childhood

#1153: The Roots of Trauma

STOPARRET

Serious stuff ahead.

 

RECORD STORE TALES #1153: The Roots of Trauma

I don’t remember the photo session, but I remember the picture clearly.  My red, white and black shirt is what I recall the most easily about this picture.  I couldn’t remember my age or what I looked like in the photo, but I remember that shirt.  This portrait was on display at my parents’ house for many years, along with others depicting my sister and I as children.

When I saw this picture again, for the first time in probably decades, I was shocked.  I looked into my own face and I read my own mind.

I still make that face.  know every angle of the eyes and the curvature of the mouth.  I am intimately familiar with that face.  It is the face of anxiety and fear.  If you have ever seen me make that face, it wasn’t a good day.

You can’t blame my parents.  Back then, nobody knew any better.  Baby was crying, baby didn’t want his photo taken.  So you ignored the crying, you sat the baby down, and you let the photographer take the photo.  There were going to be lots more photos.  He’d better get used to this.

I look at the picture and I don’t see a baby crying for his first portrait.  I see the fear and the need to be understood.  I was always “shy” around strangers.  You can imagine how I felt, with this strange photographer and in this weird place with a shag carpet beneath me and a dreary grey background.  My parents were probably frustrated that they were paying for this photo, and this baby keeps crying.  I can read that face.  It’s the face that says, “I’m in distress here and why isn’t anybody listening to me?”

My whole life, I have felt like people don’t listen to me.  They either don’t understand what I’m trying to convey or they just won’t listen.  I have had dreams about this going back to when I was a kid.  Trying to tell people what I’m feeling or what I need, and being dismissed.  Eventually the frustration at not being understood boils over to screaming.  To me, there is nothing worse than not being heard.  To this day, sometimes the only person who understands what I’m saying and feeling is Jen.

In this picture, I see a need.  I clearly wanted the hell out of there, and back home where felt safe and sound.  I needed someone to hug me, tell me it was alright, and it will be over in just a minute.  I needed someone to touch me and say, “I know you’re scared, this is all new to you.  I know that camera and all that stuff looks scary.  I know that person is a stranger, but if you need me I’m right here and I won’t let anything happen to you.”  I needed that time being reassured.  I can see it in my face.  It’s as clear as words on paper.

This picture makes me feel a lot of things.  I see my entire future laid about before me.  So many fears.  Going to school, learning to drive, living alone…that’s the face of someone who doesn’t want those things.  He wants to stay home with his mom and dad, where he would be safe and surrounded only by familiar things and people who love him.  This is the face of someone who is so uncomfortable that he is questioning why mom and dad are doing this to him.  This is the face of someone who feels utterly alone inside.

It was over in minutes and forgotten, but I can’t help but feel that seeds were being sown.

There’s nobody to blame.  Nobody knew any better.  I couldn’t even talk, let alone understand all this terror I was feeling.  I couldn’t have said “That person is a stranger and something about them is bothering me, I don’t know what those things are, I don’t like being up on this table covered with a shag carpet, and can someone please just tell me what is happening right now?”  All I could do was cry.

I hate being this way.  I hate the constant anxiety that nibbles away at me every day.  I hate the feeling of not being understood.  It’s amazing to think that I can see all this in my baby picture.

 

#1110: Happy Winter Memories Vol. 3 – Rocking the Basement

RECORD STORE TALES #1110: Happy Winter Memories Vol. 3 – Rocking the Basement

To an unsporty Canadian kid, growing up in a cold climate had its disadvantages.  I didn’t give a fuck about hockey (to coin a phrase from Gord Downie), and nobody likes to shovel.  The only good thing about fall and winter to me were Christmas and the return of my TV shows, like the Transformers and GI Joe.  Otherwise, it was like hibernation.  There were a lot of things I wanted to do and could only do outdoors, so I passed the time inside with my music and shows.

In a sense, winter was the best time for my friendship with Bob Schipper to flourish.  In the summer we’d be outside a lot, riding bikes or hitting balls.  Or, just getting into trouble as we often did.  During the colder months, we spent more time being creative.

A typical Mike & Bob winter Saturday morning would go as follows:

Around 10 AM, Bob would pop by my place.  Our creative Saturday mornings would usually happen at my house.  Bob’s parents were more strict than mine, and we could listen to music in the basement.  The basement was the best place because that is where the big TV with the VCR was.  That was where MuchMusic lived.  My VHS collection would grow video by video, week by week.  The Pepsi Power hour ran twice a week (“Molten” Mondays, and Thursdays) and I would collect music, clip by clip, on my VHS collection.  It would be my responsibility to show him what was new in music.

We did not always agree!

Savatage struck me from the moment I saw “Hall of the Mountain King”.  It was the riff, the singer, and of course the little guy running through the caves looking for the king’s treasure.  I had to record it.  I thought Bob would really be into this song.  It had a lot of what we both liked:  nice, heavy melody metal with a screamin’ singer.  Disappointingly, he was not as impressed as I was.  He thought the video was less than great, and the singer not as impressive as I hyped him.

On the other hand, one viewing of “We Came to Rock” by Brighton Rock had him hooked immediately.  In this case, singer Gerald McGhee really did blow him away.  That scream at the end of “We Came to Rock” made his jaw actually drop.

If music videos were not on the menu that morning, I would bring my “ghetto blaster” downstairs and we would play whatever newest tape one of us had acquired.  If it was a good one, we’d dub each other a copy.

Then, out came the paper and we would get down to creating.  We were very much into drawing military vehicles, cars, and muscle-type men with warrior’s garb and jagged guitars.  Our self-portraits were always masked, muscled, and flexing.

We would fantasise about being on stage.  We’d picture the drum riser, and why not have it elevate?  We would both be singers and guitar players, sharing lead duties from song to song.  It had to be democratic.  We came up with cool melodies and song titles.  Mostly though, we sang our lyrics to other peoples’ songs.  Of course, I can’t repeat the lyrics to anyone.

The two of us had enough creativity to power the world for decades.  If only we had the technology to do the things we really wanted to do!

Still, it was in that basement during the coldest of months that Bob and I amassed binders full of drawings and cassette tapes full of our goof-offs.  I kept everything I could.  Of course, some things couldn’t last forever, such as the cardboard guitars or silly sketches.  As unofficial archivist, I kept a lot.  I have almost all my VHS tapes with those special music videos.  When I play them, the memories return.  These things matter to me.  They show a snapshot of the best childhood anyone could have.

#1106: “The Entire Population of the World Can Fit in the State of Kansas”

A sequel to #893: Damien Lucifer, and #1104: …Parental Guidance…

RECORD STORE TALES #1106:  “The Entire Population of the World Can Fit in the State of Kansas”

Not all of us have been this lucky.  I had a fortunate and free childhood.  I was allowed to listen to whatever I wanted to:  AC/DC (oh no, “Anti-Christ/Devil Child!”), Kiss (“Knights in Satan’s Service!”), Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest…all the bands that the TV shows said were bad influences on kids.  They would lead us to drink, drugs, violence, and worst of all…Satan.

I went to a Catholic grade school where wearing a Judas Priest shirt to class earned scornful glares and harsh words.  I also had several friends in highschool from other religions with strict views on dress, music, movies, and TV.  I knew how good I had it at home.  I never had to hide my Guns N’ Roses tapes from my mom.  I didn’t have to crop my hair short like a couple of the highschool kids.  There was a family though…oh, there was a family across the street.  And this is a story about those strange characters that I loathed, then and now.

Now, keep this in mind:  I have no issues with faith.  I do have issues with dogma and assorted silliness.  So if you’re offended, I am sorry.  I’m cool with Jesus but not so much with strict, outdated thinking.

With that in mind, let’s push play on Ghost’s Opus Eponymous CD and dive on in.

Let’s call these people the Davids.  Mr. and Mrs. David, and their two kids, Boy and Girl.

Mr. David was a teacher.  I have rarely encountered such a dumb educated person in my life.  Maybe dumb isn’t the right word.  Airheaded?  Scatterbrained?  Moony?  Oblivious?  I once saw him pull out of his driveway, realize that he forgot something, stop his car in the middle of the road, run in to get whatever he forget, and get back in his car.  He used to park on our side of the road because he liked our shade tree, but he would park his car backwards against traffic, which drove me nuts to no end.  I would purposely park as close to his bumper as I could get without pissing off my own parents.

They had embargoed all kinds of fun stuff in their house.  One day we were out tobogganing.  Mrs. David was driving a car full of kids.  I was talking about how much I loved Doctor Who, in particular the villainous Daleks.  They may have looked like little pepper pots with a plunger sticking out, but their cries of “EXTERMINATE!” rattled the bones of every kid.  They were awesome!  Mrs. David simply said, “We are not allowed to watch the Daleks in our house.”  Ouch!  Talk about a buzz killer.  What the hell did she have a problem with?  Intelligent science fiction with badass villains, I guess.

In 1984 they all went to go see Bruce Springsteen. His music was allowed.  Helix was not.  I can remember Boy David coming over and watching the Pepsi Power Hour with Bob and I on television.  He was absolutely terrified from the “Rock You” music video.  I seem to remember him bailing and running home when it came on.

‘Twas Mrs. David who spied my MAD magazine and was so offended by the cover story about “Damien Lucifer“, lead singer of “Antichrist”.  She reported the offending magazine to my mother, who asked me about it.  I laughed and took great joy in telling my mom that Mrs. David thought a MAD Magazine was real.  Mrs. David was a child psychologist.  She fell for an obvious parody.  Directly below the Damien Lucifer picture was a contest, with the prize being getting trampled at a Motley Crue concert.  There was a “six page fold-out” of Gene Simmons’ tongue.  I mean, come on.

The weird thing is this.  About a decade later, Boy David was blasting Savatage’s “Hall of the Mountain King” from his front window so loud you could hear it around the corner.  Banning music didn’t really work for the David family.

Through the years, my parents have maintained suffering contact with the David family.  They always come home bitching about them, but haven’t been able to completely get themselves away.  I sense that they wouldn’t mind if they never had to socialize again, but don’t want to be the ones to make the break.

One night while I was still working at the Record Store, my parents came home from dinner with the Davids, and my mom immediately started with the stories.  The things these people would say!  My parents would sit in stunned silence, sipping drinks and nibbling food, but not really reacting.

“You wouldn’t believe what Mrs. David said at dinner tonight,” began my exasperated mother.

“You’re going to like this one Michael,” nudged my dad as he walked past.

“Tell me!” I squealed in delight.

My mom set up the story.  Mrs. David was on about the state of the world, natural resources, overpopulation, and lord knows what else.  Malthusanists, they were not!  You see, they adhered to a particularly hard (but traditional) interpretation of God’s infallibility.  Because God is incapable of error, the Earth that He created is flawless and perfectly made for us to use.  Hard-core Catholics used to believe that extinction was impossible, due to this perfect intelligent design.  Equally impossible is overpopulation.  God told us to “go forth and multiply,” did He not?  Therefore, overpopulation is absolutely impossible.

“You know, the entire population of the world can fit in the state of Kansas?” asked Mrs. David to my stunned mother and father.

“How the hell did we get on this topic?” they thought to themselves as they concentrated on their food.  My mother told me this in the kitchen that night, and I just laughed uncontrollably.

“Sure, if you packed them in like sardines!  What is wrong with those people?” I asked.

“I do not know,” said my mother in a flat, tired tone.

The last time I saw anyone from the David family was in the 1990s.  I’d like to keep it that way.

#1087: View From the Front

RECORD STORE TALES #1087: View From the Front

Although our back porch at the cottage is arguably nicer and more comfortable, the front has its advantages.  What it lacks in privacy, it makes up for in a huge front awning that has protected me from in in every storm, and even broadcast Grab A Stack of Rock in the rain.  It has the best view, with the bright blue of Lake Huron peeking through the trees, right in my eyeline, no matter what I’m doing.

But I’ve always had a preference for the front, even at home when I was a kid.  Despite the privacy of the back, I was usually playing in the front.  I always wished I had a bedroom with a front window.  The back didn’t give me much to look at when I stared out the window.  Which I did a lot.

Was I trying to see, or be seen?

Like my dad, I always have this sense of…keeping watch?  If I hear a loud motor coming down the road, I usually look.   We used to make fun of my dad for this, but I have become my dad.

I have a sense that I’m partly keeping an eye out, but am I also intentionally making myself visible?

Back then in my youth, I’d be playing Lego in the front yard.  Then, G.I. Joe and Star Wars.  The grass and twigs were great for fort building.

Later, it would be ghetto blasters, guitars and music.  A lot it would happen on the front patio.

I’m a shy guy by nature and I prefer to let neighbors walk by as I focus on whatever I happen to be focusing on.  Sometimes writing, sometimes listening, sometimes just watching cartoons.  I like to play the music at a decent volume, and yes, you can usually hear it from the road.  (Sorry.)  So why do I draw this attention to myself?

I think there’s a part of me who still thinks, “Hey look at me, listening to 80s Styx on the front porch like a bad ass,” even at age 51.

I don’t know what to think about that.

 

#1055: Alone Again

RECORD STORE TALES #1055: Alone Again

I think I’ve felt alone most of my life.  Alone inside my head.  Sometimes creating worlds of imagination, sometimes overthinking the world around me.  I guess not much has changed in that regard.

Eventually you come to crave that alone feeling, even when you would be better off out with friends.  Just because that alone feeling is what is safe and comfortable to you.  It’s a situation you can control.

I suppose this lonely feeling began in grade school, where I did not fit in and had few kids that I would consider truly friends.  We were not “friends” because we liked one another, we were “friends” because we were in the same grade at school.  It was a case of proximity and temporal coincidence and nothing more.  Those kids — Kevin Kirby, Ian Johnson, Kenny Lawrence — they were not my friends.  We might have spent time together, but by the end of the 8th grade they had sided with the bullies and expelled from my life.

My friends from my neighbourhood were the real deal.  But we weren’t in school together.  We were separated most of the time.  And so for just about all of grade school, I felt alone.  Hearing conversations I was not a part of, wishing I was in on others’ jokes, or longing to be picked first for something.  Anything.  It was not meant to be for me.

As I got older and friends moved on with work, school, and families, I spent a lot of time in my room listening to music.  Though it is not something I do anymore, and kind of wish I did, I used to lay on the bed, playing an album for the first time, and reading the lyrics along line by line.  Studying them, trying to penetrate the meaning.  Squinting the eyes to read the tiny print on the inside of a cassette J-card.

Though I’m not alone today, and have not been for 17 years, it’s startling sometimes how easily I can slip back into that mindset.  It can happen in the car or on the couch.  I retreat into my head, and those feelings of isolation creep back like the tide.  I remember loving and hating the Rush song “Subdivisions”.  A great song, with a phat synth riff that echoes in the head for days.  But the lyrics hit a little too close to him.  “Be cool or be cast out.”  Was that my fate, to be cast out every time I tried?  Only when it stopped mattering if people were cool or not did I finally feel like I was no longer alone.

Sometimes retreating into those lonely spaces one more time can result in helpful introspection.  Other times, it just brings me down.  The constant has always been the music.  Music has always been there.  If it’s not in my ears, it’s always in my head.  I can hear songs in my mind when I need them.  The songs of my life’s soundtrack will always be there to accompany my smiles and tears.

#848: Dear Bob [Reblog]

Happy birthday, big guy!

Dear Bob,

I know we don’t get to talk much anymore.  I think the last time I saw you was at a funeral.  We both have our own lives now.  You have four kids to raise, and I have a Jen to take care of and cherish.  While we have separate journeys now, I will always remember and treasure our shared origins.  We were the lucky few to grow up on a very special street in a neighbourhood like no other.

Some of my earliest memories are of us playing in the front yard.  You were two years older but at that young age it hardly mattered.  All that mattered were our adventures.  It started with dinky cars, Lego and plastic swords.  Do you remember building little garages for our cars?  I do.  You showed me how.  A few twigs stuck into the ground covered with a grass roof, and we had multi-car garages right in the front lawn.

You taught me how to improvise our fun.  With cardboard boxes, we constructed a Cloud City for my Star Wars guys to play around in.  Do you remember showing me how to make little sliding pocket doors?  Or how about that board game we came up with on our own?  It was huge!  How many of my mom’s shoeboxes did we cut up to make that?  We used my Army Men for the pieces.  We constructed traps for them, that could you trigger with the pull of a thread.  Mom eventually said “No more shoeboxes!”

I could go on, and on, and on about how we created our own worlds to live in.  The drawings, a huge binder of which I still have!  We designed our own video game.  We wanted to submit it to Atari.  Then, when my family got a computer, we discovered a new world:  word processing!  No more pen and paper; now we could really come up with stories.  The program was called IBM Writer’s Assistant and we pushed the limits of what we could achieve.  We co-wrote the Adventures of Comet-tron, though it was your idea.  I even sold copies of our “book” at a garage sale.  25 cents each, and there were two issues!

Building obstacle courses in the back yard.  Improvising audio equipment with little more than a few wires and black electrical tape.  Riding our bikes, exploring the trails.  Renting horror movies and pausing to see fake rubber props.  Writing down the rules to our own invented version of street volleyball.  These are all things I did with my best friend.  If I didn’t have you, do you think “Double Bounce Volleyball” ever would have been conceived, much less documented with actual rules?  Chances are high that the only reason I owned a volleyball was because you had one first.

It’s funny that you studied architecture later in life, because I remember us sitting down with pencils and designing our future houses.  In our blueprints, we still lived on the same street.  We bulldozed all the other houses, and added on to our own (things like swimming pools and helipads and secret tunnels and overhead bridges).  We put new houses for our families to live in, while our original homes were connected by an enclosed bridge so we could hang out without even having to go out!

As your interests changed, so did mine.  Where you led I was eager to follow.  Music was next.  Do you realize how lucky I was to have you and other older kids around the neighbourhood?  While my classmates were listening to music they’d be embarrassed by in six months, you guys had discovered Van Halen.

Do you remember our front porch listening sessions?  One of us would plug in the stereo, and somebody else would bring over the Van Halen.

“Van Halen!?” said my dad as he came home from work.  “Sounds like some kind of tropical disease!”

And so began the long tradition of my dad creating memorable quotes about rock bands.  Wouldn’t have happened without you.  Your dad had some good ones too.

“Is there something wrong with that man?” he mocked when Bruce Dickinson was screaming the high notes.

Classic!  Absolutely classic.  You were not only there for it, but you were the guy who supplied the music for them to mock!

What I’m getting at here is this.  I need to really let you know how much you shaped my life, and how much I looked up to you.  I wanted to be you.  For years I was your mini-me.  You were smart, you were cool, you were big and strong and creative and everything I wanted to be.  I had nobody like you at my school.  Why did you have to go to a different school?  How life would have been different if you were able to stand up for me during the dark times.

I’ll never forget one thing you did for me.  It was grade six.  My bully Steve went at me really hard that year.  He made me cry in class.  It’s not a good feeling, crying publicly with 30 of your peers.  All I could think is how badly I wished you were there to stop him.  Stop all of them.  Then one day, you did make an appearance.  Our schools had March break during two different weeks.  During your March break, you got on your bike and paid me a visit during recess.  None of those kids had ever seen you before.  Maybe they thought you were my imaginary friend.  Not any more!  Steve actually fell flat down on his back when he saw how much bigger you were.  The memory still makes me smile.

I don’t know if you really understood how bad I had it at school.  It was a daily living nightmare.  You were the opposite of that.  I’d come home, phone you up, and 10 minutes later we’d be in the back yard jumping hurdles made of lawn chairs, and everything was forgotten.  You just got me; we shared the exact same sense of humour.  Nothing can gravitate two friends together like a shared love of laughing at the same things.  You also drew out and nurtured my creative side.  Anytime you came up with something cool on your own (which was frequent) you’d share it with me and together we’d expand on it.  It was the exact opposite of what I had at school.  There, nobody understood me.  There, nobody nurtured me.  There, nobody laughed with me.  Only at me.

You were my hero, man.  You were my Wolverine or Iron Man.  Funny enough, I got into Marvel comics because that’s what you read!  Do you remember reading comics on the patio?  Hawkeye was your favourite Avenger back then.

I mean it when I say you were my hero.  You were smart and popular and I was just happy to be the sidekick!  When I finally made it to highschool, you sneakily got an extra locker next to mine.  I felt so cool sharing that illicit locker, like part of an elite club.  We had some excellent times in highschool.  You bought a black guitar and so for contrast I bought a white one.  We never really put the effort in, but we did have fun drawing our logo.  “Paragon” was the name you chose for our band.  We never really learned to play, but we made a music video.  I know you’ll never forget that.  Together we spent a week after hours at the school in the editing suite, finishing the video with a very tight deadline.  We did it, though.  It was hard work.  We fought through technical issues and were recognized for our efforts by having our video shown at the local 1989 Charlie Awards.  What an honour for us.

I know for a fact that I would not be the person I am today had we not crossed paths 40-some years ago.  I think I’d still find ways to be creative, but the things I do today are just extensions of the things we did then.  Sequels, reboots, remasterings.  I like to think that I’m continuing with the projects we started together.  Together we made a music video and two movies.  Today, I make several music videos every year!  And as hard as it is to believe, I even completely re-edited one of the movies we made 30 years ago.  Finishing the work that we started.

It’s OK that you went to college and started your own life.  It was always going to be that way.  We were never really going to bulldoze the neighbourhood and live in connected houses.  Back then, I was never able to express how important you were — and still are.  You helped me survive.  I knew that all I had to do was endure a week at school.  On Saturday it would be us again, you and me, racing cars, flying starships or hosting our own shows.  Despite everything I had to go through at school, I always have considered it a good childhood.  The best childhood.  And that’s because I had you, my best friend.  We embarked on truly great adventures, and they far outweigh the damage the other kids could do.  When it was you and me, they couldn’t touch me.  They weren’t a part of the worlds we were building out of cardboard and Scotch tape.  You projected a force field around yourself and nobody would touch you.  In turn you were able to shield me with it too.  That was a tremendous gift that you can’t understand unless you were the beneficiary.

Do you remember why you chose the name “Paragon” for our band that never was?  “Because it means we’re the best,” you said.  It was true!  We were the best.  We were the paragon of friendships with adventures that shaped a lifetime.  Thank you for sharing that with me.

 

 

#965: The Collector’s Disease

RECORD STORE TALES #965: The Collector’s Disease

There’s no question I have the disease of a collector.  It’s undisputed and quite obvious.  I like to have not just one of a thing, but many.  I couldn’t just start with one Kiss album, I had to get more.  The goal was to get them all.  Having one GI Joe figure wasn’t enough.  You had to have as many as you could afford.  It’s marketing genius that this common psychological flaw was exploited guilt-free for so long.  Where did it start with me?

Perhaps my collector’s nerve was first tickled by Lego.  The more you get, the better stuff you can make.  Every year, new pieces were introduced.  In 1978 they launched the “Space” theme of Lego.  Prior to that came the new “Technic” pieces.  Right as I was hitting the perfect age for creating things made of Lego, they upped their game in a way that completely meshed.  I remember getting quite a few Space sets and several Technic too, including one where you build an 8-cylinder engine.  All you needed were more pieces to fully realize your creative visions.

At the same time, Star Wars had hit theatres and we were starting to collect the action figures.  This planted a seed.  Cleverly, Kenner included pictures on the back of every figure package:  Each Star Wars figure, numbered in a checklist style.  This was cribbed from trading cards, like Topps — another Star Wars merchandising brand we tried to collect.  Something about a checklist is an itch that begs to be scratched by certain personality types.  Hasbro recycled the checklist gimmick with their in-pack Transformers catalogues in 1984.

As I’m happy to recount the tale, I discovered Kiss in 1985.  Their new album Asylum was out.  The next door neighbour George had a bunch of rock magazines, and one of them (perhaps Faces) had a big full page Kiss ad.  The famed “Accept No Imitations” Asylum ad.  Simple branding, like Coke or Pepsi.  The “real thing”.  They were really promoting the new Kiss in North America as the 20th in a series of records, including the four solo albums, two live albums, and Double Platinum.  Laid out in two rows at the bottom, checklist style, were all 19 of the previous album covers, including their release dates.

Like bells going off in my head, the collector’s itch needed to be scratched.

Gene Simmons is a lifelong comics reader, and he knew as well as anyone that Marvel had a monthly checklist near the back of each book.  He would have had many trading cards in his youth and was surely familiar with the concept of a checklist.  Whether that’s a connection or not, that Kiss ad really set off the fireworks in my brain.  I stared at it, studying each individual album cover, and the frequency of release.

I’ve detailed, many times, my process in first recording all the Kiss records from George or Bob.  The desire to have a complete set, buying as many as I could find while recording the rest.  The need to include the “forgotten” Kiss Killers album in the count.  I displayed all my tapes, either recorded or originals, in order by release date, just like the ad I had seen, except my taped collection numbered 22, including Killers and Animalize Live Uncensored.  Eventually in highschool (1987 precisely) I discarded the recorded copies and acquired a complete set on tape.  In the Record Store years, the process would repeat on remastered CD.

But wait….

While all of the above is the truth, and nothing but the truth, it is not the whole truth.  Kiss were not the first rock band I sought to “collect”.

Before I had that Kiss epiphany with the checklist, I can remember having a specific earlier conversation.  It would have been Easter of ’85, several months before the September release of Kiss Asylum.  My mom asked me what I wanted for Easter, and I told her “the new Quiet Riot” because “I want to have all their albums.”  I thought they only had two, and it would be an easy collection to complete.  But there it was:  the desire to have “all” of something.

Strange how the concept of collecting only latched onto me in some ways.  Atari games looked pretty on display in their coloured boxes, but we had no desire to get all the games.  Just the “good” ones.  Even with comic books.  I would buy issues of current books off the newstands, but did not go back to buy older issues, because they could get insanely expensive, and numbered in the hundreds.  Since comics always referred back to previous and concurrent issues, they really made you want to buy them all to get all the backstory.  But I didn’t — couldn’t.  This is exactly why Bob preferred only to buy limited series, like movie adaptations.  I guess my collector’s desires only extended as far as I could reach, in a monetary sense.

Today, musical artists exploit this common need to collect at lengths never before seen.  We’re still out there, trying to make it through an adult world, but now we have disposable income.  It used to be you’d want all the albums, and if you discovered single B-sides, you wanted those too.  Then it became the bonus tracks, the deluxe editions, the super deluxe editions, and all the different colours of vinyl you get for just about every release these days!  That’s how they get us.  Next thing you know, you just dropped a grand or two on a Gene Simmons Vault, or $800 on a Judas Priest box set.

And we go along with it, time and time again.  Once the itch has been scratched, and the soothing radiation of a complete collection rolls over you like waves…the itch inevitably returns.

And so it ends?  It never ends.

 

#955: Music Enjoyed Alone

RECORD STORE TALES #955: Music Enjoyed Alone

I’ve always had a solitary side.  Music is a fascinating hobby because it unites introverts and extroverts alike.  Everyone has their own preferred environments to enjoy music.  Whether you like to go out and rock it at a show with your buds, or whether you like to listen to a record alone with the headphones on, music unites us.

There is a certain amount of joy in both ways of life.  Ultimately, most people experience music in a mixture of both settings.

Some of my happiest memories were spent with music, by myself, with nothing but my thoughts and feelings.  When I’d get a new album, typically the first thing I’d do was go up to my room, close the door, and rip off the cellophane.  Hit “play”!  I’d read the lyrics, the liner notes, and study the artwork.  Then, after a heavy dose of rocking, I’d emerge to tell anyone who’d listen how awesome the album was.  That would often be my sister (usually uninterested).  Or, if it was a special occasion like Christmas, and the album was a gift, I would go downstairs to tell my gift-giver how much I loved it.  That’s how many first listens went down in my house.

I liked to keep my brain occupied while listening to music.  If I wasn’t studying the lyrics or artwork, perhaps I was reading a book.  Or doing homework.  Or drawing.  Or going through my growing stack of Hit Parader magazines, looking for pictures and info.

I’d allow myself a few minutes of air guitar when a favourite song came on.  Just drop what I was doing, and hit those air-strings.  Give it my all; burn off some energy.  Or perhaps I’d pretend I was Bruce Dickinson, fronting Iron Maiden at Long Beach Arena.

I was generally left alone.  Sometimes my sister would have a comment about the music blasting from behind my closed door.  “There was one really good song,” she might say if I was playing Poison or Warrant.  If it were Priest or Maiden she’d complain, “All I could hear is screaming”.

In 1988 I got my first guitar.  Periodically I would attempt to pick along to songs, but that was a futile endeavour.  I may as well have been playing air guitar.  A few years later, my sister got a pair of drum sticks with her VHS copy of Wayne’s World.  I would steal them and attempt to drum along to albums.  Poorly.

The kind of experiences that I had with music in solitude in my room were rarely equalled in a group setting.  My best friend Bob and I would play music and discuss it, while drawing pictures or writing stories.  That was the kind of thing I enjoyed most.  “Listen to this cool part, I wonder how he does that,” one of us would say mid-song.  “What did he say there?” was one common remark.  “I have no idea,” was usually the answer.

Treasured memories.  But a lot of that time with Bob was actually enhanced by our separate listening times alone.  When we met up on weekends, we were ready to show each other something cool we had heard, or had drawn.  Perhaps I had some new theories about Iron Maiden’s Seventh Son of a Seventh Son concept that I had to share with him.  The times we spent alone in our bedrooms listening to albums prepared us for the times listening together.  We had specific things we liked and wanted to share.  It was always nice when one of us got the other into a band.  He got me into so many, the last of which was probably Extreme.

When the CD began supplanting the cassette in my life, I added another activity to my solo listening sessions.  I still liked to have a cassette copy for portability once I started buying CDs.  So I made cassette copies of all my CDs, so I could listen to them in the car or on a Walkman.  (I did not get a Discman for quite a few years, as I did not trust them to keep my discs unscratched.)  Many happy hours were spent making cassette covers for my CD dubs.  I got better and better at it over the years, but sometimes making the cover was as simple as sketching a logo and neatly writing all the song titles down.

While I have had some amazing times singing at the top of my lungs gathered with best friends and associated buddies, some of the best times were spent listening alone!

 

 

#951: Set Your VCR, It’s 1986 and KISS Meets The Phantom Is On Tonight!

Special thanks to Jennifer Ladano for telling me to write this story down!

RECORD STORE TALES #951: Set Your VCR!
It’s 1986 and KISS Meets The Phantom Is On Tonight!

When thinking back about my earliest rock and roll discoveries, it’s important to recall the order in which I got the albums, or first heard the tunes.  It seems like I had always known “Rock N’ Roll all Nite”, but since my first Kiss albums were Alive! and Hotter Than Hell, those were the songs I knew best.  And I barely knew them!  I got my first Kiss in September of ’85.  But I was learning slowly.  Eventually I’d get Asylum, and gradually tape Kiss albums from my neighbour George.

Something else happened that exposed me to Kiss in a new way, that I sometimes forget about.  It was the first time I saw Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park.

Everybody knew about Kiss Meets the Phantom, but few of us were old enough to have seen it.  When it showed up in the TV guide one week, on some Buffalo station, it seemed like every kid with access to a VCR set it to record.  It was being shown at something like 1:00 in the morning on a Sunday.

Upon waking, I got my sister up early and we raced downstairs to watch.  We did not have time to watch the whole thing that morning.  It was winter, possibly the tail end of Christmas holidays, and we were off to the lake for one day.  We watched some, went to the lake, had lunch at the Embassy, and came home to finish the movie.

I noticed there were far more ads to fast forward through on late night TV than during the day!


Actual ads from the actual tape of the actual night.

My sister recalls liking Kiss Meets the Phantom; my memories are quite different.  I was bored to tears any time Kiss wasn’t on screen, and you had to wait through, like, an hour (with ads) for Kiss to arrive at the bloody park!  I didn’t know who this Anthony Zerbe fellow was, but at age 13 I considered him possibly the worst actor I had ever seen.

It was my first time seeing Peter Criss on video and not just still photos, and I was surprised at his voice.  I told everyone, “Peter Criss sounds like Aquaman.”  I had the show right, but the character wrong.  Michael Bell did the voice of Peter Criss in Kiss Meets the Phantom, and Wonder Twin Zan in the cartoon Superfriends.  Legend has it that this was because Peter didn’t show up to loop his lines in post-production.  Whatever the case, it led to a different urban legends:  that Peter Criss had given up rock and roll, and taken up a lucrative career as a cartoon voice actor!

I thought Gene’s distorted voice was tiresome after a while, and Paul seemed the coolest.  My sister liked that Kiss were like superheroes with powers.  On the other hand, I didn’t like that.  If Paul Stanley couldn’t shoot a laser beam out of his eye in real life, I didn’t understand why he would in this movie.  They were still Kiss, still playing the same Kiss songs, but also super-powered.  My rigid brain couldn’t reconcile the two.

As for the music, the movie contains several songs that I heard for the very first time that day.  “Beth” (acoustic, no less), “Shout It Out Loud”, “God of Thunder” and “I Stole Your Love”.  (“Rip and Destroy” doesn’t count.)  Now, because I didn’t know these songs, and there were no captions, I had to guess at the titles.  “Shout It Out Loud” was the easy one.  But these were the live versions taken from Alive II, fast and reckless.  Not to mention we were hearing it on a TV with mono speaker; state of the art for the time, but not for proper music listening.  So that’s why, for that day at least, I thought “God of Thunder” was “Not a Doctor”, and “I Stole Your Love” was something that sounded like “I Ho-Jo-Ho”.

The process of discovering Kiss was so memorable because it’s so fun.  The superhero character aspect appealed to my sister and there’s no denying that it had something to do with why I loved Kiss too.  But hearing the songs and albums for the first time can only happen once.  And I can clearly remember a tinge of sadness when I finally acquired Rock and Roll Over, the last original Kiss album I needed to finish my collection.  I was starkly aware that I was having this experience for the last time:  hearing a classic Kiss album, guessing who was singing the songs by the title alone, and discovering hidden favourites.  As I learned when Crazy Nights came out, hearing a new Kiss album was simply not the same as discovering the classics!

Kiss Meets the Phantom was a struggle to sit through then, but fortunately I saw it at an age when Kiss still seemed larger than life.  Objectively, it is a pretty terrible film, best enjoyed as a trainwreck.  The best parts are the concert scenes, which was the closest I got to seeing Kiss live at age 13.  It was my first exposure to some really important songs even if I wondered why Gene was singing about being “Not a Doctor”!

#950: A Letter To S

Hey S,

I felt like writing again, I hope you don’t mind.  My emails are not the esteemed A Life in Letters by Isaac Asimov, but it’s more about the process of the writing for me.

I’ve been listening to Van Halen in the car a lot.  Long story short:  I’ve been having issues with my music hard drive in the car, with it repeating tracks.  I discovered I could fix it by formatting the drive and starting over.  Certain Van Halen albums used to give me issues in the car, with the repeating songs.  It’s been a pleasure to rock to King Edward this week.  It’s hard to believe but he died over a year ago now.

I remember coming home from work the day he died and I was just in a foul mood.  Not only was I grieving Edward Van Halen, but I felt stupid for grieving someone I never met and never hoped to meet.  It was a torrent of shitty feelings, plus I hadn’t eaten properly.  It was a Tuesday and I had to do laundry or something, and I snapped at Jen.  I felt like an asshole afterwards.  I also remember telling you this story, and you were the one who said it was OK to be grieving.  Until that moment I didn’t really consider that maybe you don’t have to be a psycho to be upset about Van Halen’s death.

Music aside — which was usually warm, fun with instrumental and occasional lyrical depth — Van Halen meant a lot to me.  I must have been 13 years old when I was sitting on the porch with my best friend Bob, hearing 1984 on the tape deck for the first time.  My dad came home from work, heard the noise and asked what we were listening to, as dads often did.  “Van Halen!?” he said.  “Sounds like some kind of tropical disease!”

My dad was always good with one liners!  When we watched music videos on Much, he would mock the singers shrieking their best operatic screams.  “What’s wrong with that man?  Should he go to the hospital?  He sounds like he’s in pain!”

Good memories, all.  I’m very attached to those childhood memories.  I’m trying to commit them all to writing before they’re gone.  Often, lost memories can be triggered by an old photograph.  But there are many things I wish I had video of!  If only there was a tape or photograph of that first time I heard Van Halen.  But film was a precious commodity until the last 15 years or so.  You didn’t just take pictures of you and your friends listening to music on the front porch.

I remember some of the tapes, and conversations.  Iron Maiden’s Maiden Japan was popular in our porch listening sessions.  George would come over from next door, and Bob would come over with his tapes.  My house was right in the middle!  I wonder how much of my happiest childhood memories are due to geographic concerns.  If my house wasn’t right there in the middle of everybody, maybe I never would have been there that day to hear Van Halen or Iron Maiden.

Sometimes I worry that I spend too much time living in the past and trying to recapture those moments.  But then I think about what you would say to that.  “Why are you worried about something that brings you happiness?” I think you might ask.  And you’d be right.  So bring on the Van Halen.  Bring on the Iron Maiden.  Let’s party like it’s 1985.  Might as well go for a soda — nobody hurts, nobody dies.

Mike