music

#837: Freestylin’ 7 – Into Best Buy

GETTING MORE TALE #837: Freestylin’ 7 – Into Best Buy

I hadn’t set foot inside a store since March 15.  Three months later on Jun 13, I broke this long streak and went into Best Buy.

We’ve been trying to stick to essential trips, and Mrs. LeBrain was doing the groceries and other essential shopping while I worked.  Ontario entered “Phase 2” of re-opening on June 12 so it felt like a good time to see how shopping had changed.

There was no lineup, but there were clear and nicely marked spaces for you to wait outside.  At the front was a gentleman in a mask.  Even with the mask I recognized him from a previous Best Buy excursion, back before the shit hit the fan.  He asked what I was looking for that day, and I said “laptop speakers”.  He instructed me to follow the arrows on the floor until I got to the computer monitors.  You can still walk around and browse, but they are trying to keep things efficient.

Most customers wore masks but they were not mandatory.  I have chosen to wear a mask in public.  To coin a phrase from our Prime Minister, I don’t want to speak “moistly” on people.  I tend to do that.  Of course as soon as I walked in, a maskless guy was meandering against the arrows talking on his cell phone.  Of course.

Best Buy have this re-opening well in hand.  They were organized, friendly and asked us to use hand sanitizer on our way in.  After a squirt and a quick walk around, I found the exact laptop speakers I was looking for.  $27.  Cheap and simple.   Looked around a bit more, and headed for the cash registers.  No line there either.  Mission accomplished with no fuss and no muss.

New speakers in action.  Uncle Meat made fun of my porch music choice.

The Covid world definitely looks different from the pre-Covid world but I think we can deal with this.  It’s going to take patience and a willingness to play ball.  There was a story on the weekend of a man entering a mall in Guelph where masks are mandatory.  When he refused to wear one, he coughed on the mall employee and fled.  This kind of behavior is disgusting.  Retail workers have it bad enough.  I’ve had people throw things at me but never had bodily fluids fired in my direction during a pandemic.  If you think wearing a mask is infringing upon your freedom, then take a stand and don’t shop at those places.  Vote with your wallet.  Don’t cough or spit, and don’t give a retail workers a hard time.  You’re the asshole if you do.  In the meantime, I will wear my mask.  I wear it to protect you from my flying spittle when I talk.  I’m not afraid.  I care.  You’re welcome.  I don’t care if you think I look stupid or not.

I look stupid on my best days anyway.

After Best Buy, we took a drive.  Streets were busy like a normal Saturday in the summer.  You couldn’t tell anything was amiss from the roads.  Restaurants, not so much.  Meals are permitted on patios.  Places with open patios looked comfortably full to the new Covid standards.  Establishments without had empty parking lots.  Elsewhere, we saw a lineup at the Nike store that went around the building.  Must have had a sale.  I don’t need shoes that badly!

I did need shoes, actually, but then I ordered some online.  It was actually better than shopping in store.  No picking through boxes looking for my size in a style I liked.  I simply clicked the shoes I wanted, clicked the colour, and picked my size.  They fit perfectly when they arrived a few days later.  Most comfortable shoes I’ve ever owned, actually.  I could get used to this.  In fact, why should I buy shoes in a store again when there is a better selection online?  I hate shopping for shoes!

Yes, the world has changed.  It will continue to change, and our old world is gone.  Look at music.  Doro Pesch played a concert to a drive-in audience, and it looked cool.  Artists are constantly live streaming chats and performances now.  We adapt.  Some restaurants, businesses and rock bands will not survive.  The economy is still being ravaged.  Most bands will not return to the concert stage until 2021.

In the meantime, people are hungry for entertainment.  Bands and record labels would be wise to release stuff from the vaults during this time.  Unreleased live recordings?  Put ‘em out.  B-sides and outtakes?  Release them.  There has never been a better time for a band to put out of a box set of rarities.  Record stores are opening and need the business.

Unless our collective mistakes cause another surge and another lockdown, I am optimistic.  We have made it through three months of this.  While in some respects we are looking at a lost summer ahead of us, I think we still have a lot to look forward to.

Doro

 

 

 

Superstream! LeBrain Train talks Top Live Albums of all time!

You can thank Harrison the Mad Metal Man for the idea.  A “Nigel Tufnel Top Ten” list for the best live albums of all time.  With little notice, I whipped up some lists.  We also recruited John Snow (2 Loud 2 Old Music), Holen MaGroin, and Uncle Meat to contribute lists.  While the lists varied in some respects, many albums made repeat appearances, sometimes in the same position on two lists!

We ran into some audio issues at the start but those five minutes have been edited out of the stream for your convenience!

 

 

The First LeBrain Live Streams – Watch ’em here if you missed ’em

It appears that I started this lockdown live streaming stuff on March 20th — a Friday.  I went live again on Saturday the 21st, and then for almost three straight hours on Friday March 27.  I started running out of gas on April 3, but kept plugging away anyway.  I started uploading my live streams to YouTube for those who missed them with the April 10 show.  The videos below are all the live streams that were previously unposted.

MARCH 20 – LOVE AT FIRST STREAM.  I was just messing around and people started watching.  We were fresh into lockdown (March 18) and looking for ways to connect with each other.

MARCH 21 – THE SECOND STREAM!  Live streaming was an addiction.

MARCH 27 – THE EPIC 2 HOUR 43 MINUTE STREAM OF MADNESS.  This was like a long-distance race.  Tremendously fun.  Music, Star Wars, Uncle Meat, and Harrison galore.

APRIL 3 – RUNNING OUT OF STREAM. “The Author Reads” was not a big hit. Lots of poo and fart content.

Live Stream – Uncle Don Don Cutoff Shorts Countdown, Interview with Geoff Stephen, Unboxings & Guests

Thanks for watching the Saturday live stream! If you missed any of it, it is now available below via YouTube. I ran into numerous technical issues, so apologies are in order for bad audio, bad video and audio lag.

Content-wise though, woah nelly! You are in for a treat. Here are some highlights:

For a live interview with Geoff Stephen of 1001 Albums in 10 Years, skip ahead to 0:07:00!  He is doing something really special for healthcare workers, so check out what he has to say.

To check out some unboxings, go to 0:12:40 of the stream.

BONUS FOOTAGE – For a sneak peak at an animation test (not part of the actual live stream) you must go to 1:26:06.

For the Uncle Don Don Cutoff Shorts Countdown, start at 1:26:10 of the stream.

For a special Star Wars chat with all-around awesome guy Kovaflyer, go to 2:01:30 of the stream!

Technical issues aside, this live stream set one new record.  It represents the longest span of time in a single day.  I’ve done longer streams but this one had segments ranging from 7:00 am to 9:00 pm, a 14 hour range.  It was fun for me and I hope you enjoy despite the quality problems.

#834: Top Five Masked Artists

GETTING MORE TALE #834: Top Five Masked Artists

The Masked Singer, you say?  Never seen the show; not interested.  What about real artists who wear, or have worn, masks?  Not makeup, but an actual physical face covering?  Since masks are everywhere today, and sometimes required depending on where you go, let’s have a look at some artists who were already ahead of the (flattening) curve.

#5:  Crimson Glory

Before Slipknot, Mushroomhead, and before Ghost, Crimson Glory were the most famous masked metal band.  Often compared to Queensryche (but more ambitious), Crimson Glory were fronted by singer Midnight.  He wore a half-mask so he could sing, while the rest of the band kept their faces fully covered.  At first, anyway.  The masks were toned down on the second album and eventually dropped.  But when their debut appeared in ’86, they looked like nobody else.  That they are forgotten is unfair — they don’t even appear on Wikipedia’s “masked musicians” list!

#4:  Buckethead

At best, Brian Carroll is a recluse.  He’s rarely been photographed without his plain white mask and a chicken bucket on his head (though you can find pictures of a young unmasked Carroll online).  According to Bucket, the mask was inspired by Michael Myers in Halloween 4.  It is highly likely that the anonymity of a mask allows Buckethead to loosen up and perform live.  In all probability, the mask helps him get into his creative headspace.   It’s not too much of a stretch to say that without the mask there could be no Buckethead.

#3:  Nash the Slash

Nash was very early in the mask game, having started wearing bandages in 1979, the same year the Residents started wearing giant eyeball helmets.   The Slash, or Jeff Plewman, passed away in 2014.  He was best known as a founding member of FM, playing electric violin and mandolin.  His 1980 solo cover of “Dead Man’s Curve” had a music video featuring that bandage mask, and trademark top hat.  It was one of the weirdest videos of its time.

#2: Slipknot

I considered Gwar for this position, but then I remembered:  Gwar don’t wear masks. They are aliens that crash landed in Antarctica. No, seriously, this position should belong to Gwar except that I don’t really consider them a masked band. What they have done takes the idea of “masks” and puts them in an entirely unique category. Gwar might be the top “costumed” band, but speaking strictly of masks, this spot goes to Slipknot. Mushroomhead may have come first, but there is no question that Slipknot commercialised their image much more successfully. They expanded upon the masks with matching numbered jumpsuits. They became iconic. Just as one can easily recognize Gene Simmons as a member of Kiss, Shawn “Clown” Crahan simply cannot be mistaken for some guy in Pearl Jam. When you see Slipknot, you know Slipknot. And only they can take the credit for that.

#1: Kathryn Ladano

Biased? Yeah, so what!  This is where I defend my choice.

All of the above artists are brilliant and that cannot be disputed.  But how many of them incorporate the mask with the music?  Perhaps only Buckethead uses the mask to get into a specific headspace to create.  Kathryn Ladano’s newest album, also called Masked, explores this.  Masks and blindfolds were worn in the studio while music was improvised and captured for the album.  The mask becomes part of the audible art, which you cannot say about Slipknot or Crimson Glory.  Maybe I’m biased, or maybe I’m one of a few people who knows how critical masks were to the creation of this music.  Without the masks, some of this music wouldn’t even exist.  For that reason, Kathryn Ladano is our topped masked artist.  Nobody else incorporated the mask with the music like she did.

Worthy Mentions

 

Hey!  Where’s Daft Punk? Where’s Deadmau5? Not on this list, that’s where!  Neither are Ghost, Thunderstick, the Residents or a number of other groups who wear physical facial coverings.  Narrowing down is the hardest part of any list, but I hope you enjoyed this one anyway.  Check out some Crimson Glory or Nash the Slash and tell us who you think the greatest masked artists are.

 

#824: “I’m Outta Here!”

GETTING MORE TALE #824:  “I’m Outta Here!”

A sequel to Part 287:  Closing Time

Name one person who doesn’t love closing down for the day.  Work completed, clock ticks 9:00 pm, and the doors are locked.  Time to go eat some dinner and unwind.  At the Record Store, we got paid until 9:15 pm, the approximate amount of time it would take to cash out and close.  Sometimes we could do it in 10 minutes, sometimes far longer.  It was always considered a victory if you could completely close out in 10 minutes, and get paid for 15.  Small triumphs.

My favourite location to close was the original mall store at Stanley Park.  It was probably my favourite for closing because I was working alone.  Closing a store by yourself gives you a greater sense of responsibility.  Plus you could listen to whatever (metal) you wanted.

Listen, I don’t care where you work, everybody wants to go home and get refueled.  It’s a basic right.  Once you stop getting paid, you’re a free human being again.

There was one occasion at the mall I’ll never forget.  I was closing up normally and had just returned from the bank to drop off the night deposit.  I shut down the lights, packed up my stuff and locked the door.  As I was heading to the parking lot to meet my dad who was picking me up, I spied a group of three or four kids down the hall heading to the store, arms loaded with CDs to sell.  Just loaded — the group must have had 100 discs altogether.  I stealthily sneaked out of the mall via a seldom-used side entrance, hopefully unseen.

Close call!  The last thing I wanted was to have my dinner delayed by a group of kids needing last minute (booze) money after closing time.

This kind of thing still bugs me.  When I’m out shopping I’m very conscious of closing time.  I’m not going to get some sales rep to perform handstands just before closing, and definitely not after!  Some kids don’t know any better, but they should.  Didn’t they have their own part time jobs that they didn’t like to stay late for?  Did they get paid extra if they had to stay late?  We didn’t.

I was glad to say “I’m outta here!” at closing time even if there were still people wanting to come in.  Maybe we could have made more money if we did stay open, but none of it would be coming my way.

 

#814: Freestylin’ 4

GETTING MORE TALE #814: Freestylin’ 4

I’ve had a lot on my mind.  Thinking about the past, thinking about the future.

Every now and then, I’ll search for old acquaintances online.  Co-workers, customers, friends…many of them have not emerged in the new online world of social media.  At least not yet.  I continue searching.  Looking for a guy I used to work with, a coincidence of search terms led me instead to the obituary of an old customer.

I recognized his face immediately as that of “Surly Brad”, one of the very first customers I had when I managed my own Record Store location in 1996.  Brad passed away in 2011, but he wasn’t really very surly.  Is there a male equivalent of “resting bitch face”?  Brad looked grouchy but he could also pull a wide smile.  He was short and to the point, but eventually we got to know each other a little bit better.  Like many music collectors, he was picky about what he bought.  He could hear defects on a CD that I couldn’t.  I haven’t thought about Brad in years, but I don’t have any negative thoughts of him.  Just sadness.  Brad died age 47, the same age I am right now.

Rest in peace Brad.  I’m sorry we used to call you Surly.

Onto other trains of thought, I’m currently deep in the midst of my usual Seasonal Affective Disorder.  Long before I knew what it was or that it existed, I experienced it.  Ever since I was a kid.  The winters were a long, sad and lonely time.  The summers were much happier and more vibrant.  I thought for many years I just “hated winter”.  I do hate winter; don’t get me wrong, but there was more to it.  In the winter of 1998 I was explaining to a friend that I was in my “big blue funk”, a long period of (what I now call) depression.  The friend was taken aback because I was speaking of these things as if everybody experienced them.  “That’s not normal,” they said.  “Sure it is,” I retorted.

I’ve learned to deal with my big blue funks a lot better these days, though I still need to seek help.  One thing I do to try to stave off the blues is to give myself something to look forward to every day.  This can be anything from having some special food that I enjoy, to buying some new music, to watching my favourite shows.  I have to make some time to just enjoy myself a little bit every day.

Of course, buying music costs money and when you’re a collector it can get expensive!  When you can’t settle for anything less than “all the tracks”, you can expect to spend money.  Of course this is connected to another mental illness, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.  I’ve had this forever too.  As a kid, I would try to collect complete sub-teams of GI Joes and Transformers.  I’d also collect music, but that was a lot more difficult in the 1980s.

The first group I ever decided I wanted a “complete” collection of was Quiet Riot.  I thought it would be easy.  I assumed they only had two albums.  How wrong I was.  There were no Wikipedia articles to refer to.  Eventually I learned about their early Japanese-only albums.  It took me about 15 years, pre-internet, to get copies for myself.

As I grew to like more and more bands, I wanted more and more “complete” collections.  Magazines like Hit Parader would run ads for mail order record stores.  They would list stuff regularly that I never heard of nor saw in stores.  All in US dollars of course.  Plus shipping!  Stuff like:

ALICE COOPER – THE BEAST OF

ALICE COOPER – DADA

ALICE COOPER – PRETTIES FOR YOU

JUDAS PRIEST – STAINED CLASS

These were not albums you could find in your local Zellers’ tape section.  I had never seen or even heard of Stained Class.

Then I would browse down to the singles and start crying when I saw things listed like:

AEROSMITH – DUDE LOOKS LIKE A LADY / ONCE IS ENOUGH

BON JOVI – LIVIN ON A PRAYER / EDGE OF A BROKEN HEART +1

EUROPE – THE FINAL COUNTDOWN / ON BROKEN WINGS

Like a cruel tease, I became aware that some of these things really existed, but on a teenage allowance, had no way to acquire them.  Or even hear what they sounded like.  I was grateful that bands like Kiss never seemed to put our exclusive non-album songs as B-sides.  Not knowing any better, I thought that was very democratic of them:  everybody had access to every Kiss song – there were no exclusives only for those who could pay for them.

Boy, did I read those Kiss cards wrong!

Many of these tracks and albums never showed up in my collection until the internet age.  But now, with access to even more information, the want list continues to grow.  It’s an expensive hobby.

Whitesnake was one of those bands that had many albums prior to the ones I knew about.  The winter of 87/88 educated me otherwise.  Meanwhile I had just acquired Slide It In.  I can picture myself shovelling the snow in the dark of the morning listening to that warbling tape.  Geffen didn’t put out the best quality cassettes in the 80s.  My copy of Slide It In ran so slow that it was almost unlistenable.  I would try to fast forward and rewind the tape to loosen it up a bit.  Nothing really helped and I never heard the album properly until I got a CD copy.  But Slide It In is one of those albums I associate with winter, shovelling snow and all of it.

I’ll make it through this winter just like all the others.  But I can’t wait for summer.  That’s when I really feel alive again.

#812: Klassic Kwote – Hanson

You can imagine how hard it is finding music for people who have no idea what they’re looking for.

“Yeah, the guy wears a cowboy hat in the video.”

Can I get a little more information?

“Yeah, it was a white hat.”

Alan Jackson?  I don’t fucking know!

One day a customer walked in to T-Rev’s store and asked for a new band.  They had a new song out called “MMMBop”.

His description, which Trevor had to somehow use to figure out what band he wanted, was as follows:

“It’s a new band.  They sound like Michael Jackson.  But white.”

Hanson, ladies and gentlemen!  The white Michael Jacksons!

 

#802: Get a Haircut and Get a Real Job

A sequel to #488:  Almost Cut My Hair

GETTING MORE TALE #802: Get a Haircut and Get a Real Job

“No razor has ever been used on my head, because I have been a Nazirite dedicated to God from my mother’s womb. If my head were shaved, my strength would leave me, and I would become as weak as any other man.” – Samson, Judges 16:17

The Biblical Samson drew his great strength from his hair.  He foolishly shared his secret with Delilah, who had his locks cut in his sleep.  True to his confession, Samson’s supernatural strength was gone.

As a young rock fan, I once identified a lot with Samson.

As soon as I discovered rock and roll, I wanted long hair.  Guys seemed to have so few options to stand out in a crowd.  Looking at the gymnasium during class, it looked like groups of clones.*  Different body types, different heights, but all the same.  No individuality.  I didn’t want to look like that.  Like them.  Like people I shared nothing else with.  I wanted to look like me.

I admired the long hairs that adorned my rock wall of fame.  I thought Adrian Smith from Iron Maiden, the blonde straight mullet style, looked best.  I didn’t like Bruce Dickinson’s fringe, and Steve Harris’ curls would never come naturally to me.  That was the thing.  I wanted something that looked natural, not hair that seemed supported by an invisible superstructure like Bon Jovi’s.  Nothing flammable due to excessive use of chemical fixatives.  It had to look effortless – like you woke up that way.

I didn’t want my allegiances to be misidentified.  I wanted it to be obvious:  rock and roll, and only rock and roll.  I didn’t want to walk down the hallway, mistaken for somebody who listened to Duran Duran.  And so, starting in grade nine, I really tried to grow out my hair.

The major issue was, of course, parental guidance.  Dad didn’t like my “long” hair.  It never got that long; a couple inches tops.  Then he would order it to be chopped.  Bob and I sometimes went to the barber together, and we would always request to “leave the back long”.   They’d explain they had to trim the dead ends, and so what we were left with rarely looked “long”.  It did look very, very 80s.

Dad just didn’t understand.  This wasn’t about looking neat and clean and tidy.  It was about looking different from all the clones.  There were very few long-hairs at our school, and once they had some length going, each guy looked different and unique to me.  That’s what I wanted.  Nothing that said “conformity”, but maybe something that said “Def Leppard”.  Who, by the way, had not become the biggest band in the world yet.

The cycle went on for the first three years of highschool.  Grow it, cut it, “leave the back long”.  Eventually I developed a nice mullet that I considered a good start.  This came to an end in late 1989.

It felt like the end of the world.

In October of ’89, my dad insisted it was time to get a job.  He knew the manager at the local grocery store and put in a word.  An interview was set up.  I dutifully went to the mall and checked in at the barber shop.  “Cut it all off,” I said despondently.  None of this “leave the back long” stuff.  Not this time.

I walked out looking like everyone else, self esteem made worse by my new glasses.  Over at the grocery store, I was expected.  “Your hair looks fine,” said the manager.  He had already spoken to my dad, who told him I was just getting a hair cut before the interview.

It was only about 10 minutes before I was welcomed aboard and introduced to new co-workers.  My first day would be the coming Friday.  But before that, I had to make it through a day at school with my new hair.

For the last couple years, I had been co-authoring a sci-fi highscool comic book called Brett-Lore.

I was quite happy with my character, the evil Darth Banger.  Most of my classmates were being lampooned far worse than I.  David Kidd, who was obsessed with drama class, was Emperor Kiddspeare.  Later when we decided to go after him harder, he became the Phantom of the Opera.  My stalker Bobby was Bobby the Hutt.  I got off easy.  Whatever misdeeds he was up to, Darth Banger was always rocking a guitar.  In fact, his starship was a giant Flying V.  He was just a stereotypical metal head, but also leader of the Evil Empire, so I went with it knowing I could have had it so much worse.

When I showed up at school with the new short hair that I was forced to adopt, Brett-Lore had to reflect it.  I couldn’t be Darth Banger anymore.  Because I am Italian, and because I now resembled Mussolini more than Metallica, my character was briefly reborn as Il Duce, the Guido.  Later on, I tried letting my facial hair grow in and suddenly my new character became Beardo-Weirdo.

This was all very depressing to me.  I didn’t care that I had a job.  All I could think about was that I had seemingly lost the only thing that made me different.  Now my ears stuck out.  I looked like everyone else.  And now even my comic book was becoming something I didn’t enjoy anymore.

The one interesting thing about work:  for me, in my life, every job introduced me to new music.  The guys at the grocery store liked heavier music than Motley Crue and Bon Jovi.  They liked Sabbath, and Zeppelin.  As soon as I was able, I added We Sold Out Soul for Rock ‘N’ Roll to my collection.  “Sweet Leaf” became my new favourite although I had no idea what it was about.  A girl named Leaf, possibly?

I worked at the grocery store for about nine months, leaving before the start of a busy summer.  The hair started growing back as soon as I could make it.  The Duce character never worked for Brett-Lore, and as soon as I was able, I forced Darth Banger back into the story.  The other authors agreed but under one condition.

Everybody in the comic got teased pretty mercilessly and so I had to pay more dues before Banger was allowed to return.  Il Duce had to be put through hell, and so I drew all sorts of embarrassing shit for him to go through, before he finally transformed back into Darth, this time with a nice single-seater Flying V spaceship to pilot himself.

As my hair grew back, I started to feel like myself again!  I was happier.

It reached record lengths by the early 90s.  But the landscape had changed.  Long hair was more common, and looking unique less easy.  One day my dad made a comment about how he’d pay me $10 per inch if I cut my hair off, so I went and did it.  He didn’t think I would, but I did.  Some of my biggest rocker heroes had shed their locks.  By this time I’d discovered something almost better than hair:  beards.

The fact was, try as I might, I never had “good” long hair.  It always wanted to curl up; get out of control.  Without investing in styling and products, it would never really look “good”.  And that defeated the whole “effortless” idea.  But it took grunge to get me to the point where it didn’t matter to me anymore.

It’s funny how something as superficial as hair took up so much of my time and energy, but the fact is, these things used to matter.  They used to matter a lot!  Maybe not in the grand scheme of things, but when you’re in highschool, the grand scheme of things was limited to the walls of the school.  I just wanted to walk my own path my own way.  I think I did OK.

* Later on I wrote a tune about this subject called “Clones”, a bitter examination of all the ball-capped lookalikes in school.

#772: The Phantom Menace (20 Years On)

GETTING MORE TALE #772: The Phantom Menace (20 Years On)

If you can believe it, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace is 20 years old this year.  2019 is a significant year in the history of Star Wars.  It is the 20th anniversary of its return with the prequels, and it will also witness the final movie of the Skywalker saga in Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker.  Back in Record Store Tales Part 209: The Phantom Menace, I said I wasn’t “interested in contributing to the background noise” regarding the movie, but I’ve since changed my mind.  Now that George Lucas is out of the picture and J.J. Abrams is helming the finale of the sequel trilogy, it’s hard not to get a little nostalgic for 1999, when things were…simpler.

Netflix has different movies available in different countries, but you can sidestep this with some VPN software.  Some countries have no Star Wars, but between them, all of the films are available.  Bahamas is the only territory I’ve discovered so far with the first two trilogies, so I’ve been re-watching from I to VIII.  And for all its flaws, with the benefit of hindsight, The Phantom Menace is still quite enjoyable.

George Lucas had his own ideas about where to take Star Wars, but the fan hate that Phantom Menace (and the other prequels) received took the wind out of his sails.  He laid the groundwork in Phantom Menace, with that talk about the highly maligned midichlorians.  Now, midichlorians were an awful idea.  J.J. Abrams is right to leave them out of the sequel trilogy.  The idea of little microscopic organelles in your blood giving you the ability to tap into the Force?  It creates so many problems.  Like, if you have more midichlorians in your blood than someone else, does that automatically make you more powerful?  Can we therefore rank numerically every character by midichlorian count and deduce who the most powerful is?  Can you get a blood transfusion from a Jedi and steal his or her Jedi powers? That’s the kind of shit that fans hate on.  Why couldn’t Lucas leave the Force alone with all its mystery intact?

Because he was going somewhere with that.  Lucas came up with the name and concept of midichlorians back in 1977; the idea is very old.  Now we understand why.  George was also setting up the final trilogy, the one that J.J. is currently finishing. Episodes VII through IX “were going to get into a microbiotic world,” George Lucas told James Cameron. So, like Ant-Man?  “There’s this world of creatures that operate differently than we do. I call them the Whills. And the Whills are the ones who actually control the universe. They feed off the Force.”  Fans recall that “Whills” is an old word.  The first Star Wars novelization refers to the entire saga as The Journal of the Whills.  In Lucas’ own sequel trilogy, Jedi were to be merely “vehicles for the Whills to travel around in…And the conduit is the midichlorians. The midichlorians are the ones that communicate with the Whills. The Whills, in a general sense, they are the Force.”

Like Ant-Man meets Dr. Strange meets The Fantastic Voyage, maybe.  With lightsabers?  Terrible; undoubtedly awful.  I can’t even fathom how he would have executed this idea.  The fans would have rioted.  You think the hate that fandom gives Disney today is intense?  Imagine if George’s microscopic version got made.

rey and the midichlorians of doom

But at least George had a vision.

Lucas wasn’t about making the trilogies the same.  Having watched both The Force Awakens and Phantom Menace recently on Netflix, it’s clear that J.J. made a better movie that feels more like Star Wars.  Flawed, yes, but it seemed to be setting up some pretty epic storytelling (until Rian Johnson took a shit all over it with his left turn Last Jedi.)  J.J.’s Star Wars is better acted, paced and edited.  The dialogue is far less stiff.  But George’s Phantom Menace has something that J.J.’s Force Awakens does not:  daring imagination.

One of the most successful sequences in Episode I is the pod race.  It’s completely irrelevant to the story, which is one of the many problems, but on its own, it is a glistening example of George’s unfettered imagination.  In 1999, this race was unimaginably new.  The only thing that came close was the speeder bike chase in 1983’s Return of the Jedi, primitive as it was.  Lucas broke new ground in multiple ways with his prequels, whether you like his innovations or not, and primitive CG characters aside.  People complain that J.J.’s Star Wars is just a soft reboot.  Well, watch Phantom Menace if that’s not your cup of tea.  The pod race, at least.  Lucas combined his love of race cars with science fiction and directed one of the best race sequences in the genre.  In any genre.  Even little Jake Lloyd shone in that cockpit, confidently flying himself to victory.

It’s a shame that pod race sequence was completely unnecessary.  I mean, you’re telling me Liam Neeson couldn’t figure out any other way to get off that planet, other than a complicated scheme of betting; gambling on a child pod racer?  Liam was supposed to be a goddamned Jedi master.  They keep talking about how much time they’re wasting on the planet, but they wait to see how this damned race plays out?  A race that could have killed a little kid!  Weird choices.  If you were a Jedi, you could have figured out dozens of faster and safer ways to get off that planet, right?

Once they do finally get off that planet, the Jedi arrive home on the capitol world Coruscant.  This was a bit of fan service, something that they wanted to see more of, since it had been such an important part of comics, novels and production artwork.  Cloud City aside, it was the first real time we saw an urban city environment on Star Wars.  True to form, Lucas made the whole planet one environment, in this case a city.  It was also some of the most brilliant visual designs on the prequel trilogy, one which would set the tone for the two movies that followed.

For better or for worse, Lucas spent much of the prequel trilogy defining who the Jedi were.  What they could do, what they couldn’t, and what they believed in.  We learned of the “living Force”, and oodles of Jedi wisdom about attachment and fear.  Jedi couldn’t marry, which was surprising, considering the Skywalker bloodline is the entire focus of the saga.  Yet George was throwing tons of ideas at us.  Stuff that he had been keeping in dusty old notebooks for years.  Nothing in the sequel trilogy comes close to revealing as much about the Star Wars universe as the prequels do.

Though Phantom Menace is the movie with the most cringe-worthy moments, wooden dialogue and shitty acting, there are the odd scenes that George did artistically and perfect.  Take the moment that Anakin and friends arrive on Coruscant, an overwhelming moment for the little boy.  George shot some of the footage from kid-height, allowing us to experience Anakin’s anxiety without clumsy dialogue.  The aforementioned pod race sequence is brilliant, and so is the final lightsaber duel.  For the first time, serious acrobatics and martial arts moves were incorporated into the laser sword battles.  This went on to define how the Jedi normally fought throughout all the prequels:  with a lot of jumping, leaping, and somersaulting.  For all the epic duels in the saga, one of the greatest (if not number one) is Kenobi and Jinn vs. Darth Maul.  From John Williams’ score (“Duel of the Fates”) to the choreography by Nick Gillard, it was focused through George Lucas’ lens into something absolutely brain-melting.  Until Darth Maul lost like a chump.  No excusing that; although remember that George did something similar to Boba Fett in Episode VI.

The droid designs were also pretty cool.  As iconic as a stormtrooper?  No.  But sleek, interesting, new and believable?  Absolutely.  This helped shape the visually stunning Naboo land battle scenes.  J.J. didn’t introduce any new infantry troops in his movie, he just updated the existing ones.

There was one thing that The Force Awakens and The Phantom Menace did equally well.  One very important thing that neither gets enough credit for: they made us anticipate the next film in the trilogies with hunger.  (Until Rian Johnson pissed all over J.J.’s ending, that is.)  Both films’ endings felt like the setup for events we couldn’t wait to see on screen.  The training of Anakin/Rey, for example.  A clue to the truth about the big bad guys (Sidious/Snoke).  The next meeting between good and evil.  J.J. and George both succeeded in creating this feeling of heavy anticipation.

By the time all three prequel movies played out, each problematic with wooden acting and stiff stories, fans were burned out on prequel-era Star Wars.  The Clone Wars TV show did a better job of living in that universe, but fans longed for the old familiar again.  X-Wings and Han Solo and the Empire and all of it.  So that’s what J.J. delivered.  And J.J. Abrams learned what we all know:  there is no pleasing Star Wars fans.

We fans take this stuff too seriously sometimes.  You’ve just read 1500 words, comparing Star Wars movies’ strengths and flaws.  That’s excessive, for both the reader and the writer!  We take this too seriously, friend.  Sure, we don’t go and harass the actors on Twitter like some juvenile delinquents do, but we’ve invested so much time and thought into a goddamn space movie series.  Too late to turn back now.  I think it’s important to take a break, step back and appreciate the movies from a different perspective.  Having done that with Phantom Menace, I can see it has its mitigating traits that still make me smile 20 years later.