This entry comes from my journal 15 years ago today, April 19 2007.
RECORD STORE TALES #982: Sounds
When I was a young single guy still working at the Record Store, I liked to customize my home computer experience. The sound scheme in particular was something I enjoyed fiddling with. I would download .wav files from TV shows, movies, and Homestarrunner cartoons. Nobody wants just the default sounds, I figured. Let’s have some fun with them, I reasoned. For example During my Homestarrunner phase, I always had the character announce incoming emails, as below.
Homestar: “Email”
The journal entry below reveals other favourite system sounds I employed. Jen didn’t care for them, and I must have loved her or something, because the below implies that I changed them for her!
2007/04/19 21:18
Every time I upgrade my computer I switch sound schemes around. I’m sure Jen will appreciate it that my computer won’t be swearing constantly anymore. My old sound scheme featured such classics as:
New person logs into MSN Messenger: “Who the fuck is this asshole?” as spoken by Samuel L. Jackson.
Jackson: “Who the fuck…”
New email (Outlook): “(gunshot) Oh I’m sorry, did I break your concentration?” again by Samuel.
Jackson: “Oh I’m sorry…”
I also changed some old favourites, just for the sake of change. My computer no longer quotes Clerks at startup and shutdown anymore:
PC startup: “I’m not even supposed to be here today!”
Dante: “I’m not even”…
And PC shutdown: “My love for you is ticking clock Berzerker! Would you like to suck my cock Berzerker!”
Olaf: “My love for you…”
Of course, those old favourites will be cycled in again one day. But now I’m sure she’ll be happy that for now, MSN Messenger has just has Fred Willard saying, “Hey, wha happen?”
I strongly recommend you brighten up your day by customizing your own soundscapes in computerland!
RECORD STORE TALES #928: Rockin’ the Computer From Then to Now
It’s funny to think about my parents being on the cutting edge of technology, but back in the day, we had all the cool stuff. In my earliest memories we had a Lloyd’s Pong machine. It came with two paddles and a really cool light gun assembly that you could customise with a stock or silencer. It was primitive but very few people had video games in the home back then.
You wouldn’t call the Lloyd’s a “computer”, but our next device was specifically marketed as a “video computer system”. The Atari 2600 console was beloved by our family for many years. There was a big sale. You could get the console with two games (Combat and Space Invaders), two joysticks, and two paddles. Our family grabbed one as did everyone else in the neighbourhood. While the games were not as sophisticated as those in the arcade (or any other home entertainment system), they were the most popular. And then one day in 1984, in front of that Atari 2600, I had the musical epiphany that changed the course of my life. Iron Maiden and Snoopy & the Red Baron collided in such a way that my life would never be the same. From that point forward, computers and music would be intertwined in my life. Music enhances everything from gaming to homework.
Cousin Geoff “Captain Destructo” wrecking our Atari joysticks while playing Snoopy & the Red Baron on the 2600
I had always been into soundtrack music, but when I was given a Fisher Price mono tape recorder as a young kid, I was able to record whatever I wanted. I made a compilation of all my favourite Atari 2600 musical themes. My sister and I would walk around the house humming those game tunes, so I recorded them for us to enjoy. Ms. Pac Man in particular had a good musical theme.
The next evolution in our computing lives was when my dad got an IBM PC through work. Not one but two 5 1/4″ floppy disc drives. Monochrome monitor. The ability to copy games from friends. That computer kept us going for many years until the early 90s when I wanted something new that could handle modern word processing for school. Not a very good computer, but a new one at least. It was regular upgrades from there: a modem, and finally the near-mythical CD-ROM drive.
Dad at the original PC
The first thing I did as soon as we got a CD-ROM drive was to buy something that truly combined the world of computers and music. In a way, CD-ROM was a new format in music, an upgrade from simple CD. Having a drive on the computer opened up my world to things I couldn’t play before, such as Queensryche’s Promised Land. (I first bought Alice In Chains’ Jar of Flies CD-ROM but couldn’t get it to work, so I exchanged it for another Seattle band.) There I sat at the keyboard, clicking on my mouse and virtually touring Big Log, the island studio that Queensryche recorded the album in. The CD-ROM also included a video game, and the prize for winning the video game was a brand new song. Queensryche specially recorded “Two Mile High”, an acoustic song, for the game. I never won the game, but I figured out what file the song was, and recorded it to a tape deck via the PC’s audio-out jack. And let me tell you, I thought it was pretty cool to gain an exclusive song by expanding my tech to play a new format. Collectors are kind of nuts that way.
When I started working at the Record Store, Trevor and I would check out CDs that had exclusive CD-ROM content, such as Tales from the Punchbowl by Primus. There was a special “enhanced” reissue that included visual content for your computer. This became common practice in the 1990s. And so, it became important to always have a computer able to keep up with the newest releases.
Ozzy had screen savers. The Tea Party had exclusive videos. I never found out what Alice In Chains had. We learned quickly at the Record Store that these “enhanced” CDs gave some people problems with playback, especially if they tried to play the album on an older computer. We had many returns. The alternative was to exchange the disc for a version manufactured by Columbia House. They usually lacked the enhanced content for your computer, which was causing some customers the playback issues. The feedback we received was that the Columbia House versions played fine!
With the advent of cheaper memory and better computers, my collection began the ongoing migration to digital copy. Having a decent computer is more important than ever. In fact now I do most of my listening right here in front of the screen. The subwoofer gives me plenty of depth. This is something I could never have imagined, even back in the early CD-ROM days. Only in the last 10 years has listening to music on the computer been smooth and decent sounding. Tech got faster and cheaper and now the computer is my main station.
I’ve had so many computers over the years that I’ve lost track of them all. The new laptop I bought doesn’t have an optical media drive at all, which alarmed me. I will always need the ability to have my CD collection interact with my digital machine. Will my future be external drives that play increasingly obsolete formats? Kang only knows, as this ride has been unpredictable so far. I guess we’ll see what changes in the next 10 years. I just know that it will change.
RECORD STORE TALES #902: The Print ShopThe Adventures of “B” Man
In the mid 1980s through to the 90s, my dad had an old client named Skully. He was a computer guy. Every so often, he would gave my dad a list of games and programs he could copy for us. If we sent him a pack of floppy discs with a checked-off list, in a few weeks he’d come back to us with all the games we wanted. Classic Concentration, Alleycat, King’s Quest, Into the Eagle’s Nest, Digger, and so many more games with names long forgotten. All on 51⁄4” floppy discs — double sided, double density.
One of the programs we checked off from Skully’s list was a program called The Print Shop. And strangely enough, it was Print Shop that had a personal impact bigger than any of the games. In fact it was one of the most widely pirated Commodore 64 programs of 1985, although we had the IBM PC version.
We mostly used it to make birthday and Christmas cards. It was great for that, all pre-formatted and everything. You could use pictures from its own library. Stuff like birthday cakes, turkeys, Easter bunnies, and so on. Or, you could painstakingly make your own graphics, block by block. In fact we used Print Shop all through the mid to late 80s. It had a poster feature and a banner printer. We used that to print a “DEMOLITION” banner when we went to see WWF wrestling at the Aud.
My sister, Bob Schipper and myself learned how to use The Print Shop to make blocky pictures. The first experiments involved modifying pre-existing graphics. That was a good way to learn. The Easter bunny fell first to our mischievous ways. Bob changed his smile to a scowl, and we changed his happy wave to a middle finger! Of course we did. I was 12 and he was 14.
The next thing I obviously had to do was figure out the logo.
With some trial and error, I drew a pretty good recreation of the legendary Kiss double lightning bolt. I proudly printed it out in poster mode. But what else should be on the poster? I was fascinated with the Kiss discography and had memorized every album and year. So I painstakingly typed out each line of text to go beneath the logo. KISS (1974) HOTTER THAN HELL (1974) DRESSED TO KILL (1975)… all the way to ASYLUM (1985).
I taped that “poster” to my wall. I was so proud of it!
Wanna know something funny? In 1987, I updated it. CRAZY NIGHTS (1987) had to be added! It took some work trying to make everything fit. I knew if Kiss continued to release new albums, I wouldn’t be able to make space forever! SMASHES, THRASHES & HITS (1988) was the last album I could squeeze onto to my humble Kiss poster before I gave up. I didn’t have a lot of things to put up on my walls, and I didn’t like to cut up my rock magazines. A printout from The Print Shop just had to do!
When the time came to start highschool in the fall of ’86, Bob helped me prepare some locker artwork. I had a Gene Simmons poster — the one of Gene from the Asylum era with his tongue stuck in the bass strings. We also thought the Easter bunny giving the finger would be a cool addition to the locker, as long as the teachers didn’t make me take it down! But what should it say? Bob and I discussed numerous sayings, shooting them down one after the other. Somehow, he came up with “The End Of Rock Is The End Of Life!” and I went with it. “OK!” Up it went in my very first locker. That way the girls will know I’m serious about the music. I’m in it for the music; it says so right on the poster with the Easter bunny giving the finger!
I know what you’re thinking at this point.
“What a loser!” you say. “But what the hell is ‘B Man’ and what are his adventures?”
This is really embarrassing. But what the hell.
That autumn (’86) I remember one of us somehow caught a bee, and pulled off its head. OK, I said it. I don’t know who it was. But we thought it was pretty cool, and Bob had an idea. He drew a little muscle-y body, and we taped the bee’s head to the paper right over it. “I AM ‘B’ MAN!” wrote Bob in a word bubble.
And once again, I thought it was a good idea to tape it in my locker. Now, I cannot remember if Bob was onside with me on this. He didn’t need “‘B’ Man” in his locker. He already had awesome posters. But I thought, hey. It’s all about getting the attention of the girls, and they’ll love that I removed the head from a bee and taped it to a poster with a drawing of a little muscle body on it. They’ll think A) that I’m good at drawing and B) I’ll protect them from bees. I showed the bees who the boss really was. Me! I was the bee boss.
It comes as no shock that none of my posters did anything to attract girls. A pair of them gave my “The End Of Rock Is The End Of Life!” the old side-eye. I think “‘B’ Man” was too small for them to be disgusted by him. My cluelessness was rivalled only by my awkwardness. I had completely misjudged the female gender. My colossally bad assumption, that because I thought something was cool they would too, was profoundly and predictably incorrect.
And so that’s the irony of the title. There were no adventures of “‘B’ Man”. He wasn’t even shot down in flames. He was a total dud and came down with no fanfare.
Now, to anyone who’s sitting there going “what a psycho! Eww!” We were kids. It was 1986. Virtually every neighbourhood had a group of kids participating in a good ol’ bug burning. It happened. It was for science n’ stuff. We all turned out pretty good.
And so, a seemingly innocent story that began with kids nerding out with primitive printing software, ends with insect mutilation. Bees, no less, the guardians of plant life on this Earth. I guess metal really does pervert the hearts of the young.
Sometimes I like to imagine myself in my younger self’s shoes. I think about me as a kid, sitting in the basement watching the Pepsi Power Hour on MuchMusic. There I am, staring intently, VCR remote grasped in hand, and set to “Record-Pause”. Waiting for the new music video by Kiss to debut. Hitting that un-pause button to get a good recording as soon as the video began. Could I even have imagined the on-demand nature of YouTube? No, but I like to imagine what I would have thought if I could have seen a glimpse of the future.
I always felt limited by technology, even though I was spoiled enough to have my own stereo, my own Walkman, and access to the family VCR (almost) whenever I wanted. Though I had all this stuff, I couldn’t make it do what I wanted to do without some improvisation. Making a mix tape, for example. If I wanted a live song on a mix tape, I had to fade it in and out. My dual tape deck couldn’t do that. To do a fade, I plugged my Walkman, via a cable in the headphone jack, into the audio inputs of my ghetto blaster. This was done with a Y-connector, and an RCA-to-3.5 mm adaptor cable. Then I used the Walkman’s volume knob to fade the song in and out while the ghetto blaster recorded. It took trial and error and the end recording usually sounded a little hot and crackly. But I didn’t have anything better.
If that highschool kid playing with cables in his bedroom could only have imagined Audacity. Instant fades, exactly as you want them. Precise digital replication. I would have lost my shit. If you had given me Audacity as a kid, I might not have left my bedroom for a week…and not for the reasons a teen usually hides in his bedroom!
I worked long hours on mix tapes back in those days, mainly because you had to make them in real time. And you had to keep it simple too. Making the tape in the first place was the challenge; making it creatively was the icing. But the end results were always…disappointing? Underwhelming? The second generation taped songs never sounded as good as the first. You’d get a little noise, perhaps a pop, between tracks where you started and stopped your recording. Little imperfections. Maybe one track sounds a little slow, one a little fast. Volume levels are inconsistent. All stuff out of your control.
The amount of control I have today over what I create is astounding. Even visually speaking. I don’t make tape cover art anymore, but doing so was a painstaking process involving sharp pencils, rulers, erasers, and scissors. Everything had to be handwritten and hand drawn. Sometimes I might be able to get my dad to photocopy a cover at his work, but usually I had to make my own stuff. I was very limited when it came to to making visuals. Even taking a photograph, it took days or weeks to get your picture back. You had to use the entire roll of film before getting it developed, of course. Now you have a phone that’s a camera and a computer.
Now that’s something that young me definitely couldn’t have imagined: our phones. Even science fiction of the mid-80s didn’t have anything like the phones we have today. Imagine what I could have made with that! It took months and a lot of clunky equipment for Bob Schipper and I to make a single music video in 1989. I can throw together a clip in minutes today, thanks to computers and phones and ubiquitous cameras that ensure I always have raw photos and videos waiting to be edited together.
Computers — now there’s a quantum leap that young me wouldn’t believe. We had a family computer from a very early time, decked out with a dot matrix printer and a monochrome block of a monitor. But it wasn’t connected to anything. We didn’t have the instant access to information. We couldn’t look up a band’s complete discography in a moment on Discogs, much less actually buy those rare items and have them shipped to the front door! Can you imagine how much that would have blown my mind? I had a few hundred bucks in the bank at that age. Well, it would all have been gone if you had given me access to Discogs for an hour in 1986. The ability to actually complete an artist’s music collection today, was something I just could not ever do as a kid. Very few people could.
We did what we could with the resources at hand. We’d save our pennies, and take the bus down to Sam the Record Man. We’d look around for an hour and decide where we would best spend our dollars. “Don’t go to Sam the Record Man and buy something you can get at the mall,” was the motto. That would be a waste of time and bus money!
Bob Schipper made far more trips to Sam’s, usually via bike. But if he acquired a rarity, it was always a given that I could tape it off him. A lot of my first Maiden B-sides were just taped copies of records he found at Sam’s.
What I was doing in those early formative years was absorbing rock’s past. Collecting the albums, discovering the bands, learning the member’s names through the magazines and interviews. But what if I could have seen the future of all this? What would I have thought of things like a six-man Iron Maiden lineup with three lead guitar players? I think tunes like “The Wicker Man” would have blown me away as an evolution without losing what made Maiden great.
I wonder what I would have thought of the Kiss tour with the original members back in makeup? I know I would have been disappointed that they never made a proper studio album together. One thing I appreciated as a kid was that Kiss put out something new every year. Today, Kiss only put out an album when there’s a solar eclipse on planet Jendell. I think the success of that reunion tour would have made the younger me feel validated for my Kiss love, but I know I would have been unhappy about the lack of new material. However, if I could have heard albums like Sonic Boom and Monster, I also know I’d have been happy that Kiss dropped the keyboards, brought Gene back to prominence, and had all four members singing. That would have impressed me.
I’m still working on my time travel powers, and I’m also wary of doing anything that could change the future. Since The Avengers: Endgame taught us that you can’t change your past’s future’s future (or something like that), I’m going to continue to work on the technology. If I can show my past self some of these amazing technological advances, I might…I don’t know! Buy first print Kiss LPs and keep them in the shrink wrap? I haven’t fully through this through, but trust me — it’s going to be awesome.
RECORD STORE TALES MkII: Getting More Tale #377: The Iron Age of Computing
In 1995, the year after I started at the Record Store, we opened our first used CD store that wasn’t run entirely by a cash register. For the first time, the store had a computer, and computerized inventory! We then expanded to a third store in 1996 (the one that I managed), and this time we were going to try something new – two computers! Imagine that? In 1996, having two computers in the same store seemed like a luxury! This way, one computer could act as a cash register, while the other one was used to look up and input new inventory. In theory!
Our software was written completely in-house. Today if you want to open up a retail store, you would buy a point of sale software (POS) system. Not us; ours was entirely home grown by one guy, the uncle of the owner! I believe it was a massive long term undertaking. Meanwhile, staff members input all of the inventory manually – thousands of items.
It’s really funny to look back on this period from today’s point of view. I was not very computer literate but I learned quick. I remember that networking the two computers was a nightmare. It took months for him to get it working with our software. Everything seemed so fragile. If you sneezed funny, you could freeze the computers. By comparison to today it felt like the stone ages. We had no email, no internet, and the actual machines were not what you’d call top of the line even for back then.
Common problems we used to run into back in the day:
Backing the memory up. We started with a disc drive, then a tape drive, and finally a second hard drive. It used to take so long to back up our inventory every night (particularly in the tape days) that we just stopped doing it. Nobody was going to stay an hour late (unpaid) to watch this thing backup and make sure it didn’t crash. No way!
Inventory would disappear, or just be inaccessible. Nothing like coming in on a weekend morning to find out you can’t access the inventory! This happened due to one file that used to regularly corrupt. If a customer came in with a big box of CDs to sell, we had no choice but to run up and down along the shelves to see if we had copies of them. Couldn’t look them up any other way.
Running slooooow. Unfortunately customers used to take this out on the staff. I remember one of our staff, a really sweet girl named Caitlin, had just started and she was dealing with a really nasty woman. At that moment the computer decided to take a siesta. Caitlin said to the woman, “I’m sorry, my computer is running really slow.” The woman responded, “Well do something about it because I am running really fast.” Thanks for the understanding, lady.
We discovered that you could not input CDs on two computers at once. They would conflict with each other and give you an error.
Every few years, one of the computers would be replaced. Not with a new one, but usually with another old one that was still superior to whatever we were running. Then a year or two after that, the other computer would be replaced, and we’d keep upgrading like that without ever really running anything brand new. But we made it work. Rivals would have loved to get their hands on our software, or our master CD pricing catalogue. The master catalogue was painstakingly inputted by just one individual. A hell of a lot of typing and hard work!*
We did the best we could with what we had available at the time. It’s absolutely incredible how much the technology has changed. My cellphone today has more computing power than our first point of sale system. Where did the time go?
*The inputting of the master catalog indirectly triggered my first experience with workplace bullying, something I have been hesitant to speak out about. Even though it was many years ago, it’s not a good memory. The story has been written, but it remains in the draft stage and will remain there for the time being.
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