time Rob even saw his bandmates until they reconciled!

#885.5: Freestylin’ 9

WordPress is changing and so I too must change. Nine years, I’ve been flying with WordPress. They are now foisting this new editor upon us. And so, I thought I should try to write with it.

Today I listened to Deep Purple’s The Battle Rages On in the car. Hey, I can still do colour.

The new editor isn’t great but so far so good. My problem is that when I get into a creative groove, I want to be able to go on autopilot. I don’t want to be pecking and searching and figuring out how I used to do something when the words should be flowing freely. But here we are; change is inevitable. Therefore, this brief test post.

Test photo gallery: A tease of upcoming reviews. Can you guess what they are?




Sadly, I only have four reviews currently lined up. I have felt a disturbance in the Force. The Friday night show, it takes up so much time and energy I simply have not been able to write and review as much as I used to. But I can’t give up the Friday night show. It is too important to me. And to my friends. I will continue to post daily, but I’m sure you’ve noticed review content has been less frequent.

I feel like I need to review something really quick in order to compensate for my lack of reviews. Plus it gives me an excuse to try embedding a video.

JULY TALK – “Laid” (2020 music video)

July Talk are a fantastically quirky quintet from Toronto, fronted by Leah Fay and Peter Dreimanis. His gravelly Tom-Waits-ish gutterals are a delightful contrast to Leah’s melodic whimsy. Their 2020 live video cover version of James’ hit “Laid” is simply great. You could argue that anybody can cover “Laid” based on every bad bar band that you saw do it. What I like here is that July Talk make it sound like a July Talk song.

One camera, no edits. Pete’s mask dangles from his ear while Leah hangs on out barefoot on the couch. Josh Warburton, Ian Docherty, Danny Miles, rocking it in the back. The masked drummer, wailing away on that signature drum riff. This non-album track adds to the band’s excellent canon of video material. If you like this one, check out their latest single “The News”.

4.5/5 stars

I think I’ve accomplished what I set out to do, which is familiarize myself with the new editor so I can continue to produce content for you! Blame Kevin.