#1065: Even the Best Weekends Can Turn to Crap

RECORD STORE TALES #1065: Even the Best Weekends Can Turn to Crap

It started great!

Thursday night, the music on the trip up to the lake was amazing. We began with The Cult’s Fire Woman EP, and moved on to Michigan Left by the Arkells.  Jen fell asleep in the car and I was left to sing along by myself.  Never a problem!

We came packed with lots of Lego, and plenty of new music to unbox live on Grab A Stack of Rock.  We arrived with coffee, treats and tunes!  Immediately I set up on the front porch and started playing mellow music.  Jim Cuddy’s All In Time is one of the best cottage front porch albums for dancing that I have ever heard.  From rockers to tear-jerking ballads, what an album!  I used to consider it “just a Blue Rodeo album without Greg” but it’s actually far more than that.  Articulating it is hard, but the album evoked emotions and dance moves that Blue Rodeo didn’t.  We also played some of Alice Cooper’s more emotional, cinematic tunes that night.  It was a magical start.

Friday was a wonderful day!  I commenced with some more porch music, and then we hit The Beef Way for our weekend meat!  We chose two T-bone steaks, a turkey breast fillet (for Jen) and a beautiful duck breast (for me).  It was my first duck breast.  I seasoned heavily with salt, pepper and garlic powder to offset that gamey taste.  I scored the fat, cooked it skin side down in a frying pan for 10 minutes to get it cripsy, and finished it in the BBQ.  When finished, you could have mistaken it for steak, it was that good.  The skin was the best part, and I’ll get duck breast from The Beef Way again.  Just an awesome lunch!

Of course, Friday night was Grab A Stack of Rock, and an excellent show was had, almost two hours long!  Grab A Stack really did rock this time!  Lots of new music revealed, to be reviewed in the coming weeks/months, including Journey Through Time.

First thing Saturday morning, I taped an excellent Tim’s Vinyl Confessions, reviewing the new Def Leppard Drastic Symphonies.  I cannot wait until this airs!  Although we were both kind but critical, I’m sure the Fanboy trolls will be out when it’s released on YouTube.  I will of course be posting it here for ease of viewing.  It was possibly my favourite Tim’s Vinyl Confessions that I’ve been involved with to date!

We did “Jazz Saturday” morning with Herbie Hancock’s Quartet.  By recommendation of Robert Lawson, next Jazz Saturday will be to Pat Metheny’s Bright Size Life.  It’s ordered and on its way.  Then we switched to the back yard, and built Lego all afternoon.  We are both enjoying the Lego “Speed Champions” series of licensed car models.  They are all roughly the same scale and although they are similar in design, very few of them use the exact same design techniques.  Jen also build a New York City skyline, while I finally finished my knockoff Titanic set.  I’ll never buy knockoff Lego again.  It looks cool complete, but it was very hard to build with confusing instructions and bags.  The final fitting pieces were not up to Lego’s standards.   It does look good, but never again.

It was Saturday evening that turned everything to shit.

I made the steaks, damn perfect if you asked me, and Jen proclaimed “I’m gonna eat the whole thing!”  I was already half full from snacking on chips so I knew I was keeping leftovers.  As she took a mid-meal break, Jen had a seizure.

The coffee spilled.  The Coke spilled.  I could stop neither because I was busy keeping her from falling off her chair.  Eventually I got her safely down, where she soaked herself in spilled coffee.  It took some work to get her into bed.  More seizures later that night.  She fell off the bed, and once again Mike managed to pull off a save.  I’ve lost track of the rest of the seizures that night but we figured it was four or five total.  Not the most restful night, and I was completely exhausted from cleaning up the spills.  I went to bed early and slept in late.  Not the way I usually do things at the cottage.  I like to stay up late and enjoy the creatures of the night.  That didn’t happen this weekend.

I came home Sunday completely exhausted and Jen slept the entire way.  Music on the way home was also mellow:  Ward One: Along the Way and When the Bough Breaks by Bill Ward.  Really good and felt appropriate to my mood.

We will have more Lego to build next time.  My Jazz Quartet set looks challenging and interesting.  Hopefully the next trip will be less eventful!

 

 

VIDEO/REVIEW: Tim’s Vinyl Confessions: Ep. 424: Neal Schon – Journey Through Time (2023)

At 45 minutes long, this is one of the best Tim’s Vinyl Confessions I’ve ever participated in. You can really pick up on our love of Journey, and perhaps our disappointment in recent events since their last album. Fortunately, Neal Schon heard us. Enjoy this episode!

 

REVIEW: The Max Rebo Band – “Jedi Rocks” (1997 CD single)

THE MAX REBO BAND – “Jedi Rocks” (1997 BMG CD single)

This is, in my humble fan opinion, one of the worst pieces of music ever included in a Star Wars movie, if not the very worst.

The 1997 Star Wars special editions are derided for many reason, but one that is not talked about nearly enough is the replacement of certain pieces of music.  In this case, “Lapti Nek” from the 1983 cut of Return of the Jedi was removed.  Why?  Because George Lucas loves to tinker.  He wasn’t happy that the singer in the band, Sy Snootles, didn’t have enough articulation and so thought to himself, “What could I do with a new song and a computer?”  The unfortunate results are called “Jedi Rocks”, by Jerry Hey.

The original song, “Lapti Nek”, plays in Jabba’s palace just before he feeds Oola the slave girl to his pet Rancor monster.  In universe, it is performed by the Max Rebo band, originally a trio featuring keyboardist Max, singer Sy and flautist Droopy McCool.  The band is expanded in the special edition to include more singers, including a really annoying big-mouthed Yuzzum named…uhg…Joh Yowza.  You can just tell that certain parts of the song were designed to show off what computers could make Yowza’s mouth do in the scene in question.

This is shit.  At least “Lapti Nek” sounded a little alien.  “Jedi Rocks” sounds like generic blues rock written by a highschool music teacher for his class to perform at the spring pageant.  And it sounds completely terrestrial, aside from the silly cartoonish vocals.  You can identify an Earthly harmonica, drum kit, organ, saxophones, guitars and bass.  That should never be the case when you’re talking about an alien band from a galaxy far, far away.  More than half the track is bland jamming that could have been on any soundtrack from virtually any Earth-bound movie with a bar and a band in it.

The only reason to buy this single, since you’ll never listen to it, is the clear picture disc.  The CD single released for The Empire Strikes Back was a shaped Vader-head disc, but they realized this were not good for the insides of your CD transport, which prefers a perfectly balanced disc.  Hence, they switched to clear picture discs that look shaped but are not.

Cool disc, bad song.

0.5/5 stars

 

Motherlode of Rock! Mike, Harrison, Jex, Tim, Snowman & Dr. Kathryn Grab A Stack

A star studded show featuring the following guests:

  • Harrison the Mad Metal Man
  • Jexcalibur J “The Muscle” Russell
  • Tim “Bad Influence” Durling
  • with John T. Snow and Dr. Kathryn

Together we revealed:

  • The new Ghost EP (2 copies)
  • The new Def Leppard Drastic Symphonies (umpteen copies)
  • The new Neal Schon Journey Through Time (2 copies)
  • Foreshadowed two upcoming episodes of Tim’s Vinyl Confessions
  • Max the Axe garage sale scores:  BBM and a dragon kite named Drogon
  • Harrison’s diverse taste
  • Classic Alice Cooper
  • Rare Eric Carr
  • New Sprite “Lymonade” celebrating 50 years of hip hop (?)
  • Record Faire scores galore
  • The 2loud2old shirt, Grab A Stack & Tim’s Vinyl Confessions merch

Official Grab A Stack of Rock merch available here!

 

Grab A Stack of Cottage Discs with Harrison & Jex

GRAB A STACK OF ROCK With Mike and the Mad Metal Man

Episode 21:  Back to the Cottage with Harrison & Jex

How can we possibly top the last cottage show, when Jex, Grace and Mr. Squirrel all surprised us by showing up at the lake?

While we always hope for more animal cameos, this is what’s on deck tonight:

  • Harrison and Jex both have new music to show off.  For Harrison, there’s quite a bit since hasn’t been on the show in several weeks!  As for Jex, the Jexciter, aka Jecalibur J. Rambo, he’s been on the prowl with Tim Durling so you can only imagine what he has in store.
  • I will be unboxing the very first 2loud2oldmusic T-shirt ever made!  (John T. Snow expected to make an appearance.)  It will look great on my new slim frame!
  • If all goes according to plan I should have some new music releases to unbox, including stuff that Tim Durling is responsible for, again!
  • We may see Lego.

As always, expect surprises.

 

Friday May 26 at 7:00 P.M. E.S.T.  Enjoy on YouTube or on Facebook!

Complete @MarriedandHeels [Instagram/Onlyfans] YouTube collection

Complete Playlist – including age restricted content not seen below!  

Bookmark and check back – new videos added periodically!

 

 

#1064: “Mean People Suck”

RECORD STORE TALES #1064: “Mean People Suck”

Working retail, year after grinding year, can wear you down.  I have friends who have been doing it for over 30 years, and I don’t know how.  I barely lasted ten.  In the end, I checked out before hitting my twelfth anniversary.

I outlasted T-Rev by a couple years.  He had been complaining to me a long, long time about retail.  He managed our Cambridge location.  He was really tiring of the predictable daily routine.  People arguing over prices, condition, or the right of the customer to use our washroom or not.  (Not!)  I worked at his location for many weeks one summer.  They had a cutout from a magazine in the bathroom that said “MEAN PEOPLE SUCK”.  They modified it to read “PEOPLE SUCK”.  Not the kind of thing you want your customers to see.

It was true though.  We were inundated with a such a myriad of stupid and flat-out meanness over the years that it could wear down Mt. Everest to gravel.  I’ve been called an asshole, four-eyes, deaf…and you’re just expected to take it all.  You have to take it with a smile on your face when a customer tries to pull one over on you.  You have to absorb all their rage when you screw up.  Just take it.

I couldn’t always take it.  Some of these guys triggered me and I lashed back verbally.  And I was better at it than any of them.  It happened three times, that I can remember.  And let me tell you, they had it coming!

I paid for it in spades, but they had it coming.

One thing that I blame for this was management’s strict rules about things like returns and reservations.  I didn’t like getting yelled at for accepting returns that I shouldn’t have, so I erred on the side of caution.  I probably could have gotten away with things, like a return without a receipt, and I think other people probably did, but instead I got blasted by customers.  It was kind of a lose/lose.  Having said this, if I remembered the person buying the CD, no problem!  If I didn’t…

Here’s something funny, a lot of customers expected you to remember them.  “Hey!  I’m back!” was a phrase I heard frequently from strangers.  We had regulars that we knew by name, but there were always total strangers who would say, “I was here two weeks, and you sold me a Skynyrd CD, remember?”

When I was a kid, grade 3 or 4, I remember being put in charge of selling things from a table at a school sale.  I had to take change and sometimes make change.  I loved it.  I loved the interaction with the other kids, and all the smiles.  I  think I was only there for an hour, but I felt amazing.  I came home from school that day all aglow, telling my dad that I knew what I wanted to do when I grew up.  It’s a shame the reality didn’t live up to the childhood expectation.

Smiles were infrequent.  You’d think people would be happier buying music.  I am.  On the other hand, just as those customers who berated me on every visit didn’t know me or anything about me, I also did not know them.  Their reasons for their ill tempers were none of my business.

I think we can still all agree on one thing:  mean people suck!

 

REVIEW: Deep Purple – Bombay Calling – Live in ’95 (2022 CD/DVD reissue)

DEEP PURPLE – Bombay Calling – Live in ’95  (2022 – Edel CD/DVD reissue)

Years ago, I begged for a CD issue of Deep Purple’s live DVD Bombay Calling.  You could download the audio on iTunes and burn your own double live, which I did, but that just doesn’t do it for a physical product collector.   I’ve made my case for physical product here over the years many, many times.  Unfortunately, this physical release was pooched by Edel by excluding one song.  Like similar CD bootlegs of this 1995 concert, the new Edel CD is missing the opening track “Fireball”!  It’s still there on DVD, and it was always there on the iTunes edition, but it’s missing from CD 1.  That’s a real shame since it’s a good version of “Fireball” and it’s the damn opener!  (The original DVD of Bombay Calling was issued in 2000.  iTunes got it in 2003.)

When originally released on iTunes, this was promoted as an “official bootleg”.  Now it seems to be marketed as some kind of deluxe live album, limited and numbered to 10,000 CD/DVD sets.  The hype sticker calls it “the best rock show ever staged in India.”

This concert was recorded on April 18 1995, which eagle-eyed fans will realize is well before the Purpendicular album.  Bombay Calling was recorded not long after “the banjo player took a hike” and Purple ultimately carried on with Steve Morse for the next few decades.  Joe Satriani stepped in for a short while, but it was Dixie Dregs guitar maestro Morse that took the Man in Black’s place permanently.  This concert was recorded at the very start of Morse’s tenure, and features a few songs they would drop from the set a year or two later.  It also features a brand new tune they were working on called “Perpendicular Waltz”, later spelled “The Purpendicular Waltz” on the album.  The lineup was fresh, feeling each other out, but full of energy and the excitement of a band creatively reborn, both in the studio and on stage.

There is one earlier concert available from this period, which is Purple Sunshine in Ft. Lauderdale Florida, exactly two weeks prior.  That one is truly is an official bootleg, taken from audience sources and released on the 12 CD box set Collector’s Edition: The Bootleg Series 1984-2000.  The setlists are slightly different.  When they hit India for this concert, a new song called “Ken the Mechanic” (retitled “Ted the Mechanic”) was dropped, as was “Anyone’s Daughter”.  They were replaced by long time favourites “Maybe I’m a Leo” and “Space Truckin’” from Machine Head.

Special treats for the ears on Bombay Calling include Steve Morse’s incendiary soloing on “Anya” (which would be dropped from the set in 1996).  His feature solo leading into “Lazy” is also excellent, and of course very different from what Ritchie used to do.  Jon Lord’s keyboard solo is among the best I’ve heard, and even features a segue into “Soldier of Fortune” from Stormbringer.  The solo segments that Deep Purple did often allowed them to play snippets from songs from the David Coverdale period of the band, and this one was unexpected and brilliant.

Highlights:  “Fireball” (boo for excluding from the CD), “The Battle Rages On”, and “Anya”.

I love a good, raw live performance captured on tape, and Deep Purple don’t muck around.  This is special, coming from that transitional period when Steve Morse was just getting his feet wet.  Considering how different he is from Ritchie Blackmore, this smooth switcheroo is quite remarkable.

3/5 stars (subtracting half a star from iTunes edition, for losing a song)