music

#528: The Ratings System

GETTING MORE TALE #528: The Ratings System

You like reading music reviews. You read them for information and entertainment. You can’t get enough music reviews!

But what formats do you like? Perhaps you enjoy a meaty, detailed review with all the nitty gritty details. Some get bored with length, and just want a quick n’ dirty summary. This is why we tried the #200wordchallenge, and why Aaron at KeepsMeAlive enjoys the old-fashioned 80 word “hit and run” style from time to time. And others, such as our friends at 1001AlbumsIn10Years, are skilled at metaphors, and have added innovative graphics and charts to album reviews.

All of these techniques are valid, and the more unique and individual reviews certainly deserve praise for breathing fresh life into an ages-old format. But what about a numeric ratings system?

Some kind of rating is pretty standard for music reviews. Rolling Stone magazine uses a five-star system. So does Allmusic and NME, but Spin magazine uses a 10 point system. These allow a reader to very quickly see if a writer thought an album was any good, without having to actually read anything!

Here at mikeladano.com, we use a loose 5 star system. This originated at Amazon, where products must always be rated from 1-5 stars. Most of our earliest reviews here began life at Amazon, before they were expanded and modified for your edification. Because of this, we imported and have continued with an Amazon-like 5 star system.

Even this is limiting, so we have allowed fractions – you will see many 3.5/5 star reviews here. This essentially makes it a 10 point system like Spin’s.

But it’s not an exact science and that’s where we get into trouble.

It’s fairly easy to listen to an album a few times and decide on a number rating that feels right. A 5/5 feels like a near-perfect listening experience. A 4.5/5 might have some perceived flaws. But when you get into seriously comparing and stacking albums up against each other, the differences can be felt.  It’s also worth noting that a 5/5 star jazz album and a 5/5 star Kiss album are going to be wildly different from each other.  It’s all in the ear of the beholder.

Taken individually, ratings usually hold up. When compared amongst a band’s entire discography, things get dicey. Our series of Iron Maiden reviews was one such example. They have so many great albums – amazing albums, in fact – that it is quite easy to lay down 5/5 stars to much of their discography. But this ignores minor different degrees of rock excellence. Iron Maiden’s Rock In Rio is excellent. It is a rollicking heavy metal journey exploring Maiden’s history up to 2001. But is it as good as Live After Death? No. Very few things are. Both could easily have received a 5/5 rating, but we chose to lower Rock In Rio to 4.5/5 stars to keep everything in perspective.

Down these roads lead madness. We have even done a 4.999/5 star review.

If you review 1000 albums on a scale out of 5, you could quickly build up enough fractional ratings to necessitate three decimal places. But that complicates things needlessly. Wasn’t the numerical rating system supposed to be a quick and easy way to say if it’s good or not?  We have done 6/5 star reviews, reviews in negative numbers; we’ve done everything imaginable to try to keep ratings in scale.  Ultimately it is simply not possible.  Like finding an electron in a cloud, you just cannot pinpoint album ratings to that degree of precision.

A numerical rating can also paint you into a corner. There was some Facebook controversy recently over our assertion that Motley Crue’s self titled 1994 was one of the best albums of the 90’s, killing much of the competition. This led to challenges and comparisons with other albums of the period, all great records. How do you rate something “the best” over a bunch of other 5/5 star albums? And how do you know that you will still feel that something is “the best” when you think about it again next month? Putting a numerical rating on an album is like putting it into stone, and that can be limiting, especially when comparing.

We’ve been utilizing the 5 star system (with fractions) for close to five years now. We could stop, but at this point I don’t think it would help. For better or for worse, our bed is now made. And it’s 5/5 stars.

#526: Location, Location, Location

GETTING MORE TALE #526: Location, Location, Location

I worked at many Record Store locations over the years, often temporarily for training and managing.  Some of them I spent a few days at, others were several weeks or months in total.  Each one had its own flavour and clientele.  While experiences and mileage may vary, here are some memories of some favourite locations (all in Ontario, Canada).

 

cambridge1. Cambridge

The store in Cambridge was our first to carry movies, initially in VHS format.  It was a lot of fun working there from time to time, buying and selling used movies.  There was always something I wanted for my collection, and it broke up the monotony of seeing nothing but CDs every day.

Cambridge was also interesting because we used to get a number of people coming in just to ask where the strip club was.  “It used to be around here!”  I don’t know why the dudes looking for the strip club kept stopping in the Record Store (as opposed to the Tim Hortons or a gas station or anywhere else), but they did indeed used to ask.

Some of the customers in Cambridge were…well, let’s just say they were not all our best and brightest.  T-Rev managed that store, and I took over temporarily when he was on road trips elsewhere setting up new stores.  The customers there wore me down more than anywhere else.  Especially when they came in to sell, which was frequently.  Cambridge bought a lot of stock.  If the customer wasn’t happy with my offer, they’d ask when the “regular guy” would be back.  Maddening since I was more generous than a lot of other folks.

There was one customer in Cambridge who hated selling to me, he always asked where “the regular guy” was.  He asked my name and I told him it was Sanchez.  When T-Rev came back, we had a laugh over the employee named “Sanchez” who was apparently low-balling this customer for his dance CDs.

 

hamilton2. Hamilton

The store I worked at in Hamilton was pretty quiet most of the time.  There was a lunch time rush when kids from the nearby highschool would come in to listen to and occasionally buy CDs.  Given Steeltown’s reputation, I was pleasantly surprised to find the kids I dealt with to be polite and friendly, more than I was used to seeing.  The adults weren’t always so friendly, but no more or less than any of the other stores I worked in.  Hamilton was a shitty place to drive (confusing one-way streets), but I didn’t mind working there at all.

 

kitchener3. Kitchener

I worked in three different stores in the Kitchener area.  One of the other guys there used to refer to Kitchener as a “ham & egger” town, a phrase I never heard before.  A lot of blue collar customers.  It was still a step up from Cambridge, depending on which Kitchener location I was working in.

I’ve said many times that my favourite store was the original one, in a small mall in Kitchener.  It was our only mall store ever.  It was a special place to work.  It was tiny and compact.  It could get really busy on the weekends.  There were a lot of regular customers, more than I remember elsewhere, probably due to the fact we were in a mall.  There was a familiarity – I knew them, and they knew me.  When I was eventually given a larger store elsewhere to manager, I missed the faces I would see on a regular basis at the mall.

I also missed the “unique” individuals you’d meet at the mall store.  Malls have a whole ecosystem of life forms, unlike others in the outside world.  There was Johnny Walker, so named because every day he would walk the circuit around the mall, talking to himself, all day.  One day, something peculiar happened.  He came in, stopped talking to himself, and bought a tape.  He paid for his cassette and then resumed walking and talking to himself again.  I only saw that happen once.  There was Butts, the guy who would dig through ashtrays looking for cigarette butts.  Let’s not forget Trevor the Security Guard, and the drunks at the restaurant next door.  It was a blast!  I didn’t care for the mallrats, but they were a minor annoyance.

 

oakville4. Oakville

I did not like working on Oakville, as was discussed in Record Store Tales Part 16: Travelling Man.  Many of those customers were snooty; just too good for you.  They felt entitled to park in the fire lane, because they were more important than you.  Read the Oakville tale for the misery that was working there.

 

mississauga

5. Mississauga

More than any other location, I may have resented Mississauga the most.  It was a shit location.  There was nothing of any value around.  There was a health products store, but nowhere to buy a snack or a lunch.  There was no foot traffic.  Across the street was an empty field.  It was a dead store from the day it opened.  I invested myself deeply in my work.  There are many things in life that can crush your soul.  One of them is working hard at something (training employees, helping set up a store) and seeing it come up to nothing.  That was Mississauga.  In the used CD business, you depend on customers bringing in good stuff for you to re-sell.  Mississauga provided very little good stuff.

 

There were more, all with tales of their own.   These however were five of the most memorable, each for its own reasons.  While a change of scenery is nice once in a while, there is nothing better than working in a location you love.

 

#523: Columbia House

GETTING MORE TALE #523: Columbia House

How many of you were members of the Columbia House music club?  Tapes or CDs?

The concept was simple.  Get 12 tapes or records for one penny.  Then agree to buy “X” more at “regular club prices” within a year.  They would usually offer all sorts of incentives, such as getting your first regularly priced item for half price.  Their “regular club prices” were fairly high, but if you played your cards right you could make joining the club worthwhile.

Every few weeks after signing up, Columbia House would send you a catalogue and an order form.  The order system was controversial, because it required a negative response if you didn’t want to buy something.  When you signed up, you could pick your favourite genre of music (I chose “metal”).  Each time a catalogue came out, your selected genre would have a “selection of the month”, usually a new release but not always.   If you did not respond with an order form expressing that you didn’t want it, they would automatically mail you the “selection of the month” and bill you for it too.  (The Columbia Record Club system was worked into a sub-plot of the movie A Serious Man by the Coen Brothers.)

For many people this wasn’t a problem.  Our parents let my sister and I sign up when I was in grade 11.  We split the membership and free tapes 50/50.  We paid for everything ourselves and diligently sent in our order forms each time.  We were both already massive music fans, so we poured over every single page.  Most times, one of us ended up buying something, if not the selection of the month itself.

I can still remember every album I received in that first shipment. Seven tapes.  These tapes went into immediate and constant rotation, which is why I remember them all so well today.

  1. Leatherwolf – Leatherwolf
  2. Motley Crue – Girls, Girls, Girls
  3. Hurricane – Over the Edge
  4. Stryper – To Hell With the Devil
  5. Stryper – In God We Trust
  6. White Lion – Pride
  7. Sammy Hagar – VOA

Our musical world opened up in a massive way, and not just because of the new music we were listening to.  The catalogues introduced us to names and album covers that we’d not experienced yet.  What is this Bitches Brew thing?  Why did Deep Purple albums have so few songs?  Did Iron Maiden copy their Maiden Japan from Purple’s Made In Japan?  Holy crap, Hank Williams Jr. has three greatest hits albums?

Everything was absorbed.  Five years later, when I started at the Record Store, my boss was surprised that I knew who most of the artists were, what sections they should go in, and even what record labels they were on.

“I read the Columbia House catalogue cover to cover every month,” was my answer!

The catalogue provided knowledge, and pictures to cut out for locker or wall.  We made the most of that catalogue every time.  It was rare when pictures were not cut out!

I was even able to acquire things that might have been considered rarities back then.  I had never seen Leatherwolf stocked in a store, but Columbia House had it.  When vinyl was being discontinued, I was still able to get Skid Row’s Slave to the Grind (1991) on LP.  They had most of the Savatage albums.

It all sounds wonderful, but Columbia House had flaws too.  The biggest one was horrendous quality control.  They licensed and manufactured the tapes themselves, which were simply not as good quality wise as the ones you could find in a store.  They would be warbling within weeks (if not right out of the case) and the J-cards were sometimes shoddy, with printing not lining up with fold lines, or just they’d just start falling apart along perforations.  They also didn’t carry certain record labels.  While they had everything Warner Bros and Columbia Records, they had nothing from EMI.  Finally, bands made next to nothing on albums that were sold through Columbia House.  Some bands such as the Tragically Hip refused to sell their music via Columbia House.  We didn’t know all of this as kids, of course.  I started to pick up on the quality issues when they seemed to take a serious dive around 1991.

The key to not getting ripped off by Columbia House was to order smart.  The 12 free tapes sounds like a great deal, but when you balance in buying the rest of your selections at full price, most people ended up on the losing side.  Get in and get out, buying the bare minimum.  That was the way to do it.  Of course, we didn’t.  We just enjoyed the convenience and stayed members for years!  No regrets since this led directly to a 12 year career in the Record Store!

#522: Smells Like Tim McGraw

GETTING MORE TALE #522: Smells Like Tim McGraw

Music fans can buy just about anything with their favourite band’s name on it.  While Elvis merchandise and the onslaught of Beatlemania stuff makes for fun collectibles, Kiss really blasted things into overdrive, for better or for worse.  Growing up in the late 70s and early 80s, we were inundated with Kiss.  Neighbors on our street had Kiss cards, the Kiss remote control van,  Kiss comics, Kiss posters, books about Kiss and more.  You could buy Kiss dolls.  Kiss Your Face makeup.  Everything!  At the time Kiss were heavily criticized for their merchandising.  Paul and Gene defended it by saying, ‘if our fans want to buy a Kiss hat, then why shouldn’t they be able to buy one?’  Turns out their fans wanted to buy a lot more including cars and coffins!

Now the merchandise door is wide open.  Everybody has dolls; my sister had some wretched New Kids on the Block dolls.  I have a friend who owns the Spice Girls.  I myself own Johnny Cash, Alice Cooper and Ozzy Osbourne.  Today, music celebrities have their own alcohol, such as Motley Brue or The Trooper beer.  Rock stars even have their own hot sauces.  I was a proud owner of Joe Perry’s Boneyard Brew.  (I’ve never been able to find Michael Anthony’s Mad Anthony sauce.)  I often like to picture Joe Perry hard at work over a boiling pot, mixing specially selected peppers and spices until he finally came up with his own Boneyard Brew.  It’s not impossible, although it is unlikely.

What is very highly unlikely is that Justin Bieber studied perfume chemistry to come up with his own scent, “Girlfriend”.

It seems perfumes and colognes are the latest hot trend in celebrity endorsements.    We are not so naive to think that the stars have anything to all to do with their own perfumes, but look at the list below.  (Courtesy once again of Uncle John’s calendar.)  Taylor Swift and Beyoncé don’t surprise me, but I didn’t know Tim McGraw had his own scent (“Southern Blend”).  Check out some of the interesting names below.

scan_20160922

Who knew Carlos Santana had a scent called “Carlos Santana”?  I wonder who came up with that clever name?  (Whoever they are, they probably make more money than us.) Even Kiss have a cologne, called “KISS Him for Men”. Kiss sell aftershaves and deodorants too. But we can’t blame Kiss for this trend, can we?  This one is on the shoulders of Hollywood.

The first celebrity scent was “Sophia” by Sophia Lauren, in 1981. The Italian film icon’s perfume was released by Coty who work with just about every major celebrity today. That’s not the interesting part. What is interesting is that we might be able to blame Gene Simmons just a little bit for the first music celebrity scent. After all, it was his ex-girlfriend Cher who was the first music star to enter the perfume world. Her scent “Uninhibited” was the first for a music performer. Did her ex-boyfriend’s merchandising ways have anything to do with this? The truth is, probably not — but it’s fun to blame Gene anyway.

With the reigning queens of pop like Katy (“Killer Queen” and “Purr”) and Gaga (“Fame for Women”), not to mention the boy-throbs like One Direction (“Our Moment for Women”), it is likely that music perfumes and colognes will remain big business for years to come.

#520: Musical Firsts

GETTING MORE TALE #520: Musical Firsts

What are your “musical firsts”?  Here are mine!  Let’s start with concerts.

  • First concert: Johnny Cash (1983)
  • First highschool concert:  Free Fare (1986)
  • First rock concert:  Helix (1987)

Who remembers Free Fare?  They billed themselves as “the band from Florida” (there was only one?) and toured highschools all over the US and Canada.  They played Grand River Collegiate in my grade nine year, performing popular covers and giving away Free Fare bandanas.

FREE FARE

 

How about your first musical instruments?

  • First instrument played – bass guitar
  • First instrument bought – electric guitar
  • First instrument smashed – the same electric guitar, smashed by my sister

 

Finally I’m sure you all remember your first albums.  Here are mine:

 

Leave a comment with some of your memorable musical firsts!

#519: Mistakes I Made Fixing Broken Tapes

GETTING MORE TALE #519: Mistakes I Made Fixing Broken Tapes

I used to play cassette tapes almost exclusively. Even when I had started growing a CD collection, my cassettes dominated. Why? They were portable. I could record a CD or LP on them, put them in my Walkman, or play them in the car. I didn’t have a good way of doing that with CDs. Plus, you could record a CD to a good quality blank tape, and make a better copy than if you bought it on a pre-recorded manufactured release.

But tapes break. They wear. They get old. There were ways of fixing them, which I sometimes screwed up gloriously. What mistakes did I make?

MISTAKE #1: Dirty hands

You shouldn’t even try to fix a tape with dirty hands. Any time I opened one up to splice or carefully wind the tape on the spools, I was touching them with my unclean, ungloved hands. This deposited dirt and oil on the tape, deteriorating the sound and then transferring that dirt and oil to my tape heads.

MISTAKE #2: Magnetized screwdriver

Here’s another no-brainer that I missed. I had a cool little screwdriver that was magnetized. It was hard to lose those little screws with one of those, since they stuck to the screwdriver. Brilliant way to keep all those little screws from disappearing, but not good for tapes!

I wondered why a lot of my tapes had drop-outs in the sound. Many could have been caused by my favourite screwdriver while trying to fix them. This is common sense but I didn’t think my little screwdriver could possibly do any harm!

MISTAKE #3: Incorrect reassembly

Putting the tape back together is sometimes harder than it looks. Small parts pop out and sometimes it’s tricky to get them back in correctly. The slip sheet – a little piece of plastic inside the tape shell – helps reduce friction and squeal, but only if you put it back in with the slippery side facing the tape spool. When hastily reassembling tapes, I sometimes put the sheet in the wrong way causing slowdowns and noise.

Another critical part is the pressure pad. This applies light pressure on the tape to keep it against the player’s tape head. These pieces were tiny and sometimes popped out of place. There were some tapes I put back together with this piece improperly inserted. The lack of pressure on the tape reduced the sound quality greatly.

push-pad

MISTAKE #4: Splicing with Scotch tape

I spliced successfully with Scotch tape…but only in the short term. As the Scotch tape ages, the stickiness reduces and becomes slimy. This means in time and with a few plays, a careful splice would break. You don’t want to get any of that stinky gunk in your tape deck, so use proper splicing tape. They used to sell it commonly at places like Radio Shack, but I came from a cheap family that used whatever was available. Hence my tapes were spliced with Scotch.

MISTAKE #5: Butter fingers

It’s tricky getting all the tape wound around the right spools and ready to screw back together. Sometimes – quite often actually – I would struggle with this and inevitably crunch the tape between parts of the shell. Once you crunch or crease the magnetic tape, you’re going to hear an audio problem.

I didn’t wreck every tape that I tried to fix, but I did make these mistakes periodically. No wonder my tapes sounded like crap.

#517: Science!

“Science is a tool of the mind.  With it one can open more doors than with the bare hands alone.” – Mr. Branday, Grand River High School, 1986

Getting More Tale #517:  Science!

Never underestimate the power of science.  Without science, we would not have the electric guitar.  Science allows us to analyse wavelengths and wires and figure out why a piano sounds so good.  With the tools of science, we can examine how music effects the human brain.  With science, we can battle ignorance!

That in mind, here are some interesting science facts that we gleaned from the September 2015 issue of Discover magazine, in an article by Jim Sullivan.

You might wonder how singers like Paul Stanley or Freddie Mercury managed to sound as incredible as they did.  It was the result of many factors, but both Paul and Freddie had strong vocal cords.  The muscles in the vocal tissues do the work.  Great singers have incredible control over these muscles, and take good care of them.  They work by increasing and decreasing air resistance, by opening and closing.  The compression and decompression of air creates waves…sound waves!  Now think about the range of sound that the human voice can produce.  It’s a very wide spectrum of sounds.  Think about the complexity of those muscles and the nerves that control them!  Get this — there are a few throat singers who are able to create up to four notes simultaneously!

Freddie Mercury was also probably dominated by the right side of his brain.  Current theories state that singing is mostly controlled by the right, while language is in the left.  Possible evidence of this can be found in some stroke victims.  Some cannot speak, but can still sing.  Another example that I remember from my childhood is country singer Mel Tillis.  He was in a Burt Reynolds comedy, Cannonball Run.  A young 10 year old me liked his character because he talked funny:  he had a stutter.  My dad told me, “He has that stutter in real life.  He has a really hard time speaking, but he can sing like a bird.”  I couldn’t believe it.  My dad told me an old story, that Mel Tillis was talking on the phone with somebody and just couldn’t speak.  His stutter was so bad that he couldn’t finish a sentence.  So instead he began singing.  Isn’t that a fascinating story?

How about volume?  Well, it turns out that the average human speaking voice is about 60 decibels.  According to the Guinness Book, there’s a lady in England named Jill Drake who can scream at 129 decibels.  That’s about the same levels measured at an AC/DC concert.  Perhaps Jill Drake should consider auditioning for the lead singer job in that band!

Singing is a special talent, and I’m not very good.  I have poor control and I’m constantly flat or sharp.  Why is this?  Is it my vocal cords?  According to another Discover article by James Dziezynski from July 2014, not really.  A study showed that it’s probably the brain.  The condition is called imitative deficit, and if you’re a bad singer like me, you probably have it. Essentially, our brains can hear and identify a note correctly. When we try to move our vocal cords to hit that same note, we can’t. The brain’s signals get scrambled. It consistently commands the vocal cords to hit a different note, no matter how hard we struggle with it. However, all is not lost. Like anything else, you can re-wire your brain with practice. Lots of practice, preferably with guidance.

This is heartening to know. There is hope, even for a talentless schmuck like me! Thank you, science.

#515: Dye, Dye My Darling

GETTING MORE TALE #515: Dye, Dye My Darling

Have you ever wondered how a CD-R burner works?

It’s quite complicated actually, but the basic idea is that data is encoded in binary “pits” and “land”.  If you recall your grade 10 math, binary allows you to record any data in ones and zeros.  In the CD world, this translates to “pits” and “land”.  Think of the pits as zeros, and the land as ones.  When you burn a CD at home, musical data is encoded with a laser.  The laser doesn’t actually etch the plastic or metal layers of a disc.  Instead, it burns the data into a layer of dye.  It is this dye that gives a blank CD its typical colours.  Once this information is properly encoded onto the blank CD, you can then play it on most household disc players.  But they don’t last forever.  The colour of the disc can be a clue how much life it has.  It can help indicate what dye was used in manufacturing.

  1. Cyanine dye (green)

These are the earliest blanks made, with a layer of dye that was also UV sensitive.  Unfortunately this meant that your CD could be destroyed by exposing it to direct sunlight.  The dyes were improved to make them more stable, but many people had their data destroyed simply by leaving the disc out, playing side up, where sunlight could get to it.

  1. Phthalocyanine (gold, silver, light green)

A more stable form of dye.  You’d have to leave your CD out in sunlight for two weeks to destroy it.  Unfortunately phthalocyanine dyes are more sensitive to the writing laser, and these discs required some technical advances to make for a good recording.

  1. Azo (dark blue)

Rated for a storage lifetime of decades.  More stable than the other two dyes.  It would take a month of sunlight to destroy an azo-based disc.  Also capable of faster writing speeds than other dyes.

Because it would have been easy to look at a green CD and say, “Nope, I’m not buying this one,” disc manufacturers tricked you by adding other colours to the dyes.   But the type of dye is only one factor in how good your CD sounds and how long it lasts.  A CD is like a sandwich made of plastic with layers in between where the data is stored.  Poorly manufactured CD-Rs allow moisture to seep in between the layers and destroy the disc.  And of course the quality of the burner is also critical to a good sounding CD-R.  And be careful if you’re labelling your disc with a marker.  Sometimes solvents from markers can react with the dyes.

In very rare cases, CDs and even DVDs have been known to explode during burning, according to a New York Times article from 2004.  It happened when a disc was spun too quickly, probably as a result of heat from the burning laser combined with centrifugal force.  This is why the upper limit for burning a CD is 56x.  Go faster than that and your music could go BOOM (and not in a good way).

A re-writable CD is different still from a dye-based CD-R.  A CD-RW (which can be re-written thousands of times) uses a metal alloy layer that is physically liquefied by the laser.  It’s crystalline before burning, but less reflective after burning.  Therefore a CD-RW has pits and lands made of more and less reflective spots on the disc.  And if you don’t like it, you can start all over again.  The laser re-heats the alloy, restoring it to its crystalline reflective state.

It’s all very technical and interesting, but how often do you record a CD today?   Though burning a CD will always be a pastime for many music fans, the majority have happily moved on to easier and quicker flash storage.  Is that as fascinating as a laser etching your music onto a disc?  No, but however you handle your music collection is up to you.

#514: Infinite Dreams

ESCHER

Do you ever have recurring dreams?

I sure do, like they’re going out of style – always have.  I used to, and still have, a number of the classic Freudian recurring dreams:  Teeth falling out, being unable to speak, or even see.  They were usually quite upsetting.  Freud believed that many of these recurring dreams are expressions of neurosis and compulsive behaviour and I think when it came to me, he was right!  Anxiety is suspected as a major cause of recurring dreams.  When I finally graduated school and had seen the last of essays, homework, exams and marks, I continued having anxious school dreams in a big way.  They would usually involve an exam that I had forgotten was occurring, or an essay due that day that I hadn’t started yet.  These dreams happened for years after graduation.

I thought I had “outgrown” recurring dreams, but they started again not long after quitting the Record Store.  Usually they would involve me starting there again, except as a part time employee without the responsibilities I had before.  In the dreams, I would show up at the store, except it wasn’t my old store.  In fact it wasn’t a store that existed in real life at all.  The most common dream featured a store in the mall, much larger than any I’d actually worked in.  I wouldn’t know any of the people I worked with in the dream, and they didn’t know me.

In some of the dreams, the Boss man would pop into the store, and in some, the office bully would show up, but be nice as pie, as if nothing ever happened.

If Freud was right and that all dreams are rooted in some kind of wish fulfillment, it’s clear that I missed working at the Record Store, but in an idealized way of not having responsibility or an office bully.  However, Freud also stated that in adults, dreams are self-censored and distorted and impossible to interpret alone.  Carl Jung believed that dreams were symbolic scenes and much more complex.

It’s interesting to look at these recurring dreams and try to remember the details, but ultimately it’s impossible to “figure them out” looking for some deep truth or hidden meaning.  Within these dreams, I had never forgotten how to do the job.  I jumped behind the dream-counter, helming the dream-computer and bought dream-CDs from dream-sellers.  It was exactly like the old days, with all the problems and excitement that happen when you buy used music from the public: the anticipation of seeing something so rare that the store just had to acquire it, and then the tension of buying it from the customer who wanted more for it.  It was all there, clearly remembered.

It is very interesting that these recurring dreams all but ceased after writing Record Store Tales.  Perhaps Freud’s wish fulfillment has something to do with this.  By re-living all the memories in print form, perhaps my unconscious mind realized that what my dream wishes were not at all what I wanted?

Never had a dream where I showed up at work wearing no pants, though!

#513.5: The #200wordchallenge is done!

200-word

GETTING MORE TALE #513.5: The #200wordchallenge is done!

A huge thank-you to all who participated in this #200wordchallenge!

From August 29 to September 2, writers were challenged to write music reviews by the same length rules as old print magazines: 200 words.  No more no less.  One of us even took it upon himself to take the challenge further with the old “Hit & Run” review style — a hard 80 words!   Thanks to rock journalist Mitch Lafon for the impetus for this adventure.

The end result was 30 posts by six writers!  Speaking for myself, I enjoyed the experiment.  Mitch was right:  forcing yourself to adhere to a hard 200 words does sharpen your skills.  In addition, the challenge succeeded in bringing Vinyl Connection out of retirement (for now?)  so no matter how you slice it, the #200wordchallenge has brought some good to the world.  Each writer who participated even contributed more than they originally estimated they would!  Perhaps the #200wordchallenge injected a shot of inspiration.

Be sure to visit our friends below, and check out their work.  Thanks to each of these talented folks, we had a fun week.  And a big thanks again to Mitch Lafon, a rock star in his own right.  Click below for the posts, and give them all a hand (or 200 hands)!

 

 

VINYL CONNECTION:

GOODGIRLFRIEND (Matthew Sweet – Girlfriend) 
TRANS GILMOUR EXPRESS (The Orb featuring David Gilmour – Metallic Spheres)
DEAR HERR FROESE (Tangerine Dream – Phaedra)

1001 ALBUMS IN 10 YEARS:

The Sugarcubes – Life’s Too Good
Hanoi Rocks – Back to Mystery City (1983)
Sigur Rós – Ágætis byrjun (1999)

MIKE LADANO:

Ratt – Ratt & Roll 8191
Two – Voyeurs (1998 Japanese bonus track)
Journey – Look Into the Future (1976)
REVIEW: Megadeth – Countdown to Extinction (Remixed & Remastered)

BOPPINSBLOG:

Black Sabbath (The End World Tour -Toronto 2016)
Prophets of Rage – EP
Misheard lyrics (bonus)

“HIT & RUN” 80 word reviews:

KEEPS ME ALIVE:

Aerosmith – Devil’s Got a New Disguise – The Very Best of Aerosmith
Jim Cuddy – All In Time
Jim Cuddy – Skyscraper Soul
Regina Spektor – Soviet Kitsch
Willie Nelson – The Great Divide
Willie Nelson – Countryman
Holly Golightly – Slowly But Surely
Pegi Young – Foul Deeds
54-40 – Smilin’ Buddah Cabaret
Elliott Smith – Figure 8
Trews – Acoustic: Friends And Total Strangers Deluxe Reissue
Jake Bugg – On My One
Weezer – Weezer (blue)