Iron Maiden

Part 12: The Pepsi Power Hour

RECORD STORE TALES Part 12:  The Pepsi Power Hour

I’m going to take you back in time a bit.  Back to a time before the record store….

I remember back to the 80’s and early 90’s when MuchMusic was king. Back when there was no Jersey Shore and they played actual music videos.  There was no internet at that time, so you had to go to the store to buy your music (more often than not, on cassette). To hear new bands, you watched videos on Much and listened to the radio. There was no YouTube.

There was this frickin’ awesome show on Much back in the day — you remember it. It was originally only on once a week (Thursdays at 4 if I recall) and was hosted by one John “J.D.” Roberts. Yeah, the CNN guy. After he left, the hosting slot rotated between Michael Williams, Steve Anthony, Erica Ehm and Laurie Brown and then finally the late Dan Gallagher. Despite his long hair, Dan didn’t know a lot about metal — he didn’t know how to pronounce “Anthrax” and had never heard of Ratt. But that show was by far the best way to hear new metal back in the day.

That show was THE POWER HOUR.

It was so popular that they eventually had two a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays at 4, which was awesome for me since by 1989 I was working every Thursday at Zehrs.  I could still catch one a week, usually.

I remember tuning in, VCR at the ready to check out all the new videos and catch onto the newest bands. There was this band called Leatherwolf that I found via Hit Parader magazine and first heard on the Power Hour. I loved that band. There was another band called Sword from Montreal. Psycho Circus. Faith No More. Skid Row. Armored Saint. Testament. You could always count on the Power Hour to have Helix on. That show rocked.

They had some of the best interviews as well.  Usually they’d have someone come in and co-host for an hour.  They had everybody from Gene Simmons to Brian Vollmer to Lemmy.  In depth stuff too, at times.

Then in 1990 something else cool happened. I discovered a magazine called M.E.A.T (the periods were for no reason at all, just to look cool like W.A.S.P. but eventually they decided it stood for “Metal Events Around Toronto”). M.E.A.T was awesome because it was monthly, free, and had in depth articles clearly written by knowledgable fans. There was no magazine with that kind of deep coverage. Even Slash loved M.E.A.T, at a time when Guns hated rock magazines! I loved M.E.A.T so much I eventually sent them $10 to subscribe to a free magazine.  I did this on a yearly basis.

I discovered a whole bunch of great bands via that magazine. I Mother Earth, Slash Puppet, Russian Blue, Jesus Christ, not to mention they were way ahead of the curve on alternative. They had a Nirvana concert review back in 1989. They got behind Soundgarden way before they were cool. And you could count on them hanging onto the oldies. They’d put an indi band from Toronto on the cover one month, and put Black Sabbath on the cover the next month.  Next issue they’d have an in-depth interview with Kim Mitchell.  They’d talk about bands that nobody else did.

Their CD reviews were my bible! My music hunting was probably 90% based on their reviews, especially since by then the Power Hour had changed into the 5 day weekly Power 30 hosted by Teresa Roncon, and sucked.  The started playing too much thrash and grunge and never gave the old bands a shot anymore.

Things have changed so much now. I never get into new bands anymore, back then I used to just eat them up. I guess new bands just don’t interest me anymore. I like my old time rock and roll. I did buy the new Sheepdogs, twice.  The last new band I got totally and 100% excited about was The Darkness, and that was, what…2003?

Yet I can’t get into these new metal bands. The music sounds so sterile to my aging ears. The rock has lost its balls. The album I have been most excited about in 2012 was the new Van Halen — a band that is approaching 40 years old. But my God does it rock.  Kiss and Black Sabbath both have new records coming out, and I’m excited about them, but I could two shits about the new Nickelback.

In a lot of ways, it’s a better time for music now.  With eBay and Amazon I’ve managed to fill nearly every gap in my music collection.  There are some bands that I now have complete sets of, and others that I am achingly close.  I’m missing 4 Maiden EP’s and 1 Deep Purple import, for example.  Back in the 80’s you didn’t have access to this.  You didn’t even have access to an accurate and complete discography.  It wasn’t until the internet that this kind of information was even available.

Aside from that, today kind of sucks for music.  Sure, it’s easier to find new bands now, but we did OK in the 80’s.  M.E.A.T turned me on to lots of bands, and they were always giving away sampler cassettes.  Much played all the new videos by all the  metal bands at least once, basically.  You had to work a little harder, but we only appreciated the music more.  It wasn’t disposable.

And there were a lot more new bands around that just plain rocked!

Part 10: What’s it like, working in a record store?

Yours Truly

Everybody always wanted to know how awesome it was to work in a record store.  They all had this Empire Records idea of it when the truth is much closer to High Fidelity.  I kind of considered myself a combination of the John Cusack and Jack Black characters.  I ran the place like Cusack, but I was a Jack Black-like smartass.  Black played a character named Barry.  You know that scene where the guy in the suit is looking for the song, “I Just Called To Say I Love You”?

Customer: Hi, do you have the song “I Just Called To Say I Love You?” It’s for my daughter’s birthday.
Barry: Yeah, we have it.
Customer: Great great… Well, can I have it?
Barry: No, you can’t.
Customer: Why not?!
Barry: Because it’s sentimental tacky crap that’s why! Do we look like a store that sells “I Just Called to Say I Love You”? Go to the mall!
Customer: What’s your problem?!
Barry: Do you even know your daughter? There’s no way she likes that song! Oh oh oh wait! Is she in a coma?
Customer: Oh, okay buddy. I didn’t know it was Pick on the Middle-Aged Square Guy Day. My apologies. I’ll be on my way.
Barry: Buh-bye!
Customer: Fuck you!

I never quite went that far, but I was always fond of the subtle insults.  I was also known for being stubbornly obtuse.  Like for example, the guy who couldn’t pronounce “Triumph”.  I knew very well what band he was looking for, but he kept saying, “Tramp”.  He didn’t know how to spell it either.  Just the very idea that he couldn’t spell nor pronounce the word “triumph”…how could I not have fun with that guy?  I eventually sold him The Sport of Kings, when I felt like he’d earned it. 

Spelling was an issue in this part of town.  We had a lookup terminal where you could search for inventory on your own.  The best question I ever got at that terminal was, “Mike, how do you spell ‘metal’?  I don’t spell so good.”

In short, stuff grinds your gears just like it does at anybody’s job.  There are times when you saw a number on call display and just did not want to answer.  Just like any job.  Annoying callers, annoying customers, lazy customers who made you do absolutely everything for them, including pick what they want to buy!

You had sales quotas just like any day job.  You had responsibilities to get done.  If they weren’t done, you can’t just say “we were really busy” if your sales numbers weren’t big.   And you had to do things accurately.  In any environment where you buy and sell used goods, you had to be sure of what you were buying and what you were paying for it.  This is made just as difficult in a music store as anywhere else, due to the multiple versions, reissues, special editions, and imports of a CD that determine just what it’s worth.  You could go from offering $2 to $20 for a single album, the exact same title, just a different version thereof.

Same album different versions, and none of these are even the standard version. How would you price them?

And customers really hated being told their discs were “too scratched to re-sell.”  They really hated that one.

You got to listen to tunes all day, that was true.  That is something that I thankfully still do today, thanks to the radio.  I actually prefer the radio to choosing store play discs.  You were so tightly constrained by various rules, which narrowed the scope.  I actually loathed picking store play discs.  If I was working to someone else, I often just said, “You pick, I’ll pick something later.”

Lo and behold, I still have a copy of the store play rules!  I’m a packrat.  I keep everything.

  • Forbidden bands list:  Kiss, Rush, Frank Zappa, Spinal Tap, Dio, Judas Priest
  • Nothing heavier than Metallica’s “black” album
  • No musicals, no classical, no instrumental
  • Must play one new release in every shift
  • Must play 5 discs in shuffle mode, must never play album all the way through except in specific promotional cases
  • Each of the 5 discs must be a different genre
  • No songs with swearing
  • No rap
  • No comedy
  • Could only play discs that were in stock for sale instore

Jazz, soul, indy, and oldies were encouraged.  Hard rock was especially discouraged. 

Of course we broke the rules. If I knew there was no chance of getting caught, I’d bring in my own discs from home all the time.  The best shift I ever had, I played all 5 discs of the Kiss box set, in a row!  I played lots of shit with swearing, all the time.  It wasn’t intentional of course, it’s just that sometimes a great album has swearing on it, and I like to listen to great albums.  Sinatra at the Sands, for example.

We sold Sinatra at the Sands in minutes, by the way…by playing it instore.

I played Dio all the time when I could get away with it, even though he was strictly off limits. 

I remember Tom walking in, during Holy Diver. 

“Wow.  That’s ballsy man,” he said.

I played Spinal Tap once, but one of my buddies got written up for doing the same thing.  Seriously.  That time I was playing Spinal Tap, there was this guy seriously rocking out to it.  He didn’t look like a fan though.  He walked up to me and said, “Sounds like you got some Sons of Freedom going on here!”  Oops!

And I played heavy stuff too.  I know I played Maiden in the store, any night I could.  (Astute readers will recall that Maiden is where we started.  Go back to Part 1 if you haven’t.)  I remember two little kids laughing at Bruce Dickinson’s shrieking during a live take of “Fear of the Dark”.  But, I also remember lots of cool kids in Kiss shirts, buying their first rock albums, and it was cool corrupting those kids.

So what did I have to complain about?  Well, I only played those albums when I could get away with it.  Which wasn’t often.  There was usually someone  in there store who could give you shit for it.

So you’d have to put up with the following:  Much Dance xx, Big Shiny Tunes, TLC, Christmas music all day while seasonal, Dave Matthews band, Linkin Park, plenty of new country, and whatever was the flavour of the month at the time.  There’s a reason I know entire albums inside and out by shitty band like The Dandy fucking Warhols.  I could tell you every fucking song on the first two Coldplay CDs.  I had the unfortunate fate of having to listen to the self titled album by Blur every fucking day for a month.  There are bands that I legitimately like, such as Oasis and Kula Shaker, that I rarely play at home anymore because I have heard them so many Goddamn times.  It sucks when you can’t stand music you actually like.

The record store will do that if you spend too many years there, and I spent too many years there.  Gratefully, I love music again.

The worst thing about the record store though were the cliques, and from what I’ve heard, many record store were like this.  You either fit in or you didn’t, and I definitely did not fit in.   They were all into the latest indy rock bands, and all wore sunglasses.   I’ve never been a sunglasses kind of guy.  Indoors, I think they’re just pretentious.  I tried, oh but I did try.  I went to their shitty bars and drank and pretended to have a good time, but I just couldn’t pretend that I liked the Dandy fucking Warhols.

But, if I didn’t experience all that, I guess I wouldn’t be LeBrain!

Part 6: The Record Store, Year 1
Myself on the left, Trev on the right.

We were pretty slow most evenings.  You could study for exams at work most nights. Fridays got busy, but Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights were dead.  That didn’t mean we doing nothing.  Rule #1:  “If there’s time to lean, there’s time to clean.”  We had scheduled to do something every night.  Mondays was cleaning the mirrors which lined the store walls.   Tuesday was putting away new stock, which always came Tuesdays.  Wednesday was checking the security tags on every cassette in the store.  Every fucking cassette.

For the first 2 months or so, it was just me and the owner.  Once September hit, he hired this other guy, Trevor.  I didn’t like him at first, he was the “other guy”.  He was the same age as me, also finishing school at the same time as me.  We shared similar musical interests.  Influences we shared:  Guns N’ Roses, Van Halen, The Four Horsemen, Kim Mitchell, Rush, and any bands with amazing drummers.  Over the course of the years, he introduced me to:  Steve Earle, Oasis, Metallica, Megadeth, Max Webster, anb Buddy Rich.  I give him a lot of credit for expanding my horizons during those days.

A lot of memorable releases came out that first year.  Superunknown and Purple were already out, but I was on board for some major ones.  Nirvana Unplugged was the biggest release of the fall 1994 schedule.  There was an Aerosmith hits disc, a Bon Jovi hits disc, and the Eagles reunion album which was absolutely massive.

The new Tragically Hip, Day For Night, came out on a Saturday.  We sold out by Sunday.  The boss drove down to Scarborough to get more on Monday.  Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy came out on vinyl the week before the CD was released.  We got just five in.  He didn’t expect it to sell, but we sold out before my shift even started.  Interestingly, none of the customers planned on playing it.  They either a) didn’t even have something to play it on, or b) were keeping it sealed as a collector’s item.  It definitely was a cool package.

Some poeople have a “swear jar”.  We had an alarm jar.  If you forgot to de-tag a customer’s purchase and thusly set off the alarm, you had to put a dollar in the jar.  We would use the spoils on our annual Christmas dinner.  It created some friendly competition between us.  That first Christmas is when I started working directly with Trevor, and I started to like him due to his excellent musical taste.  But in the alarm jar game, we were always about equal.  Sometimes you just forgot!

One lady may well have stolen something and set off the alarm, and I’ll never know, because, well….  As she was walking out the alarm went off.  I asked her to come back in the store and check to see if she had something from another store that may had set it off.  She was so upset at the alarm, she really wanted to show me she had nothing on her person.  So, she removed her top.  “See I’m not hiding anything in here!”  Covering my eyes, I told her it was quite alright, I believed her, and she could go.  First time I’d been flashed on the job.  Not the last.

She wasn’t even drunk.  They actually used to serve alcohol at this mall.  There was a licensed restaurant right next door to the store.  The regulars would start in the morning and keep going.  You’d see them in there every day, and they’d wander in completely plastered.

We had a few regular psychos at that mall.  There was Johnny Walker, who would just walk around the mall talking to himself, all day.  Literally, all day.  The story goes that he was quite rich.  He didn’t need to work, wasn’t capable of work, and just came to the mall and walked around all day, talking to himself.  Sometimes he would argue with himself and he had been ejected from the mall a couple times.  He came into the store a couple times but never caused any problems on my shifts.  One time, he even bought a cassette.  It was like the madness turned off.  He spoke to me, bought the tape, and walked out.  Madness set back in, and he’s off arguing with himself.  I wonder what happened to Johnny Walker?  He’d been walking the malls since grade school, sometimes changing malls when he got permanently ejected from one.

Then, there was Sue.  Sue had been in an accident years before, and had a walker.  She moved very  very slow.  She had a bit of a crush on the owner.  She stalked him relentlessly and gave him Christmas gifts.  She’d park her walker right there in front of the counter and talk his ear off for hours.  Hours!

One day, a large Japanese woman was shopping.  The owner said, “Go ask that lady if she needs help.  Then he stood back and waited.  I didn’t know it, but he had just given me my first challenge.

“Hi, can I help you find anything today?”

“No thank you though,” she answered, then almost immediately, “Do you have Soundgarden?”

I showed her what Soundgarden we had both new and used.  We also had the latest copy of M.E.A.T Magazine, and Chris Cornell was on the cover.  I’ll never forget that detail.

“Do you like Chris Cornell?” she asks.

“Yes, he’s actually one of my favourite singers.”

“Oh!  Really!  I love Chris Cornell.  He’s sexy.”

It was too late now.  I had opened Pandora’s box.  She opened the magazine to his picture inside.  She went on:  “I like when he wears his sexy black boots.  Chris Cornell wears black Doc Marten boots.  Do you know the boots?  Chris Cornell wears black Doctor Martens boots.  Do you like Doc Marten boots?”

I was on my own.  The boss just stood back.  I couldn’t even figure out a way to improvise my way out.  I was a rookie  I decided that this woman was most likely a lil’ crazy and I played the polite card.

“Yes, I do…”

“Chris Cornell is sexy.  Did you know that Soundgarden had an original bass player who was Asian?”

I did know that.  “Yes, his name was Hiro Yamamoto…”

“Yes Hiro Yamamoto.  He is Asian.  There are not many Asians in rock bands did you know that?”

This went on for a good 20 minutes.  After she left (not without asking my name, fuck!) my boss came to speak to me.

“That’s your first lesson.  Don’t get into conversations with customers.”

And of course we had the drunks.  I remember one jolly drunk came in that first Christmas Eve.  We all wore ties Christmas Eve, that was the tradition.  It was a tradition I kept every year to my last year at the store, even when I was the only one left who still did it.  This drunk came in, a big Grizzly Adams dude just reeking of alcohol.  He was definitely in great spirits though.  First he asked us why the ties?  The quick-witting Trevor answered, “I’m wearing mine because it makes me feel important.”  We laughed.  I then went over to see if he needed help finding anything.

“Hi there!” I began.

“Not yet, but I will be when I get home.  Hahahaha!” he answered.

Ultimately the jolly drunk guy couldn’t remember what to buy, so he bought $100 in gift certificates for his grand kids.  That was a great sale, and the best part was that it turned out to be $100 of pure profit for the store.  The bearded drunk guy probably lost it, because all my years with the store, they were never redeemed!

After Christmas, the owner confided in Trevor and I that he was going to be opening a second location.  This location would be in Waterloo.  It would be easily accessible by one high school, two universities, and one college.  He would be splitting his time between our store and setting up the new one.  Ultimately this meant he’d be in much less and we’d be getting more hours, and also bhe was bringing a new guy in.

I walked in one Tuesday to see this black-bearded behemoth behind the counter.  It was kind of awkward because the owner didn’t introduce us at first.  I looked around for an hour, stealing glances at this big grizzly bear of a man with the thickest blackest beard you can picture.  Finally he introduced me to Thomas, later to become Tom, the legendary founder of Sausagefest.  Ahh, but that comes much later.

TOM

Tom was a wicked cool guy who expanded my musical tastes even further than Trevor had.  Tom and I had many influences in common.  I had met another kindred spirit.  Influences:  Black Sabbath, Dio, Rainbow, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Van Halan (not Van Hagar!) and Johnny Cash.  Music he would introduce me to:  Miles Davis, Willie Nelson, Fu Manchu, and the whole stoner rock scene in general.  His place was plastered with rare Marillion posters.  Tom was serious about music.

Tom was so serious about music that it was actually hilarious.  Kids, this is the difference between liking music and loving music.  Nobody loves music as much as Tom.  Dare I say it, Tom loves music even more than me.

One night in Toronto, we visited the big HMV on Yonge St.  Tom was methodically working his way through every decent section of the store.  Long after Trevor and I had finished shopping, Tom was just finishing browsing rock.  With a handful of discs by Rainbow and Saga, Tom would then announce, “OK…I just have to check country.”

20 minutes would pass.  “Alright…on to jazz.”

20 more minutes.

“I just have to check blues.”

10 more minutes.

“Oohh…I wonder if they have the soundtrack to the Godfather.”

Checkout.  Trev, Tom and I usually checked out of that store $200 lighter.  Each.

Then, repeat.  We walked down the street to Sam’s, and finally to Virgin.  Rock, country, jazz, blues.  Every store.  That was Tom, three stores, one night.

Seriously those early days at the store were the best times I ever had working.  Working hard or hardly working?  No, we worked hard.  If there’s time to lean, there’s time to clean.  We ran that store with the owner making guest appearances, adding to it with our own creative ideas.

I graduated school in the summer of 1995, and hadn’t decided on my next move.  After that I was putting in increasingly more hours at the store.  It gradually built up from a part time job to full time.  When the new store opened, Tom split hours between the two of them so there were plenty of day and night shifts available, usually alone, which were the best times because you could play whatever you wanted!

I remember Tom walked in one night when I was playing Dio.  Back in 1995 you could not play Dio in a mainstream record store.  That would be like the equivalent of playing Michael Bolton in one today.  He was so far removed from what was selling at the time.  But I was rocking out to Holy Diver and Tom appreciated that I had the balls to do it.

Tom went to a lot of concerts.  After we had bonded over the mutual love of metal, I joined him and many of my future Sausagefest friends at a Black Sabbath concert.  It was Motorhead opening on the Sacrifice tour, and Black Sabbath headining, supporting their final studio album (17 years and counting!) Forbidden.  They played at Lulu’s Roadhouse just down the street.  A few weeks later we saw Queensryche in Toronto on the Promised Land tour.

Trev, Tom and I would have many adventures.  Such as that time seeing Kiss in…ahh, but that’s another story.  Before I talk about Tom and Trev again, I need to tell you a really shitty story.

TBC…

Part 4: A Word About B-Sides

Hysteria singles collection

RECORD STORE TALES Part 4:  A Word About B-Sides

My definition of a B-side:

A song that is found on the B-side of a vinyl or cassette single, but not on the album; or a song on a CD or digital single other than the main track, not found on the album.

A well known example:  “Hey Hey What Can I Do” by Led Zeppelin.  Up until the release of the Led Zeppelin box set in 1990, this great song was only available on the 7″ single for “The Immigrant Song”.

I’d known about B-sides for a while thanks to George, the neighbor next door with the Kiss albums.  He had a couple Iron Maiden 12″ singles such as “Aces High” with unreleased studio tracks on the B-side, usually two per 12″.  I’d also been aware of Maiden tunes like “Women In Uniform” (technically an A-side) that weren’t on any albums that we’d ever seen.

Right from an early age I’d always been a collector.  I had a massive collection of Lego.  Then later on I had a collection of Star Wars figures that put all others in the neighborhood to shame.  Then it was GI Joe and Transformers.  I didn’t do anything small.  When music came along, it inevitably became the next thing in this obsession.  Quiet Riot was the first band I pledged to complete (still incomplete 27 years later).  As I expanded out to more bands, I pledged to complete a lot of collections….

When Def Leppard came out with Hysteria I went wild for that album.  Definitely still to this day my #1 album of 1987; and that was a year that included new records by Kiss, Aerosmith, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, and a band I hadn’t quite discovered yet at the time called Guns N’ Roses.  Yes folks, I rank Hysteria higher than Appetite.  But listen, I’m not going to get into that debate right this second.  I’ll save it for another day.  I’m just giving you the setting.

I was really passionate about the Hysteria album and early in 1988 I acquired the Animal EP on cassette.  That 4-song EP contained three tracks not on the album:  “I Wanna Be Your Hero”, “Tear It Down”, and an extended mix of the title song.  I really got into “I Wanna Be Your Hero”, hard.  It’s still a great track.  That really set off a fire for me to collect these rare songs.  This was the first really awesome B-side track that I’d found so far.  If it was this good, there must be more coming…

I was in highschool, and on a weekly basis, I trekked into my local Zellers store to peruse the 7″ singles.  Some you could get as cheap as 99 cents.  Any time Def Leppard came out with a new video, I knew there was a new 7″ single to be had.  Up next came “Hysteria” itself, and I rapidly found a copy at Zellers.  On the flip side was a song called “Ride Into The Sun” (a re-recording of an early Def Leppard track) and it blew me away.  It was fast and heavy, there was nothing else like it on Hysteria.

In the summer came “Pour Some Sugar On Me” which appeared at my Zellers soon after the video started running.  The B-side was “Ring of Fire”, not a standout track, so I figured by now, Def Leppard were running out of good unreleased songs.

Me at the time, awesome hair

That fall, “Love Bites” started airing on Much, so I knew there would be another single to be had.  This one proved to be more elusive.  I finally tracked it down, not at my local Zellers, but at a Radio Shack store in Port Elgin, Ontario.  They rarely had any, but they did have this.  This time, the B-side was a live track.  “Billy’s Got A Gun” was definitely my least favourite B-side so far.  It wasn’t my favourite song on Pyromania, and it wasn’t a good live rendition either.

Hysteria continued to spawn singles.  “Armageddon It” was yet another game-changer for me.  Walking into Zellers I could barely believe my eyes:  A picture disc 7″ single!  I’d seen 12″ picture discs before, but I didn’t even know they made them in 7″.  And best of all it was only $1 more than a regular single.  I ran home with my prize, but puzzled over the B-side.  It didn’t appear to be even by Def Leppard.  The song was called “Release Me” and it was performed by Stumpus Maximus and the Good Ol’ Boys.

The notes on the flip side of the disc indicated that never in their travels had Def Leppard come across a talent as great as Stumpus Maximus.  And there was a picture of him.  A bald bearded man balancing a hat on his nose, with a backing band sillouetted behind him.

I cautiously played the single.  The strains of the Engleburt Humperdinck cover poured out of my tinny, shitty equipment.  It wasn’t even good!  This sucked!  Then it got weird.  Stumpus started screaming the lyrics in the most gutteral scream I’ve ever heard.  I’m telling you people he made Mike Patton sound sane.  Stopping, burping, and picking it up again, Stumpus screamed all the way to the end.

I got the joke.  But who was Stumpus?  I noticed right away that the sillouette of Stumpus’ backing band matched a photo of Def Leppard on the previous single.  A reading of the very long and small liner notes on the Hysteria album revealed that Stumpus Maximus was their roadie – real name Malvin Mortimer.

Hysteria was not dead yet.  There was one more single to be had, and once again I picked it up in a 4 song cassette format.  This single was “Rocket” which was presented in both remixed and extended remixed forms.  The other two songs were live versions of “Women” (taken from the Def Leppard home video) and “Rock of Ages”.  These versions were better than “Billy’s Got A Gun”, but I had a pretty clear idea that Def Leppard were not a great live band.

“Rock of Ages” however contained a little surprise.  This extended live take included a medley of rock and roll classics right in the middle of the song!  Def Leppard performed the most memorable moments of “Not Fade Away”, “Radar Love”, “Whole Lotta Love”, “My Generation”, and “Come Together”, changing the melodies and riffs slightly to meld seamlessly into “Rock of Ages”.  I gotta tell you people, it’s a fucking brilliant version.  Hunt it down.  Do what you have to do.  You’re listening to the tune thinking, “I know this part, what the fuck is it?”  And then you realize it’s “Come Together”.  It’s really cool.

That was the last of the singles off Hysteria.  It would be years before my Def Leppard collection would pick up again.  Sadly Steve Clarke died in January of 1991 — the first of my heroes to go.

So I’ll dedicate the blog to Steve, whose band Def Leppard is really responsible for why I have more CDs in my house than dollars in my bank account.

Part 2: Gimme an R!

RECORD STORE TALES Part 2:  Gimme an R!

When I was growing up in Kitchener, you had only a few choices of who it was OK to listen to. In 1984, your status depended on your listening choices.

Quiet Riot and Twisted Sister were both “finished” by that point, if you liked them you were not cool anymore. Kiss were kind of cool, but only if you only liked their newest album. The stuff with makeup was “lame” and “old fashioned”.  Van Halen were passé by the time David Lee Roth did “California Girls”.  Judas Priest was OK, but the singer had short hair. And Ozzy?  He scared us.  Even then we couldn’t understand a word he said, plus he looked like a monster on his records.

Your only real choices were: Iron Maiden, W.A.S.P., or Helix.

And no matter who you were into primarily, everybody liked Helix. Why? Well, mainly because Brian Vollmer lived on Breckenridge Drive. I could probably see his place from my parents’ bedroom window.

Fritz (Helix) and LeBrain

Fritz (Helix) and LeBrain

All the kids who lived on Breckenridge, like Ian Johnson, would always tell stories about Brian, who lived three doors down. Brian’s got a cool car, he’d say. Brian got a Christmas card from W.A.S.P., and it was so fucked up…something about “Slashing through the toes, in a one horse open slay…” But then again, Ian Johnson also told us he knew George Lucas and he a squad of ninjas who had a secret base in his basement.

Ian Johnson did not have a basement.

So, Helix were the band you had to like. But the stories of Brian Vollmer and his bandmates were considered heresay at best. I had never actually seen Brian in the flesh. He was considered a legend, a myth, like Loch Ness or Sasquatch. Ian, after all, couldn’t be trusted.

Well, fast forward two decades, and now Helix is now a rock institution. They keep truckin on, with new members and new records, but Brian Vollmer is still at the helm, proudly still asking us to give him an R.

Of course, in this day and age, everybody has a website, and an email. The first time I ever wrote to Brian a few years ago, I asked him if he did indeed live on Breckenridge. He confirmed for me that he did, with his first wife, during the early 80’s. Ian told the truth! (I never did email George Lucas to find out about that part of the story.)

Hell, just last night I was surfing http://www.planethelix.com and saw the very Christmas card from W.A.S.P. “Slashing through the toes”. Brian had scanned it and added it to the memorabilia on his site.

Every time you went to the grocery store in 1984 or 85, you’d take a second look at all the long haired guys. I swore I saw Brent Doerner buying soda at Zerhs, but I lost him in the crowd.  Or was it Brian Doerner?

Again, fast forward a few years. When the movie “Fubar” came out, Sum 41 contributed a version of “Rock You” to the soundtrack. I was working at the record store, and a gentleman came in and asked if he could listen to it. He used to be in Helix, you see, and wanted to hear Sum 41’s version. It was Brian Doerner, Helix’s drummer in the late 70’s and early 80’s. Brent’s twin brother. The Doerners are very distinct looking, I should have recognized him immediately. I of course identified myself as a big fan, and we had a nice chat. Brian Doerner turned out to be the nicest guy.

I saw Helix in 1987 and again in 1996, and again from the second row in 2006 (opening for Alice!), and a bunch of times in 2007. They were great every time.  It’s funny because I can’t think of too many kids in the 8th grade who still proudly listen to the same music then as they do now.  They’re all probably embarrassed that they used to listen to Mr. Mister, or Boy George.  I don’t mind boasting that I was never into the trends.  I knew what I liked then, I know what I like now, and although my tastes have grown and expanded tremendously, I never felt embarrassed by my roots.  I still love Maiden, I still love Helix, more now than then.

I remember when Paul Hackman was killed in 1992. It was the total Cliff Burton accident; he was thrown from the tour bus in a crash. My friend Mike McNeill was in a band opening for Helix at the time, he was there.  When we first met in my record store, that’s one of the first topics that came up:  Helix!

Playing the albums today, you can hear that so many of them are solid all the way through. The first two, Breaking Loose and White Lace & Black Leather have that 70’s sound, as only an indi band in 1978 could sound. I think those albums probably only sold about 2000 copies each at the time. But they are solid, the band was writing varied music. And they were always superb musicians. Brent Doerner’s a really talented guitar player, with an amazing stage presence.

“Billy Oxygen” from the very first record , aptly titled Breaking Loose, is a marvel.  Drums:  Brian Doener.  Fast, accurate, and hard, like a good jazz drummer.  Bass solo courtesy of Keith “Burt” Zurbrigg.  Brent Doener took the lead vocal on this, a song he wrote and garner the band some of their first airplay.  The lyrics seemed to be about a spaceman named Billy Oxygen, who went to other planets looking for people to party with.  Not exactly Arthur C. Clarke-ian, but to a me, any sci-fi reference in a song was cool.  (That’s why we older rock fans love Savatage, those silly Trekkies.)

When I was in University I tried my hand at bad, bad science fiction short stories.  Suffice to say, none of it survives today with good reason.  However, Helix had a little moment in my fiction:  My spaceship was called an ES-335, named after Billy Oxygen’s ship in the song.  And only a little while ago did I learn that ES-335 wasn’t the name of a spaceship at all.   An ES-335 was a Gibson guitar.

There were other science fiction moments in Helix songs as well. “Wish I Could Be There”, from the same album, is one such song.  It’s about a guy who dreams of going to space.  That song represents their epic, their “Stairway to Heaven”.   “Time for a Change” from the second album spoke of nuclear war, if we do not change our ways, a common theme in the sci-fi of the era.

I should clarify, however, that we didn’t even know about these first albums back in 1984.  The earliest song we knew was “Heavy Metal Love”, and even that was pretty new.  We were vaguely aware that they had existed before 1984, but we didn’t know for sure because there were no music videos before that, and those records were out of print.  You couldn’t walk into Sam The Record Man and ask Al King for them.

Occasionally we would hear rumours.  Usually these “little known facts” would come from that one uncle that everyone had, the one who wore no shirt, watched a lot of football, and had a handlebar moustache.  Usually this stereotypical uncle would say, “Yeah, Helix have been around a long time, like 20 years, I saw them when they were still a country band.  My buddy was in the band too.”

Some nights I sat up in a sweat about this.  A country band?  Helix?  Sure, I didn’t hate country music, my dad played that Johnny Cash stuff and it’s alright.  (I even saw Johnny Cash live in ’83, before I ever heard of Helix.) But Helix were rockers!  Rockers were about breaking loose!  They sang about their heavy metal loves!  They told us not to do what people tell you to do, and to always be yourself!  If a bunch of country guys were now posing as rockers to make a buck, well, that would be a black mark on Rock N’ Roll.  Why?  Because it would prove that our dads were right:  Rockers were just in it for the money.  If we couldn’t trust Helix, you couldn’t trust any of them.  Especially W.A.S.P.

We didn’t speak of these things often.  It was bad to speak of these things.  But each of us dreamed—nightmared—about finding a copy of an early Helix album in our uncles’ musty collections.  And in the dream, there they were always on the cover.  A black and white photo.  And they’re wearing cowboy hats.

It never came to that.  When their first two albums, Breaking Loose and White Lace & Black Leather, were finally issued on CD in 1992, they sounded pretty damn good.  It’s classic rock, but harder, much harder.  And best of all, it sounds like home.  Everything about those two albums sounds like right here.  If I played them for you, you’d hear nothing.  But to me, I can’t understand how nobody else can hear that these albums were born right here in Kitchener,Ontario.

Brian Vollmer and I, back in in 2007 at Planet Helix!

Brian Vollmer and I, back in in 2007 at Planet Helix!

The kids from Kitchener 1984 didn’t hear about Helix until MuchMusic started throwing “Rock You” into heavy rotation.  The song was everything we needed at the time.  It was catchy, yet you and your tone deaf friends could all chant it.  Hey, maybe that’s the same reason hip-hop is popular today?

The video for “Rock You” was equally cool.  There were whips, chains, nearly naked girls, leather, guitars, and fire.  The best part of the video was when Brent Doerner comes out of the water with his Les Paul screaming the guitar solo.  And then your friends would debate:  “Could that guy really play under water?”  “No way man, he’d get electrocuted!”  “Are you sure?  That looked awesome though.”  It was catchy, but you could still be a tough guy if you liked this band, because clearly they got lots of girls.

Come to think of it, Helix seemed to get lots of girls.  There were girls in every single video that we had seen!  Granted, the one in “(Make Me Do) Anything You Want” was doing ballet and stuff, but she was still alright.

Oh, and by the way, Ian Johnson also took credit for the “Gimme Gimme Good Lovin'” video.  He said, and I quote because I will never forget this, “Yeah, that was my idea.  I told Brian that he should make a video with a lot of girls in it.  So, he did.”

But then again, Ian Johnson also said that he wrote the Disney movie “Bambi”.

But that, dear friends, is another story.

Part 1: The Beginning – “Run to the Hills”

 

RECORD STORE TALES PART 1:  The Beginning – “Run To The Hills”

I still remember the first time I heard Iron Maiden.

Maybe it’s this way for some when they remember the first time they heard the Beatles, or the Stones. Or for those younger, maybe it’s like the first time they heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or “Fake Plastic Trees”. The first time I heard “Run To The Hills” was monumental to me, but I didn’t realize yet what the massive impact would be.

It was Christmas of 1984. I was a mere 12 year old looking for musical direction.  I hadn’t been much interested in music prior to that.  I had albums by Quiet Riot and Styx, but my majority of my collection was John Williams’ movie soundtracks.

I really wasn’t interested in music yet. I had yet to dedicate myself to any particular style. At the same time that I would listen to Quiet Riot, I somehow also thought Billy Ocean was cool.

Well, the video for “Loverboy” was nifty….

I had always been kinda afraid of heavy metal bands.  Guys that wore spikes, like Judas Priest or Iron Maiden. Kiss literally scared me when I was buying my first comics (there were always ads for Kiss posters inside comic books), and I know I wasn’t the only one. The neighbor kid was scared to death of Gene Simmons spitting up blood. Bands like Maiden and Priest looked like a bunch of hooligans, definitely up to no good, definitely out to hurt people, including kids.

Boxing Day, Bob came over. It was tradition, every Boxing Day, Bob and I would get together and compare our Christmas scores. Bob scored a cassette tape called Masters Of Metal Volume 2 and I was given an Atari game called Snoopy Vs. The Red Baron.

In my basement, we sat down to play the video game. Our goal was to take the game as far as humanly possible, to see what happened when you shot down so many planes that the Atari didn’t have enough characters to display it anymore. (Incidentally, disappointingly, like most Atari games, it just starts counting up from zero again.) We sat there playing that game so long that Bob had to go home and eat lunch, then come back. But what he left behind while eating was Masters Of Metal.

“Run To The Hills” came on. Some people speak of moments of clarity: That was my moment. The music was fast, powerful, dramatic and melodic. The lyrics were cool and you could mostly sing along. Most importantly, the music and lyrics seemed to combine with the game experience. When Dickinson was singing “Run to the hills, run for your lives!” it meshed perfectly!  Too bad Aces High wasn’t out yet!

A moment like that could quickly pass into history and be forgotten for most people.  As the day wore on, I realized that I had found something. This music kicked ass!  I was brought up on movie soundtracks.  This stuff had the same drama, but with guitars!   This was even better than Quiet Riot and AC/DC, so I said at the time.

It didn’t end there of course. We played through Masters Of Metal, finding a few more diamonds. “You’ve Got Another Thing Coming” By Judas Priest was definitely a close second to “Run To The Hills”. We were fixated on Accept’s “Balls To The Wall”.  We’d play it over and over again laughing hysterically at the lyrics.  But the song still rocked!  I can still remember when MuchMusic started the Power Hour, and they played that video.  There’s little Udo Dirkscheider, in his camo pants, and crew cut, rocking with these skinny German guys with long hair.  It was fucking hilarious!

We skipped (what we then thought was) the crap…Lee Aaron, Anvil, Triumph.  I grew into them later, particularly Triumph.  Something to do with double guitars, maybe.  I digress.  We always came back to Iron Maiden.  Always.

Bob would bring other tapes over as the months and years went by. W.A.S.P., Motley Crue, Black Sabbath. Now Bob’s a father of four who doesn’t listen to rock music anymore, which makes me sad in a way.  I’m not sad for him, because he’s got a great family and always has.  I’m more sad because I don’t think he can ever appreciate what impact our shared experiece of rocking out had on me.  Listening to Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, and the rest.  The was it, the beginning.