Bob Schipper was the instigator. He was always the one with the creative ideas. From making our own spiked wristbands from juice tins and black electrical tape, to sketching our own original video games, he was usually the one with the kernel for the idea. I provided the energy, and was able to spin his ideas off and expand them into entire universes. On this day in question though, Bob had the idea that we could make our own tie dye T-shirts.
I don’t know where he got the idea. Probably someone from school. There was one hippy kid in his grade that I would later work with at the grocery store. Massive Grateful Dead fan. The idea probably came from him.
In our world, tie dye wasn’t big. Metal bands rarely wore the stuff, and we didn’t go back to Zeppelin. Our horizons were much more recent. In my world, wrestlers like Superstar Billy Graham were my inspiration. He was known for his tie dye, and he looked incredibly cool.
We were not able to make tie dye as fancy as Superstar’s. We were only able to mix a couple colours. Our methods were simple. We went to the local Zeller’s store, bought a few colours of fabric dye, and four of the cheapest, plain white T-shirts we could find. Then, we would walk home and set up in my mom’s basement. With no regard for other people’s clothes or the mess we were making, we dumped the dye into the big basement sink, and mixed it up. Then, we carefully twisted the shirts up, trying to create a spiral effect. Once satisfied, we fastened everything with elastic bands, and dipped the shirts spiral-side down into the dye. We repeated the process with another colour, and let everything dry. Of our shirt experiments, maybe one out of every two attempts turned out.
The dye started to wash out after two washes. The shirts wore thin and ripped easily. One evening, Bob and I were wrestling in the park, when he grabbed and lifted me, and my favourite tie dye shirt ripped. I had no choice but to finish the job. “Rip it off like Hogan!” encouraged Bob. With a roar, and a lot of effort, I ripped the shirt off my body and threw it to the ground. “Raaaah!!”
Meanwhile at home, Mom was trying to get splashes of dye off of every surface in the basement. She was absolutely furious with us. No wonder Bob wasn’t allowed to do stuff like this at his house!
My best friend, Bob Schipper, spent most of the summer of 1986 out on Alberta with his brother Martin. The two of us had been joined at the hip for summer after summer. He was gone for about six weeks: the majority of the holidays. He was excited to have some independence out there with his brother, far from parental supervision. I missed him terribly. It just wasn’t the same without him. My partner in crime was gone, and I was lonely.
We wrote back and forth. I’ll never forget the day my first letter from Bob arrived in the mail. My mom came into my room excited that my letter from Bob had come. I could have cried, I missed him so much. His letter did not disappoint. It was loaded with drawings and stories, and I read it over and over. It helped alleviate the pain. I wrote back immediately of course. I think I wrote my letter on the family computer. Bob wanted one so badly. In his letter, he said “When I come back, I’m getting a computer and a dog.” My parents laughed at that. They knew there was no way his parents would agree to a dog! Bob was showing that independent streak that he was picking up.
I was counting the days until he came home. We had so much to discuss. Bob had missed six weeks of WWF wrestling! There were heel turns he knew nothing about. I had new music to show him on my VHS collection. Most seriously though, I was weeks away from starting high school. Bob was going to show me the ropes and help me buy school supplies. He knew exactly what I’d need and what to be prepared for. While I was excited to start highschool, far from the Catholic school bullies that tormented me for eight years, I was also extremely anxious. I didn’t know the building and I had heard about hazing “niners”. I needed reassurance.
One day in mid-August, Bob came home.
I gave him some time…a little bit…to settle back in. Then I raced over and rang that doorbell. His mom always greeted me with a warm smile. Bob had great parents: Tina and John. They treated us so well. I can still see his mom’s smile and hear her voice, every time she greeted us at the door. Then Bob came downstairs. We didn’t hug or shake hands. Kids didn’t do that back then.
“HEY!” I said.
“HEY!” he returned. Simple as that.
We went out on the back porch, and talked and talked and talked. There was show and tell, gifts, and stories. Importantly, Bob had returned with Kiss.
The vinyl copy of Killers that he brought home with him is the very copy I own today. I think he also arrived with Kiss Alive II on cassette. I taped both immediately! Taping Kiss records from Bob meant I didn’t have to tape them off creepy George next door. There were a few songs we were quickly obsessed with: “All American Man”, “I’m A Legend Tonight”, and “Nowhere To Run”.
Bob also brought home for me an unusual gift: a defused hand grenade! Imagine putting that in your luggage today. I don’t know what happened to it. I should still have it in a box of stuff in storage somewhere. It was hollow inside, but heavy as hell! I played with it so much I eventually broke the pin off.
It wasn’t a long visit. Bob promised to help me with school supplies before the end of the summer, and he was true to his word. I knew he’d also shield me from anyone looking to haze a “niner”. I just couldn’t wait to get back at it with him: drawing, creating, listening to music, watching wrestling, and raising havok everywhere we went. It had been a quiet summer, spent collecting GI Joe and Transformers figures, and playing with them in the yard by myself. But now…the kids were back.
I love admitting to my past musical sins. Perhaps others will learn from my mistakes.
I was in grade 11, a mere 16 years old, when the music video for “Youth Gone Wild” hit the airwaves. Skid Row were the latest thing, a band promoted by Jon Bon Jovi himself, from his home state of New Jersey. We didn’t know yet that the lead singer, Sebastian Bach, identified as a Canadian. He grew up in Peterborough Ontario, just on the other side of Toronto. In fact, I didn’t know that I already had something of Bach in my music video collection. I had a brief clip of him, with teased up hair, in a prior band called Madame X. This band was led by Maxine Petrucci, sister of Roxy Petrucci from Vixen. They featured a young Sebastian Bach and Mark “Bam Bam” McConnell whom Bach would play with in VO5. I wasn’t into any of those bands. I was pretty hard-headed about what I liked and disliked.
In Spring 1989, I first encountered “Youth Gone Wild” on the Pepsi Power Hour. It could have been Michael Williams hosting, but whoever it was, they hyped up this new band called Skid Row. I liked getting in on new bands from the ground floor. Made them easier to collect when you started at the start. At that point, I wasn’t even sure how many albums Judas Priest actually had. I was intrigued enough to hit “record” on my VCR as the music video began. I caught the opening “Ba-boom!” of drums, and sat back to watch.
While I wasn’t blown away, I kept recording. The key was the singer. If the singer sucked, I’d usually hit “stop” and rewind back to where I was. The singer passed the test: he didn’t suck. I kept recording.
After about a minute, I pressed the “stop” button, and lamented that this new band wasn’t for me. What happened? What did Skid Row do to turn me off so quickly?
I can admit this. I’ve always been open about the fact that I was very image-driven as a teenager. We all were! With the exception of maybe George Balazs, all the neighborhood kids were into image to some degree or another. I was probably driven by image more than the average kid, consuming magazines and music videos by the metric tonne. So, what exactly was wrong with Skid Row?
I’ll tell ya, folks. It was serious.
The bass player had a chain going from his nose to his ear.
I just could not. I couldn’t put a poster on my wall with some band that had a bass player with a chain that went from his nose to his ear! No way, no f’n way.
I pressed rewind, and prepared to record the next video over Skid Row.
That summer, the glorious, legendary summer of ’89, I went with Warrant. I bought their debut album sight-unseen, based on a blurb in the Columbia House catalogue. Warrant were the selection of the month. “What the hell,” I thought, and checked the box to order it immediately.
Meanwhile, Bob Schipper and the girl I liked, named Tammy, were really into Skid Row. They knew all about my issues with the nose chain. They got under my skin about it a bit, but I wouldn’t bend on Skid Row.
“18 and Life” was the next single, a dark power ballad that was easy for me to ignore. “I Remember You” was harder to pass on. It was the perfect acoustic ballad for 1989. You had the nostalgic lyrics, which Bob and I both connected with. Somehow, we knew that 1989 was the absolute pinnacle. We knew this would be the summer to beat! Bon Jovi and Def Leppard were still on the charts. Aerosmith and Motley Crue had new singles out with albums incoming. We walked around singing “Summer of ’69” by Bryan Adams, except we changed the words to “Summer of ’89”. We just knew. “Got my first real six string…” we sang. And we both had our own fairly new guitars that we could barely play.
“I Remember You” was a massive hit, and still I resisted.
“Because of the nose chain?” Bob Schipper questioned me.
Absolutely because of the nose chain!
I stood firm for two years. Bob Schipper went to college, and Tammy was long distance and not meant to last. I felt a bit like an island by the time 1991 rolled around. I felt alone. My best friend was gone, I had no girlfriend, and most of my school friends went their own ways. I was a loner like I’d never been in my life before. Music was my companion, and my beloved rock magazines were my library.
That’s how Skid Row eventually got me. Sebastian Bach had a good friend in Drew Masters, who published the excellent M.E.A.T Magazine out of Toronto. Drew’s praise for the forthcoming second Skid Row album, Slave to the Grind, was unrelenting. He caught my ear. I was looking for heavier music in my life, not satisfied with Priest’s Painkiller as one of the heaviest albums I owned. I wanted more rock, and I wanted it heavy.
The other thing that got me was the collector’s itch. When I found out that Slave to the Grind was released in two versions with different exclusive songs, I was triggered. I had to have both.
“I’ll make a tape, and put both songs on my version!” It was a pretty cool idea.
Costco had Slave to the Grind in stock. They had the full-on version with “Get the Fuck Out”, the song that was excluded from the more store-friendly version. Columbia House stocked the tame version, which had a completely different song called “Beggars Day”. I bought the CD from Costco, the vinyl from Columbia House, and suddenly I was the only guy in town who had the full set. I made my cassette with joy, recreating the Skid Row logo on the spine, and writing the song titles in with red ink.
“Get the Fuck Out” was track 6, side one. “Beggars Day” was track 7, side one. I still have them in that order in my mp3 files today.
Sure, there was an audible change in sound when the tape source went from CD to vinyl, but I couldn’t afford two CD copies. Little did I know how cool it would be later on to have an original vinyl copy of Slave to the Grind.
I loved the album. I loved all three of the ballads. The production was sharp. There were excellent deep cuts: “The Threat”, “Livin’ on a Chain Gang”, and “Riot Act” were all as great as any of the singles. Furthermore, the singer had taken it to new heights of intensity and excellence.
I let Skid Row into my heart that day. It was a good decision. Skid Row accompanied me through times good and bad, lonely and angry. They were my companion through it all, and they’re still pretty good. It was meant to be!
There’s wet globby snow that melts as soon as you pick it up. There’s packing snow, perfect for snowballs. There is light powdery snow that won’t clump together. On one particular winter day in the early 80s, we had hard brick-like snow that allowed us to build an awesome snowfort.
Together with my sister, Bob Schipper and I ventured out one weekend morning with the intent to turn this snow into an igloo. An igloo of sorts. We didn’t have the snow or skill to do the roof properly, so we cheated a little. My sister had a “Mr. Turtle Pool” — a green plastic pool about four or five feet wide. Flipped upside down, that would make a perfect roof for our igloo.
Side note: I keep thinking about how good our parents were to us. We had everything we needed. Turtle pools, bikes, video games, and most of all, freedom. Freedom to make a mess of their yard and build this igloo right in the middle of the front lawn.
Snowpants on! Boots, gloves, scarves, hats, and we were ready. We had kiddie shovels at the ready. The three of us started in the morning, and kept going for what seemed like the whole day. Kids lose track of time, and moments become frozen. We didn’t wear watches, and I rarely knew what time it was. We just went out and didn’t come back in until we were bored.
Bob and I began collecting large brick-shaped clumps of snow, and assembling them in a circle – the rough outline of our igloo. Then we began stacking them, and packing the gaps with more snow. The snow was not easy to work with that day, and we frequently had to rebuild what we had started, but eventually, layer by layer, our igloo began taking shape. We left a gap for the door and tested our construction to make sure there was room for three. Time for a break. We had a little shelf on one of the inner walls, perfect to hold a couple soda pop cans or drink boxes. Up and up we built. Good snow was in short supply as we got higher and higher, and we eventually capped it off with the turtle pool.
We were so proud of our little igloo! We called mom and dad outside to look. Unfortunately, they didn’t take any pictures. It wasn’t like today.
The three of us huddled inside the igloo and relaxed after a day of hard work! Soon it would be dark and we would have to go inside, but there was always tomorrow! In the meantime, we sipped our drinks and enjoyed our fort. We’d pretend there was a roaring storm outside and we were taking shelter from the elements.
The best kind of fun was the kind we made on our own. We let our creativity flow, we burned our energy up, and we let our imaginations take us wherever it could. Winter offered opportunities different from summers. You could build a fort in the summer. That was the exclusive property of the cold months. It enabled us to use a different side of our creativity. Later on, Bob studied architecture. Take from that what you will.
I always think of my best friend growing up, Bob, on my birthday. Our birthdays are only 10 days apart, so for us, July was a busy month full of music new and old. We always gave each other music. The last birthday we celebrated together was 1991 as I recall, and he gave me Van Halen’s For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge on CD. Same copy I still own today.
My favourite birthday memory might actually be his party in 1984. He was into Marvel comics limited series because they were easy to collect, and he loved The Last Starfighter, which was three issues. Obviously we had to go see the movie. His parents took us to Mother’s Pizza for dinner and then to the movie. “It’s better than Star Wars!” I raved back home.
This year on my birthday I’d like to share this new video I made from Mike and Bob’s Cross Kitchener Adventure. I set it to the Gene Simmons song “Waiting For the Morning Light”, written by Gene and Bob Dylan. (Don’t ask why I set it to that song.) I hope you enjoy this nostalgic music video from about 9 months before Bob gave me that Van Halen CD!
Major events on this date: Deep Purple broke up in 1976!
If you would like to celebrate this year’s birthday with Harrison and I, you can do that live this Friday at 7:00 PM on Grab A Stack of Rock! Please join us, won’t you?
Bob had a blue and yellow BMX bike, so I had to have a blue and yellow BMX bike.
Bob had a leather jacket, and so I had to have a leather jacket.
Bob had an electric guitar…so I had to have an electric guitar.
Early in 1988, Bob bought his first and only guitar. It was a jagged, black Stinger with a whammy bar. It had two double coil pickups. He had strap locks so he could twirl his guitar over his shoulder if he wanted. And I had to have all these things too.
Bob bought his guitar second-hand from a guy who said “it used to belong to the guy from Helix”. Of course there was no way to verify this so we never treated it as fact. The first weekend he had it, he invited me over to check it out. How hard could a guitar be to play? They used to teach sheet music in grade school, so I thought “piece of cake, I can play guitar”.
I told my parents that I was getting a guitar, and to them it was just another thing that Bob had, that I had to have too. And since Bob was two years older and had a part-time job, they’d be paying for this guitar that I insisted I was getting. Bob and I went out on our own one afternoon, to East End Music in downtown Kitchener. We browsed, got the help of the man working (probably the owner) and I picked out a generic white guitar. It had what I needed — the humbucking pickups and whammy bar like Bob had.
“The black and white guitars will be a cool contrast,” we both thought.
I really wanted that guitar. I thought it was just meant to be. Bob and I were going to form a band. This was the first step. We already had a few band names picked out.
“We’ll be back,” I told the guy as we left. I was really excited. Upon arriving at home, I proceeded with begging my parents for the guitar. My dad wasn’t happy, especially when I explained to him that we already told the guy that I was coming back for it.
“Oh no,” he moaned. But they agreed, as long as I took music lessons. That seemed like a pretty sweet deal! My dad got out his cheque book, asked the man, “What can you do for me here?” and bought me the white generic instrument that I couldn’t live without, at a slightly reduced price! I was the only one who was happy with the outcome.
It was at this point that I discovered that guitar was really hard.
Look closely in this picture and you can see the black cardboard “air guitar” that I made, and our old Atari 2600 console.
Sure, I could pick out the first six or seven notes of the “Detroit Rock City” solo, but not in time. Bob and I figured out how to do a simple version of the “Wasted Years” intro, but couldn’t play the song any further than that. I saw a kid at school playing acoustic guitar, and he did something with his fingers that I couldn’t. He laid his index finger on the fretboard, and played multiple strings at once — the skill of chording that I had yet to learn.
My mom found a teacher that did housecalls. It was perfect — my sister was learning keyboards from him. Gary Mertz was his name, a keyboard player by nature but also able to teach guitar. Bob would come over on Saturday mornings, and take his lesson after Kathryn and I had finished. Gary could teach three lessons in one stop, and I believe there was a fourth kid in the neighborhood that he taught as well. After lessons, sometimes Bob and I would hang out and listen to music, or go to the mall.
The first lesson I really learned about guitar is why you don’t want a whammy bar. I spent most of my time tuning that thing, and replacing a set of strings was a nightmare. “I’ll never buy another guitar with a whammy bar,” I said after buying a second guitar with a whammy bar.
The reason I bought that second guitar was due to an accident with the first. I left it lying upright, leaning on a bench. It got tangled in a cable, and when my sister got her keyboard out to practice, the cable yanked on the whammy bar. The guitar hit the bench and the headstock broke in two. It was made clear to me by both Gary and my parents that this accident was my fault. But Gary found a guy who would fix it.
A broken guitar is never as good as it was brand new. A couple years later I bought my Kramer flying V, which became my preferred instrument. It too was a white guitar, and so I said to Bob: “My gimmick is that every guitar I own will be a white guitar.” He thought that was cool, because two of my favourite players, Adrian Smith and Phil Collen, frequently played white guitars.
The fact of the matter is, some people can play instruments, and some people can’t. I went the full distance before admitting that I can’t. I modified my first axe with some cool stickers. Bob and I both bought “super slinky” guitar strings thinking it would help us play fast. For my guitar strap, I chose a cool faux-snakeskin thing. (I didn’t want animal print — too 1984.) I had an electronic tuner, a suitably heavy ancient tube amp with a reverb pedal, and a collection of different picks. Gary tried to make my mom feel better about my difficulty. “It’s not as easy as the keyboard,” he explained. “If I dropped an ashtray on this key, it’s still going to make the right note. A guitar won’t.” But eventually, I called it quits. It turns out that my sister got all the talent.
Bob didn’t think he was learning anything from Gary, and he quit several months before I did. He had a new interest now: sailboarding.
“Oh I suppose you’re going to want a sailboard now!” said my mom with a warning tone in her voice.
But I didn’t follow Bob this time. Sailboarding was the first thing Bob was into, that I had no interest in. I toiled away at guitar a little longer, thinking now I could be a solo artist. I wrote some lyrics and recorded some ideas on cassette. Half of my ideas were played on the keyboard using the “guitar” voice, because I just couldn’t play guitar.
My first guitar, the one bought in February 1988 at East End Music in downtown Kitchener, with the repaired headstock, was sold to an older lady that Gary was teaching. I’m sure she was able to get more music out of it than I did.
My favourite single comic book growing up was Marvel Star Wars issue #47: “Droid World”. I have three copies today including the one I originally had back in 1981. The post-Empire period is the one I remember most fondly, even though Han Solo was absent from the story, frozen in Jabba’s dungeon. I took this issue everywhere with me. It is tattered but still barely holding together. At the lake or at home, I kept it near. I tried to draw the robots inside, with the comic pages splashed open on the driveway. Best friend friend Bob was with me with pen in hand.
I recently opened it again and came across a page that had to be Bob’s handiwork. He was the destructive one, not me. In ink he scrawled a word bubble on an ad page featuring the Hulk and a dollar bill with the face of Stan Lee. Stan Lee + Hulk = Stulk?
Whatever the reason for this comic book graffiti, at least I have my two backup copies of “Droid World”. I can’t remember him doing this but it had to be Bob!
GETTING MORE TALE #838: Wild Nights, Hot & Crazy Days
I couldn’t believe it when that red Daytona pulled into the cottage driveway.
“Is that Bob?” asked my dad. It sure was!
Bob’s parents had a trailer not too far from our cottage, part way between Kincardine and Goderich. It wasn’t unusual for him to drop in, but this time was different. He was about to start a new job and wanted a little vacation before his first day. He chose to come and stay at the cottage with us!
You might think it strange that he just showed up unannounced, but that’s not unusual for cottagers. My dad’s friend Ron often showed up with his whole family, completely unexpected. Bob had an open invitation; he was always welcome.
We raised hell that week. Bob didn’t know, but my cousin Geoffrey and his family were also scheduled to visit. Geoffrey was…how do I put this? Hyperactive was the word they used, but at that age, he was…impossible! I am glad he had since turned into a fine normal young man, but back then you could only take so much Geoff at a time! Naturally, Bob and I ganged up against him, which was a nice change of pace! It was during that week that Geoff infamously pierced his ear, while we took the blame for it. I didn’t trick Geoff into anything, I just chickened out. But that was just one of the many things we did that week.
Bob was obsessed with one album in particular that summer: Extreme’s Pornograffitti. In that Daytona, we all cruised endlessly to the sounds of that album. My grandmother, in the cottage two doors down, was not impressed by our loud hootin’ and hollerin’. I was at that age when I thought being loud and obnoxious was funny.
Pornograffitti is a special album, but that summer it was extra-special. We played it on a loop, and I had just about every song memorized. I asked for and received it for my birthday later that month. While I liked all the rockers, “Hole Hearted” really hit me where it counts. Its melancholy exuberance reflected how I felt at that time. (I know that sounds like a contradiction!) I was both excited and scared to be starting a new journey in my life, at University. Fall was only a couple months away and I was nervous. Whatever the case, the acoustic strumming of “Hole Hearted” was exactly how I felt, before I jumped into the deep end of school.
It was a beautiful summer, bright and warm. Bob and I took the canoe out onto the lake. There was a rock far from the shore, that was just inches below the water. Finding it was the trick. We were determined! I knew roughly where the rock was located, but once you’re out on the featureless water, it was difficult to pinpoint. Yet we found it relatively easily, by carefully looking for little crests of water where it rolled inches over that rock.
We dropped anchor and stepped onto the rock. There was room for both of us. Singing heavy metal songs at the top of our lungs, we both “mooned” the shore. We were so far out that nobody would have been able to see. I guess I’ve always been an exhibitionist. But we did it — we mooned a crowded Lorne Beach.
As my dad likes to remind me, we could have been arrested!
Ah well. “We didn’t,” was my answer then and now!
We had huge beach fires at night, and found plenty of activity during the days. There was one afternoon that we took a trip up to Bruce Nuclear. We usually did that once a year, to go on the tour. There were actually two tours: one indoors through the visitor’s centre, and a bus tour through the grounds. Bob came with the family on the bus tour. And we were awful. I don’t mind saying so. That poor tour guide had to put up with our running commentary. The grounds included nature preserves, and she was telling us about the wild deer that you could sometimes see in the trees to our right.
“Yeah, that one has two heads!” chuckled Bob out loud. Chuckled, or heckled? That’s up to interpretation.
I like to say that we were like Tom Green, but without the video camera. If only we had one! We were definitely a public nuisance. And I’m definitely an old fart now, because I would find that behaviour annoying today.
But we didn’t hurt anybody. Nobody got arrested. We were loud and annoyed a few people, but at the time I thought that was very rock n’ roll. We were ahead of our time. My cousin started his summer by getting a hole in his ear and Bob and I had one last hoorah together. That all sounds real good to me.
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