cds

Too Much Music? Grab A Stack of Mike’s CD Collection

How much music constitutes too much music?  This was a question I asked rhetorically during the recording of this 50 minute episode of Grab A Stack of Rock.  It is clear, whatever the number is, I have hit it and then some.

We had an interesting show and tell tonight, including the below:

  • Stir of Echoes, a 2008 band of Ray D’Auria’s (Mystique)
  • A Harem Scarem box set
  • A Max Webster box set
  • A defective Black Sabbath CD
  • An Iron Maiden bootleg with Blaze Bayley
  • Some gifts from Rob Daniels
  • White Snake
  • A Def Leppard bootleg
  • Some Rush and some jazz
  • Japanese import Deep Purple
  • Promo DLR
  • Deluxe Foo Fighters
  • Alice Cooper
  • Greta Van Fleet
  • A gift from Kevin Simister
  • A lot, lot, lot, of sealed Marillion
  • An avalanche!

This pre-recorded episode was an experiment and I think it went very well.  I was able to interact via the comments on YouTube and we had a lively discussion on the side.

While I will always prefer going live, these shorter solo shows will offer an alternative way of making it through the cold snowy winter together.  Thanks for watching and dropping the comments.  This was fun!

Next week will be a re-run, but Mike and the Mad Metal Man will be back on January 26 with John Snow and Tim Durling to show off music DVDs.  Then, on February 2, Marco D’Auria will be back to talk about the new 95 minute version of the Mystique movie that has been getting glowing accolades at festivals.  These will both be live shows and I hope you can join us!

Too Much Music? Grab A Stack of Mike’s CD Collection Tonight!

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

Episode 47:  Too Much Music?

A must-watch for fans of Harem Scarem, Marillion, Deep Purple/Whitesnake, and the CD format!

Trying something different tonight.  Regular viewers know the original concept of the show (courtesy of Uncle Meat) was to just “grab a stack of rock” and talk about it.  Strangely enough, we never really just grabbed a random stack of discs from my collection to go through them.   So that’s what I did this time!  Instead of going live, I recorded this episode ahead of time.  It took 45 minutes to go through a stack and a half of neglected CDs from my collection.  It’s my first solo show in a couple years.

What may shock and appall you is how many discs from these stacks are unplayed and unopened.  Too much music?  I believe this episode makes a case for that.

I also unboxed a surprise care package from Marco D’Auria (The Contrarians) and what a cool surprise it was.

Tune in tonight at 7:00 PM at the regular places!

Friday January 12 at 7:00 P.M. E.S.T. / 8:00 P.M. Atlantic.   Enjoy on YouTube or on Facebook!

#1101: In The Mix – An Uncle Paul Story

RECORD STORE TALES #1101: In The Mix – An Uncle Paul Story

At the dawn of the new millenium, technology was on the move!  I now had a CD burner on the family PC, and had just discovered this new thing called “Limewire“!  I was just starting to download all sorts of rare music, from out-of-print songs to live performances.  I had burned my first mix CD and was just starting to dip my toes into this new world, when Uncle Paul and Aunt Maria came over to visit one Sunday afternoon.

I was eager to show Uncle Paul what I could now do with a computer and an internet connection.  Making a custom CD was such a revelation back then.  It seems mundane now, but it truly was new and exciting in the year 2000.  For Uncle Paul, the wheels in his head started turning.

“Can you make me a CD?” he asked.  “With anything I want on it?”

“I can try!” I responded.  “What songs do you want?  Make a list…”

He only wanted two songs.  I wish I could remember what they were.  I know they were both car songs.  That’s all I can remember.  Two classic car songs from the golden age of rock and roll.

I searched for the two songs on Limewire, found decent copies, and began downloading.

“You still have about 70 minutes of blank space on this CD, what do you want to fill it up with?” I asked him.  I hated wasting valuable blank CD real estate.  Once you burned a CD, that was it.  You couldn’t go back and add to it.

“Can you repeat each song, twice?” he asked.

“Sure can.  But you’ll still have over an hour of blank space on the CD.”

“That’s OK,” he said.  “I just want each song, twice.  That’s all I need.”

“Really?  I can repeat them as many times as you want until the CD is full.  If you want me to,” I said, trying to convince him.

“Twice each is fine.  Can you do that?”  That’s all he wanted!

One the songs were downloaded, I started up the burning software.  Track 1…song 1.  Track 2…song 1 again!  Track 3, song 2, and track 4, song 2.  That was it.  It burned in no time, and we tested it.

“Thank you Michael!  This is exactly what I wanted.”

You’re welcome Uncle Paul.  A simple request that provided all the entertainment he needed.  A happy man, and a happy nephew to have done this one small thing for him, that he appreciated far more than it warranted.  He was a good uncle.

#1077: Lunch With Aaron & Son

RECORD STORE TALES #1077: Lunch With Aaron & Son

In the last five years, my world has changed drastically.  We lost Jen’s mom, we’ve lost friends, but on the positive side, we’ve also lost weight!  The world has gone through a transformative pandemic, but one constant is Aaron KMA, a man I have not seen since 2018.  I am happy to report that Aaron is still out there being Aaron – bearing gifts and warmth as always!

We met halfway, at the Elk & Finch in Southampton Ontario.  He brought his son, who I’ve never met before, but has good taste in hamburgers.  We sat down to some amazing food, including the best smoked salmon I’ve ever tasted in my life.  This is it: as good as it gets.

Food aside, I knew Aaron would arrive bearing gifts, and as usual, he did:  Books, CDs, and more.  Let’s have a gander, shall we?  Let’s go through the contents of Aaron’s gift bag bit by bit.

Not pictured, there were four bottle of Iron Maiden’s Trooper beer!  Not pictured because I didn’t think I should pull out liquor of my own at a restaurant.  You understand of course!  You are probably familiar with this acclaimed brew already.  That made up a lot of the weight of the gift bag.  Much of the rest of the weight was taken up by books.  One book specifically.

The big one is The Art of Classic Rock by Paul Brushkin, with foreward by Alice Cooper.  Aaron has showed this off on my show before.  We also have rock magazines (with CDs)!  Other reading:  Gods of the Hammer by Geoff Pevere, the story of Teenage Head.  The “Hammer” in this case is Hamilton Ontario.  Keeping a punk vibe, Aaron also gave me Perfect Youth: The Birth of Canadian Punk by Sam Sutherland.  Finally, it’s The Story of Tommy which is really gorgeous!

I’m very excited about the music.  I actually didn’t own a copy of Garbage’s self titled debut, until now.  This one is signed by all four members, and lo and behold, it’s dedicated to Mike!  Just a coincidence I assure you but how cool is that?  I now also owned Backwaxed by Anvil, which I was missing until now, and now I also own the Hip side project Stripper’s Union.

I get more and more excited the further we go!

These Hot Wheels are really cool.  I think I need to open them.  The Yellow Submarine (Beatles) is groovy.  The USS Enterprise though…I just enjoy swooshing those ships around.  This Enterprise is NCC-1701 from the 2009 film Star Trek, directed by JJ Abrams and starring Chris Pine as Captain Kirk.  (I have to be honest, I prefer Paul Wesley’s Kirk from Strange New Worlds, which I am trying to get Aaron to watch!)  I enjoy these very much, and this is not the first time Aaron has found an appropriate Hot Wheels to gift me.

Onto the shirt, which was actually the first item in the bag.  Jeff Woods is legendary in my circles – he is THE Legend of Classic Rock.  Jeff Woods even contributed to the Sausagefest countdowns a number of times.  Aaron, however, isn’t a radio listener and isn’t intimate with the works of Mr. Woods as I am.   Yet Aaron found this shirt, thought of me, and put it in the bag.  I am thrilled.  This is a shirt I would have bought myself anyway!

Finally…

I just loved the Sheik.  I have always loved the Sheik.  He was one of the greatest villains in WWF history.  We talked to Spenny about the Iron Sheik back in May on Grab A Stack of Rock.  And now I have a little loveable stuffed Sheik of my own.   I couldn’t be more happy.  This is the kind of gift that just screams “Mike”.

 

Aaron, it was a delight to hook up again and finally meet your son.  I hope we do something like this again soon.  I could go for some salmon again.  And the coffee was great too.

Three cheers for Aaron!

 

 

#1047: A Pretty Good Day

RECORD STORE TALES #1047: A Pretty Good Day

The worst and most tiring kind of days at the Record Store were the ones with customers bringing in endless boxes of discs for us to buy.  These took up a lot of time and counter space to keep organized.  I hated it when multiple customers with multiple boxes arrived at once.  All you could say is say “leave your name and number and we’ll get through these as quickly as possible.  It could be a couple hours.”

Some customers understood, some did not.  That’s retail.

By contrast the best kind of days were often the ones without the pileup of CD boxes.  If everything came in at staggered times, that was ideal.  Even better if all the discs were in good shape.  Icing on the top of the cake if the customer wasn’t a jerk about pricing.  Everybody assumed their discs were worth solid gold.  To be truly the best kind of day, customers would be bringing in good stock that you wanted for yourself!  Whether it be a new release or something rarer from a back catalogue, those were the good days.  You’d slap your name on a post-it note, stick it to the CD and claim it for self-musical enrichment.

I may have mentioned this a couple times before:  the Big Boss Man hated when we bought stock for ourselves.  But that was 50% of the reason people wanted to work in a music store.  The best of days were those when the Big Boss Man and his underlings were not around!

One factor that didn’t affect whether the day was good or bad:  who I was working with.  I liked virtually every single person that worked in my store.  There were one or two who made me pull my hair out, but they never lasted very long.  I was very fortunate to have good working relationships with just about everyone in my staff.  I tried to show my appreciation by buying them CDs or dinner.

Speaking of dinner, one of the best days I had was in the late 90s.  A Jack Astor’s restaurant opened in the plaza across the street.  I was working one afternoon minding my own business when a guy showed up at my door with a “Jack Attack”.  I was shaking my head “no” as if to tell him I didn’t order any food, when he explained it was all complimentary!  A bucket of wings and six bottles (bottles! Not cans!) of root beer.  He dropped off a menu with ordering instructions for delivery.  That was a very good day.  I was working alone, but I left a couple bottles of pop for the night shift.  (A couple.  I was thirsty.)

I liked working alone, but eating a meal on a lone shift was tricky.  Even the best of days were food-free days.  The boss absolutely hated when we ate meals at the counter, but where else was there to go?  We were working alone, we couldn’t leave the store.  We couldn’t go into the back room to eat for 15 minutes.  So most days, at least the ones working alone, were junk food only.  Chips, pop, candy bars, pepperoni.  That was it.

But combined with good tunes and no bosses, a pretty good day!

 

 

 

Boxing Day Live Stream featuring LeBrain’s Mom – “Christmas Memories”

We’re locked down, but not knocked down as this week’s live show proved!  From 1977 to 1991, stories of Christmases past were unfurled for fun discussion.  From the Star Wars years, through GI Joe, Transformers, and Atari, to cassettes, CDs and VHS, the greatest years of our lives were presented.  Then, special guest LeBrain’s Mom joined the latter half of this episode for her first on-screen appearance…bearing wine!

I had a great night and I hope you did too.  Lots of visual aids this time.  Thanks for watching!

#866: Untitled ’94

GETTING MORE TALE #866: Untitled ’94

I didn’t go to the cottage at all in 1994.  I was busy with school, then in the summer met a girl, and finally got a job at the Record Store.  That was all the distraction I needed to stay home.  Girls trumped trees and water.  Priorities!

The first summer at the Record Store was a brand new world for me.  New faces, new names, new music.  Lots and lots of cleaning.  “If there’s time to lean, there’s time to clean!” went the saying.  A lot of the job was tedious.  Wednesday was “tape check day”.  From A to Z we had to check every cassette in the store and make sure the magnetic security strip was firmly attached.  If it wasn’t, we’d get some scotch tape and secure that sucker.  My hands always felt so grungy after a day of tape checking.

There was always filing to do, and new stock to price.  When we sold a tape or CD, we had to know to re-order them.  How was this accomplished?  Tapes had a little clear plastic sticker on the back.  It had the artist, title and record label written on it.  When we sold a tape, we had to file these stickers in a photo album, sorted by record label.  Then when the boss was ready to order more stock, he’d flip through the photo album and read the stickers.  When we re-stocked the tapes, we had to put the clear sticker back on.  CDs were similar except they were in clear bags with the info written on them.  The bags were used to re-order discs.

When something new was released, we had to make the stickers and bags for those items too.  I remember when T-Rev was hired, he used to leave special releases for me to do the tags and bags for.  Kiss Unplugged he specifically left for me, because it was the first Kiss album released during my tenure at the store.  The first of many.  I drew the Kiss logo on the tag and smiled.  Small things like that meant something to me, though after waiting so long for a new Kiss album, it was quite anti-climactic.

We had also started selling used CDs.  Some of the first I acquired with my staff discount were Sven Gali’s debut and Chronicles by Rush.  Weirdly, I was still buying a lot of cassettes.  Kim Mitchell’s brand new one Itch got the staff discount treatment.

In the early days the boss used to give us weekly homework.  We had to come in with a current top 10 list every week.  This was to ensure that we were familiar with the current hits that people would be asking for.  T-Rev did his homework; I did not.  I felt like I already knew it all.  Before I started at the store, I used to keep on top of “everything the kids were listening to”.  I guess the boss recognized that since he didn’t bug me for my homework every week.

I was glad to have this job at the Record Store when in late ’94 my relationship blew up in my face.  I compensated by throwing myself into the store.  I came in early every day so I could review all the new stock.  Business was fairly slow most nights.  We were not in a high-traffic mall.  We had our regulars and we had our time-wasters.  The drunks from the restaurant next door were interesting.  Some of them even spent money!  None of them were problems, just time wasters.  “Tire kickers” as I call them now.  Then there were a couple notable janitors.  Trevor Atkinson from highschool was one.  I wonder what ever happened to that guy?  He was certainly a time waster.  It’s my theory that he was the cause of the first customer complaint I ever received.

Working in that Record Store was pretty much my whole social life.  I didn’t know anybody at school anymore.  Through the store, I reconnected with highschool and neighborhood friends that dropped by to shop.  Guys like George Balasz and Scott Peddle.  The boss didn’t like his employees to socialize at work, but what could you do?  It was the local Record Store and I was working in it.  I knew lots of people.  He socialized far more than I did, but he was “the boss” so nobody could give him shit for it.  When one of his friends was in the store, he’d chat it up and get me to take care of everyone else.  “Do as I say, not as I do” was another one of his famous demoralizing sayings.

But it was a good job.  The boss used to say he was “firm but fair”.  For the first few years that was true.  For a retail job it was pretty good.  We got to listen to music during the shift and we felt like part of a team.  It was a special place during a special time.  I’m glad I was there before we grew, because that’s when things changed for the worse, from an employment point of view.  But for that brief period in the beginning, the Record Store was a part of my identity.  I’m still really proud of everything that we did there as a team.  I may be critical of some things, but I’m proud of being there on the ground floor when things were about to take off.

#838.5: Father’s Day 2020

Father’s Day 2020 was one of the strangest yet, but we celebrated my dad outdoors with steaks and social distancing.

The day started quietly with an espresso at dawn, but I couldn’t wait to get cooking.  Jen bought steaks and corn.  I love cooking and I especially love barbecuing.  Cooking for my mom and dad is one of the best hobbies I have.

The morning was spent relaxing by myself on the patio, reading Gord Downie and Jeff Lemire’s graphic novel Secret Path, the story of Chanie Wenjack.  I spoke about this book a bit on Saturday’s live stream.  To say reading this book was an intense undertaking is to sell the experience short.  I had to stop twice to catch my breath.  This powerful, true story is made so clear, so intense and spiritual thanks to the words of Gord and the images of Jeff.  A book/album review is absolutely forthcoming.  (Even though the book comes with a download of the Gord Downie album, I still bought the CD individually as well.)

It was a hot afternoon but at least my parents have a back deck with some shade.  I lit the gas and let the flames do their work.  I incorporated some new techniques that I picked up watching YouTube videos over the winter.  I let the steaks get up to room temperature, then patted them dry and seasoned with just salt, pepper and garlic powder.  Nothing fancy and no marinate was necessary.   I overcooked mine a bit for my liking.  Everybody else likes them a bit more done than me.  I forgot how hot my dad’s barbecue can get.  But they were still juicy and flavourful, I just prefer them a little more red.

We chatted current events, the cottage, and Uncle Don Don.  My mom saved for me what was left of his CD collection (I gave my sister first dibs and she took Frank Zappa’s Hot Rats.)  Mom asked me to sort through the music, but I decided to take them home to do that here.  The CD covers have the telltale yellowing of a smoker’s home and I didn’t want to handle them and have to prepare dinner too.

There are a few CDs here that I’ll have to keep.  I’m missing several Tragically Hip.  I don’t have that Lee Aaron (her debut).  I could probably use some Johnny Winter, George Thorogood, Garbage, and Jane’s Addiction.  A few of these are duplicates; I have all the Deep Purple and Alice Cooper albums.  But those are two bands that Uncle Don influenced me to get into.  “Child In Time”, he said.  That was the song he praised.  He has two versions of “Child In Time” in this cardboard box.

Looks like I’m going to be owning Jackyl, Haywire and Collective Soul too.  Cool.  I’ll go through the box in detail in the coming days.

My dad enjoyed his Father’s Day meal, and we had a nice visit.  The first one in many months.  It wasn’t hard to stay sanitised and distant, but it was different.  Just something we have to live with for a while.  Hopefully not too much longer.  I’m starting to get tired of the same old scenery from my little patio at home.  I want to get back to the lake.  Because of various health concerns and vulnerabilities, we’ve all agreed that we can’t all be at the same cottage at the same time, so we’ll have to take turns.  I’ll have to wait a little while longer to cook my dad a nice barbecue chicken dinner (skin on, of course). It’ll happen though — eventually.

I hope all the fathers had as nice a Father’s Day as my dad did.