RECORD STORE TALES #1194: You got exactly two words of that right.
I have a soft spot for Ian Gillan and Roger Glover’s Accidentally on Purpose. The Deep Purple Pair had a writing partnership dating all the way back to the 1960s and a band called Episode Six. Before Ian was fired from Deep Purple in 1988, he and Roger emerged from the sessions for The House of Blue Light with an excess of stifled creativity. These lighter, more summery tuned formed the basis for their only duo album. I found it on cassette in the mid-90s, right when I was seriously collecting Deep Purple for the first time.
It’s not rock. There are some songs that do rock a bit, but it’s more like fun pop with roots in rock and prog. There’s saxophone, and loads of programming. Very 1980s. It took a couple listens to adjust to this distinctly non-Purple album, but once certain songs like the floaty “Clouds and Rain” and the funky “Evil Eye” started to hit, they stuck. Programming aside, you’ll hear some cool instrumentation and musicianship on this album. Eventually, I grew to like it. As soon as I found out the CD reissue had three bonus tracks that were not on the cassette, I upgraded, as I often do.
The bonus tracks included a song that would have worked on a corny 80s Beach Boys album, called “Cayman Island”. It also had a sax-heavy cover of “Purple People Eater” which is the definition of guilty pleasure.
Shortly after I bought the CD, a used copy came into stock at the Beat Goes On. It always happened that way. If you bought something new, you’d see a used copy a matter of weeks later. It was eerily inevitable. Of course, when that used copy came in, I threw it into the rotation for store play one afternoon.
A guy walked up to the counter, intrigued by the music.
“What’s this that we’re listening to right now?” he asked.
I was thrilled to have someone ask!
“This is a side project by Ian Gillan and Roger Glover from Deep Purple,” I answered with inner glee, but also some trepidation as I’d personally prefer to keep listening to it!
He responded, “Roger Waters from Pink Floyd?“
What…? No! No! You got just two words of that right: “Roger” and “from”!
He sulked away upon learning it was not Floydian music. No sale that day!
GETTING MORE TALE #519: Mistakes I Made Fixing Broken Tapes
I used to play cassette tapes almost exclusively. Even when I had started growing a CD collection, my cassettes dominated. Why? They were portable. I could record a CD or LP on them, put them in my Walkman, or play them in the car. I didn’t have a good way of doing that with CDs. Plus, you could record a CD to a good quality blank tape, and make a better copy than if you bought it on a pre-recorded manufactured release.
But tapes break. They wear. They get old. There were ways of fixing them, which I sometimes screwed up gloriously. What mistakes did I make?
MISTAKE #1:Dirty hands
You shouldn’t even try to fix a tape with dirty hands. Any time I opened one up to splice or carefully wind the tape on the spools, I was touching them with my unclean, ungloved hands. This deposited dirt and oil on the tape, deteriorating the sound and then transferring that dirt and oil to my tape heads.
MISTAKE #2: Magnetized screwdriver
Here’s another no-brainer that I missed. I had a cool little screwdriver that was magnetized. It was hard to lose those little screws with one of those, since they stuck to the screwdriver. Brilliant way to keep all those little screws from disappearing, but not good for tapes!
I wondered why a lot of my tapes had drop-outs in the sound. Many could have been caused by my favourite screwdriver while trying to fix them. This is common sense but I didn’t think my little screwdriver could possibly do any harm!
MISTAKE #3: Incorrect reassembly
Putting the tape back together is sometimes harder than it looks. Small parts pop out and sometimes it’s tricky to get them back in correctly. The slip sheet – a little piece of plastic inside the tape shell – helps reduce friction and squeal, but only if you put it back in with the slippery side facing the tape spool. When hastily reassembling tapes, I sometimes put the sheet in the wrong way causing slowdowns and noise.
Another critical part is the pressure pad. This applies light pressure on the tape to keep it against the player’s tape head. These pieces were tiny and sometimes popped out of place. There were some tapes I put back together with this piece improperly inserted. The lack of pressure on the tape reduced the sound quality greatly.
MISTAKE #4: Splicing with Scotch tape
I spliced successfully with Scotch tape…but only in the short term. As the Scotch tape ages, the stickiness reduces and becomes slimy. This means in time and with a few plays, a careful splice would break. You don’t want to get any of that stinky gunk in your tape deck, so use proper splicing tape. They used to sell it commonly at places like Radio Shack, but I came from a cheap family that used whatever was available. Hence my tapes were spliced with Scotch.
MISTAKE #5: Butter fingers
It’s tricky getting all the tape wound around the right spools and ready to screw back together. Sometimes – quite often actually – I would struggle with this and inevitably crunch the tape between parts of the shell. Once you crunch or crease the magnetic tape, you’re going to hear an audio problem.
I didn’t wreck every tape that I tried to fix, but I did make these mistakes periodically. No wonder my tapes sounded like crap.
IAN GILLAN & ROGER GLOVER – Accidentally on Purpose(1988 Virgin)
Shit LeBrain’s Customers Said
I was playing this album in-store one afternoon in the 90’s. A customer walked up to me and asked what I was playing.
“This is a side project by Ian Gillan and Roger Glover from Deep Purple,” I answered
He responded, “Roger Waters from Pink Floyd?“
What…? No! No! You got just two words of that right: “Roger” and “from”!
Deep Purple’s The House of Blue Light was an incredibly difficult album to make, especially for Ian Gillan. A working vacation was in order, so he and Glover took off for the Caribbean. They settled in to Sir George Martin’s recording studio AIR Montserrat, to record whatever they felt like. The result was the light and tropical Accidentally on Purpose, an album that Gillan says has become the favourite record for a number of his friends. He is very proud of it, especially since it came on the heels of a terrible creative experience in Deep Purple. It would not have been born if not for the gloomy Purple process. Many guests contributed to the jovial sessions, such as Dr. John, George Young, and Andy Newmark.
Jump in your TARDIS, and travel back in time to 1987. Your destination: a tropical island with plenty of rum, beaches and a recording studio. Can you picture it? Can you hear the sounds of the late 80’s in your mind? Then you can imagine what Accidentally on Purpose sounds like.
There are no “Clouds and Rain” in the images in my mind, only boats and surf and sand. Glover plays bass and keyboards, Newmark is on drums, while George Young contributes a light sax solo. This is not for most Deep Purple fans, most assuredly. This is for those who want to open their minds and have a trip into the clouds and sunshine. This is about as light as light rock gets, but there is a quality to it above the pop morass.
Hard hitting electronic drum beats back “Evil Eye”, a much edgier track. Still, don’t expect guitars, solos or Ian Gillan to scream his ass off. If you enjoy the kind of pop rock that Robert Plant was doing in the 80’s, you’re in the right ballpark for this. It’s blatantly commercial compared to Deep Purple, but at the same time it’s not because there are musical challenges to be found here.
“She Took My Breath Away” is a sweet love song, similar musically to the brightness of “Clouds and Rain”, but relying too much on electronics. Then they get goofy on “Dislocated” which sounds like Ian Gillan having a blast. (I recognize one of the keyboard voices on this song from our old Yamaha back in the day!) Glover’s enjoying himself too; he plays some brilliant bass parts, very different from Deep Purple. “Via Miami” ended the first side with an old time rock and roll party! It’s the first significant guitar rocker, and it sounds like something the Honeydrippers could have gotten away with. (In fact Plant would sound brilliant singing this.) Bring on the sax!
There is plenty more guitar on “I Can’t Dance to That”, which unfortunately is not a good song. It is not different enough from Deep Purple rawk, but not good enough for Deep Purple. The old blues classic “I Can’t Believe You Wanna Leave” is incredible, giving Ian a chance to sing something different, and he does it with lung power! Dr. John on the keys lends it that funky N’awleans drawl. If you were to make a mix tape of Ian Gillan’s finest vocal performance, then this song should be on it. The skippable “Lonely Avenue” only has synth to back it; largely forgettable. Synth-rocking to “Telephone Box” is more fun; it’s probably the best rocker on the album. Cool female backing vocals make Gillan sound even more suave. He breaks out his trusted congas on it, and truthfully you could imagine the Deep Purple of today performing a song like this now.
The last tune on the record was “I Thought No”, rocking bluesily along to the end. If you want a drunken, laidback jam session with scads of harmonica to go, then “I Thought No” will deliver the right thrills. Just open a bottle and dive in…but the CD offers three more bonus tracks! The cool rockin’ blues of “I Thought No” is contrasted by the most nauseating track, “Cayman Island”. Ian’s done some kind of Jamaican twist to his accent. Pure synth, with all those keyboard presets I remember from the 80’s, that’s “Cayman Island”! And I love every second of it, as terrible as it is. No matter how much you hate “Cayman Island”, you have to be a real hard hearted bastard if you don’t like “Purple People Eater”. That’s exactly the song you think it is, and who better to do it than the guys from Purple? You want a golden oldie performed by the guy who loves the golden oldies the most? I sure do so fuck off if you don’t! It’s brilliant, and you just gotta dance. The last song is a synth throwaway called “Chet”, which references a boat called the Carrie Lee; Gillan also name-dropped the vessel in Cayman Island.
Accidentally on Purpose probably kept Ian and Roger sane at the time. That has to be why it sounds so gleeful. They needed this. Does a Deep Purple fan “need” this? No. But they’d find some good times here regardless.
RECORD STORE TALES MkII: Getting More Tale #423: The Tyranny of Cassette in the ’80s
Anyone who grew up in the mid to late 1980s probably enjoyed their music on the most popular format at the time: cassette. Vinyl LPs were still around, and still popular, but not nearly as much as cassettes. CDs were new and only a few of us had CD players yet. Cassette tapes had the portability factor going for them. Everybody had a Walkman, and those who didn’t probably had one on their Christmas list in 1985.
Vinyl was a dying breed in our highschool halls. There were still some older kids who boasted of the superior sound quality, but none of my friends had equipment good enough to enjoy that sound quality. I certainly didn’t. All I had was a turntable hooked directly into a Sanyo cassette deck for amplification. The sound was harsh and tinny. The scratches inherent with the format were also more distracting than the tape hiss of cassette.
So, it was all about cassette! Buy ‘em, trade ‘em, swap ‘em and re-record over them when you decide you don’t like the music anymore. I have a cassette copy of Michael Jackson’s Thriller that had long ago been erased and taped over with other stuff. When you couldn’t find a fresh blank tape to record on, you could just erase something else. Everybody did it. My friend Bob had a cassette of In Through the Out Door that he recorded over with us talking and goofing around!
For teenage highschool kids, cassettes were enough for our musical fixes. A decent quality name brand tape could hold up to 110 minutes without stretching. We used them to tape anything and everything. (I have a tape with the sound of a friend’s dad taking a massive shit — no, I did not record it, they did!) Since cassettes were re-recordable, that meant that every kid could even record their own music and become a rock star in his or her own basement. You couldn’t do that with your fancy schmancy LPs, we all thought! Don’t like your song? Just rewind and record it again! Those who didn’t play music could have their own fun, DJ’ing and and writing skits. And let’s not forget about taping your friends’ albums. Recording tape to tape would always result in excessive tape hiss, but kids didn’t seem to mind in the 1980’s. We ignored the hiss. It was something we considered part of the music, because we really never heard any music without hiss!
Although the flaws of cassettes are patently obvious today, in the 80’s we were just discovering these troubling issues for ourselves. We overlooked the tape hiss, but it was harder to ignore speed issues. The biggest problem that I had with cassettes was inconsistent speed. Some tapes, especially those made by Polygram and EMI in Canada, seemed to have a lot of internal friction. Grab a small screwdriver and open up an old cassette tape some time. Inside you will find rollers, spindles, and bits and pieces all designed for the cassette tape to roll smoothly. Whether they worked right always seemed to be a matter of random luck. When friction inside caused the tape to run slow, it was immediately obvious. The pitch would be noticeably lower, and often the tape would warble as your player tried to play it at normal speed, but fought against the friction.
On the other hand, sometimes the problems came down to your player. Your tape deck had even more spindles and doo-dads to turn that tape around and around. Those got dirty and worn out, too. Sure, you could buy tape head cleaners and demagnetizers, but did they ever really have a noticeable effect on your listening experience? Probably not. I used to diligently clean the insides of my tape decks with lint-free cloths and isopropyl alcohol. Although I could see black filth coming off the rollers when I cleaned them, the sound and speed never really improved. It was always very frustrating when a tape would play fine on a friend’s deck, but went slow as molasses on your own. My Sanyo went in for service and professional cleaning more than once, but that didn’t help either.
Although cassettes sounded like shit, and only got worse the longer you kept them, they did have a big advantage over CD for me, and that was portability. I preferred cassettes in the car, up until fairly recently. The reason for this was, working in the used CD store, I saw so many CDs that were just utterly destroyed by car CD players. You don’t get that problem so much anymore, but in the 90’s and 2000’s, there were a lot of discs just annihilated by a lot of car decks. It didn’t seem to matter if the car player was a high-end stereo or a piece of crap. People would bring their used CDs in to me, and ask me how they looked. I’d usually ask, “Did you play this in a car deck?” I could always tell. Customers would ask me, “How did you know?” Because the CD would be completely scratched, but always in perfect circles. Some dirt clearly got into the car deck, and scratched up the discs as they were spinning. Or, the disc was just scraping up against the internal workings of the car player as it spun. Either way, the result was usually a CD that looks like a kid’s Spirograph drawing.
At least when playing a cassette in the car, those things could take a beating. I only ever had one or two that were “eaten” by the player. Compare that to the thousands of CDs that I saw destroyed by car decks over the years.
If life is a musical journey, then cassettes were my travelling companions for over a decade. We had a necessary parting of ways, and now I am happy to stick to CD and flash drives when on the road!
Here are some new sh*te photies to start your new year right!
How did you spend your New Year’s Eve? I spent it unconventionally, for me. While Mrs. LeBrain snuck in some early evening Bingo, I went down to City Hall with my buddy Jason and his family. Apparently, there was going to be a toy show and sale / 80’s retro night going on. One of my favourite Transformers vendors in the whole wide world, B&K Collectibles, was going to be there!
There were a ton of people there. Also present was the DeLorean from Back to the Future, and K.I.T.T. from Knight Rider. Although I didn’t stick around to see him, Todd Bridges from 80’s sitcom Diff’rent Strokes was also on hand last night. Yee-haw.
After the toy show I got Jen at Bingo and we headed home to watch the Leafs barely beat the Bruins. I fell asleep well before midnight.
But…toys!
My two scores: Transformers Masterpiece Smokescreen. Similar to, but different from, Masterpiece Prowl. I also snagged some snazzy new missiles for my Prowl figure, from third party company Before and After. The kit includes the “Omega Launch” weapons which snap over Prowl’s normally teeny ones, and a decal sheet which I have not yet applied (if I do).
mikeladano.com 