RECORD STORE TALES #1071: Hot Town, Summer in the City

Setting:  The 1980s.  Southern Ontario.

Our summers always began with a week at the cottage.  For a kid, being out of touch with friends from home, not to mention the latest happenings in WWF wrestling and music videos, it was a challenge!  We took everything we had for granted back then, and what kid our age didn’t?   The cottage was not a place I looked forward to going.  I didn’t like the isolation.  Sometimes I wonder if I’d dislike cottage vacations today as much as I did then, if we didn’t have high-speed internet and all the entertainment and connection that it brings.  Literally the first thing I do when I arrive at the lake is connect to my family and friends and tell them we’ve arrived safely, often with a photo or video.  But back then….

For me, the summer excitement didn’t begin when we arrived at the lake.  It began when we got home from that first week’s vacation!  I’d race into the house and check my mail.  Would it be comic books straight from Marvel?  Or a cassette from Columbia House?  Mail was the most exciting thing about coming home, and it sucked when there was no mail!

Next up:  check the VCR.  Did the many hours of WWF wrestling that I had programmed record properly?  Usually not!  Programming a VCR was tricky back then, and you had to count on power failures resetting everything.  There were many times that I would come home to find no wrestling!  Other times, it would record like a charm.  If successful, the morning after returning home would be spent watching the wrestling I missed.

Speaking of the almighty VCR, the week spent at the lake would mean I missed at least two installments of the Pepsi Power Hour.  What videos and interviews did I miss?  I preferred not to think about it.  In the summers, there was a lot of metal that I missed.  I didn’t want to set the VCR to record whole shows – I was compiling music videos and interviews, ad-free.

After the July holiday, I’d come home with some new music purchased at the lake, and want to show my new albums to my best friend Bob.  In 1989, one that I was particularly enthused about was The Headless Children by W.A.S.P.  It took Bob some time to believe me when I said it was great.  Later that year, the ballad “Forever Free” convinced him.  Meanwhile, Bob would be filling me in on anything important happening in our neighborhood.  It wouldn’t be long before we were back at it, getting into mischief in the summer of the city.

Our interests changed as we got older and more independent.  Bob was driving by the summer of ’90 so we could go virtually anywhere we wanted to.  We made excursions downtown to buy music!  There we had Encore, Sam the Record Man and Dr. Disc all waiting for our dollars.  Today it’s just Encore, who have moved twice but is still alive!  The longest serving record store in Kitchener still lives today.  I can recall bringing home treasures such as Rocka Rolla by Judas Priest.  Vinyl, of course – cassettes were impossible to find of that oldie.  The idea was, if you went downtown, you wanted to score something that you couldn’t get at the mall.  It had to be something special.  A single, an import, a record you couldn’t buy on cassette in these parts.  The city had record stores, but so did the cottage.  What the cottage didn’t have was Sam’s, Encore, and Dr. Disc.  No access to music that was hard to find.  Coming home to the city meant buying rarities.

We rocked hard and we played hard.  Summer meant basketball, baseball, and tennis.  Usually with music blasting!  Sports weren’t my thing but they were a thing that we did.  Hours spent at the park.  In driveways.  In backyards, playing.  Or we’d be getting into trouble, exploring the nearby woods on our bikes.  We did a lot of exploring.  We came back scraped and bruised, and it was awesome.  Constantly exploring!

Occasionally we’d go to the waterpark at Pioneer Sports World, which no longer exists.  I can still smell the chlorine!  One thing about summer in the city, you can smell the chlorine from nearby pools.  Chlorine always smells like summer.  Of course, for non-chlorinated water fun, we set up sprinklers at home.  One summer, we built an obstacle course in the back yard with lawn chairs and sprinklers.  Only we understood the rules, but it was a race against the clock!  My new digital stopwatch was timekeeper.  Just couldn’t get it wet!

Sprinklers gave way to water balloons.  Bob and I would go to the store and buy a few bags of balloons.  We made such a mess!  Parents would be furious about the wasted water and rubber fragments all over the yard.  Those rubber bits always took a while to clean up.  Parents did not enjoy water balloon days at our house.

The next door neighbor George was always a misfit.  One day Bob and I decided to hurl water balloons at his bedroom window.  The barrage of water was never acknowledged, but I do recall Bob and I remarking how dirty his windows were!  The water revealed years of accumulated dirt on his screens.

Playing outdoors was the thing.  Parents didn’t want us in their personal spaces.  In the olden days, we would have played GI Joe or Lego in the yard.  Later on, we’d grab our guitars, amps, tape decks and power cords and record!  Whether on the front patio, or in the garage, we recorded a lot of garbage.  It didn’t matter how bad it was, just that the record button was on.  I have seven cassettes called “Mike and Bob…” littered with garbage we recorded!

Bob and I would raise hell for a month or so, but then it was time again.  My dad usually had two weeks of vacation booked for August which would be spent at the lake.  Sometimes he’d go home for a day and bring us our mail, but there was rarely anything good.  The two weeks of isolation in August was worse than July because the weather was wet and cold.  Worst of all, the TV would start showing “back to school” ads.  Now that was something in the city that we didn’t want to return to.  By the time we got home, kids were already sporting their new “back to school” haircuts, and had new shoes waiting for the coming year.  All we had left was Labour Day and then back to the daily fall grind!

Time changes everything.  Once Bob finished highschool, he was allowed to drive to the cottage.  No more friend-less holidays!  Then we got phones, cable TV, and VCRs.  (There are actually three VCRs in storage at the cottage right now!)  When these things changed, so did my attitude.  Now I’d rather be there, than anywhere else in the world!

I wonder if Bob’s up for a garage jam session this summer!