april wine

Friday Preview! A Massive Music Haul!

I came home from work last Friday to find not one, not two, not three, not four, but FIVE parcels containing new music!  Of course, if you unbox something these days, you have to do it on camera.  All of this music will receive a closer look on our annual Good Friday Afternoon Show on Grab A Stack of Rock, tomorrow!  However, nothing can top the first look at a musical surprise!

Catch my reaction as I look at:

  • Six versions of the Darkness’ Dreams On Toast album, which will be discussed in more detail on Friday.
  • A brand new EP of previously unreleased music by Mystique!
  • Killer metal from the UK.
  • A surprise gift of a Japanese import.
  • A very special gift from Blotto!

All here in this spontaneous and magical unboxing video!  Tune in tomorrow for our Good Friday show and a deep dive into all this new music, and much more!

#410: Doing it Right

Christmas

RECORD STORE TALES MkII: Getting More Tale
#410: Doing it Right

I’ve complained about the way I was treated toward the end of the Record Store Days, but that was a small part of my life there.  In the beginning before we grew too big for our britches, it was a wonderful place to be.   There were a lot of things we did right, and there are hundreds of great memories of that era.

What did we do right, or differently, to make it so special for us?

  1. No uniforms! I remember the staff at HMV had these ugly shirts they had to wear.   We had plain T-shirts with a logo, which were optional most of the time.
  2. A better listening selection. Although the rules about this got more restrictive later on, back then we could listen to pretty much any one of the thousands of used CDs we had in stock.  Big chain stores at the time had less flexibility in their playlists.
  3. I felt a real “all for one, one for all” attitude.  It was inclusive.  I felt like we were the up-and-comers, underdogs ready to take on the big record stores.  Management were excellent at sowing this kind of feeling, that we were all on the same team even if we worked at different stores.  When the owner took a step back and let others run the show, the feeling of camaraderie changed into a feeling of exclusion.  Nothing lasts forever, but I felt much more job satisfaction when I felt like I was contributing to a real team.
  4. Rewarding the staff.   We had an annual Christmas party, and an annual summer house party.  These were epic.  “Time to release the hatch!”  As a store manager, I always did my best to reward my own staff, by buying them CDs that they wanted.  I did this voluntarily with my own cash because that’s the kind of manager I tried to be.
  5. The owner was willing to help out.  I remember him saying in a newspaper interview that he “still washed the windows sometimes.”  While I never saw him wash the windows, he was always willing to jump behind the counter when we were busy.  This continued even into my last year.
  6. People power. I don’t know if anything is more important in the workplace than the quality of the people you work with.  Work is a second home.  In some cases you spend more time with your co-workers than your family.  Both the owner and his people were very good at hiring excellent staff.  There will always be a certain percentage of bad apples and people who don’t work out, but I had the privilege of working with some of the best.  I feel genuinely blessed to have the experience of knowing and working side by side with these unique folk

I’ve somehow managed to find great places to work with amazing people.  Today I work with another completely different crew, and each and every one of them is awesome.  I’ve never seen a more diverse bunch and that keeps it fun and interesting every day!

Part 97: New Release Tuesdays

    

In the early days, Tuesdays were one of the busiest days of the week.  That was the day that new releases came out.  We’d also re-stock all our other stuff that day too.  Canpar would show up with several boxes which you would crack open to gander at the goodies inside.  It was also cool to see the new releases for the first time.  Checking out the album covers, the song titles, stocking them, seeing how they’d sell.  Any time there was a new release that I was personally into, it was twice as fun.

I still remember on my very first Tuesday, April Wine’s latest album Frigate came out.  I remember thinking, “April Wine?  Do people still buy new April Wine albums?”  (They didn’t.)

In the days before computers you’d have to make an inventory tag for each new release.  That was your trigger to re-order the title.  You’d put the tag on one copy of the CD.  If that copy of the CD was bought, you’d take the tag off, and put it on another.  When there were none left, you’d file that tag.  (We always filed by record company – there were more record companies back then, many have merged.)  Then come order day (Mondays) you’d go through the tags and re-order things that were sold out.

I remember when Kiss’ MTV Unplugged came out in March 1996.  Trevor was working the day shift, me the night.

“I left the Kiss Unplugged for you to make the tag.”

Maybe only a record store guy would get it, but that was cool of him.  That inventory tag would be in the store forever.  Little things like that meant something to us.

I remember when Radiohead put out The Bends.  We ordered three copies, and sold out immediately!  Imagine that today — ordering three copies!  But back then, as far as we were concerned, they were a band with one novelty hit.

The worst new release Tuesdays were the ones where we didn’t get something important.  Maybe the distributors stiffed us on an in-demand title.  Maybe we just missed some new hip-hop artist that we’d never heard of.  It would happen all the time.

I would always try to get in rock titles that I knew we could sell.  Rock wasn’t huge in the mid-90’s, but I did carry the flag.  I made sure we ordered 5 copies of Queensryche’s Hear In The Now Frontier album in 1997, which we sold out.  Then I ordered three more, which I also sold.  In fact, I sold out of that faster than I sold out of Notorious B.I.G.’s posthumous second album (which was twice the price, however).  I also carried Bruce Dickinson’s Accident of Birth.  I sold out of that one.  Even though the numbers were insignificant as far as our store sales went, I felt good that we were at least bearing the flag for rock during the 90’s.  Believe it or not, in 1997, we didn’t even carry the new Judas Priest.  That’s how bad it was for metal at the time.  I ordered one copy for myself, and just one copy.

New release Tuesdays were a long day – you had to rearrange the charts to accomodate for the new releases, and sometimes in the old days when we had more new releases, you wouldn’t even finish stocking until the next day.  Sometimes your fingers were sore from applying peel-and-stick security tags.  The excitement of new release Tuesdays, and the surprises in store, meant it was always a shift to look forward to.