Friday afternoon and we’re off to the races! The Summer 2024 season of Grab A Stack of Rock has commenced and Jex Russell was there to ring in this happy tradition. The theme(s) for this week are: Top 11 Albums & Songs to Play with the Windows Down! Summer is the time for rocking the road, and Jex and I brought the thunder with two excellent Nigel Tufnel Top Ten lists!
Highlights:
Music on four of the major physical formats: CD, vinyl, cassette and 8-track!
Lots of Canadian content: Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan, Ontario, & Quebec represented!
Stories of years gone by: 1991, 1992, 1996, 2002, 2023 and today.
There was a quick discussion of the new Motley Crue song “Dogs of War”. Who’s the weak link in Motley Crue?
The debut of the Fire Pit on Grab A Stack of Rock
This show was dedicated to my Uncle Paul, and my mother in law Debbie, who inspired some of these picks. It’s also in the spirit of friendship and good memories with Jex’s friend Lucas, and my friends Peter, Bob and Trev.
See you next week for Top 11 Marillion albums with Todd Evans and Uncle Meat!
GRAB A STACK OF ROCK With Mike and the Mad Metal Man
Episode 57: Top 11 Albums to Play with the Windows Down – with Jex Russell
Show & Tell on four formats: CD, cassette, LP and 8-track
Long we have waited, but Spring is here and the traditional outdoor afternoon Grab A Stack of Rock is back too.*Jex Russell joins for this happy cottage tradition. Last year, these afternoon outdoor shows were incredible fun! If you were there last year, you know! If you weren’t, join the rock and roll party today at 3 PM E.S.T. It’s our first live show in almost a month, after several weeks of popular re-runs!
The theme this week is a “Nigel Tufnel Top Ten” list: Our 11 favourite albums with play with the windows down! There are so many to choose from, this list is literally wide open. What are you choosing to play this spring with the windows down? Many of my picks are traditional favourites with stories attached.
Now, due to a miscommunication on my part, I will do top 11 albums, while Jex will do top 11 songs! This will give us plenty of variety in the lists. Expect plenty of show & tell.
This episode is dedicated to my late Uncle Paul, whose beloved ‘Cuda appears in the show art. He loved music and cruising, and we spent many summer hours in his car with the take deck going! Will Van Halen make these lists today, or something else? Tune in and join the fun! We always chat with the comments section, live.
What are your top 11 albums or songs to play with the windows down? Drop a comment today, on Grab A Stack of Rock.
Friday April 26 at 3:00 P.M. E.S.T. / 4:00 P.M. Atlantic. Enjoy on YouTube or onFacebook!
As long as I can remember, I’ve hated winter, and craved the warm rays of summer. My dominant genes are Mediterranean. My not-so-distant ancestors made their living on the balmy coasts of Sicily, and Amalfi before that. I was never cut out for the cold months.
I took hockey lessons as a kid. I hated putting on those uncomfortable skates and all that cold-weather gear. “Why do I have to take hockey lessons, mom?”
“Every good Canadian boy should know how to skate,” she answered.
Why? Why couldn’t I just stay indoors where it was warm and I didn’t have to bundle up in three layers to go outside? Hockey lessons never appealed, and to this day, I can’t really skate. I mean, I can go forward…I can turn…but I can’t stop. So, I can’t really skate. Do I care? No. It’s been 27 years since I was last on skates. More than half my life ago.
I can’t ski. I can’t even get on the chairlift properly. I haven’t been on skis since…1986 maybe? No interest whatsoever. We would build snowforts and take toboggans downhill, but I would much rather it be warm outside, riding my bike and playing in the sun. The winter was always wet and messy.
My earliest memory of seasonal affective disorder was studying a globe with my dad as a kid. I’ve long been obsessed with maps. I’d study maps until the cows came home. This time, we were looking at a globe. He was explaining how the analemma on the globe worked: that figure-eight line that tracked the movement of the sun over the 12 months of the year. The line can be traced by finding the position of the Sun as viewed from the same position on Earth at the same time every day. In the winter, the sun can be found travelling the line in the southern hemisphere on our globe, but my dad explained, once December 21 came and went, the sun would be making its way back north again. I would look at the globe and find the date on the analemma. It sure made it feel like summer was coming, to see it translated into mere centimeters on a globe.
It’s quite remarkable that I was feeling those feelings as a kid. Not even 10 years old yet? Counting the days until the sun was back in the northern hemisphere. To the days when I shed my outer skin of parkas and boots, and went back down to a T-shirt and shorts, basking in the comfort of the Canadian summer. Seasonal affective disorder has been with me at least that long.
Another memory: winter time, putting on my layers to go outside. By the time all the layers were on, I didn’t want to go outside anymore. My parents really struggled with trying to keep me active in the winter. I wished I could have hibernated through it all.
I wonder if the added component here was school? I hated school. I hated the bullies. The summer represented time away from all of that. I wonder how much that fed into my seasonal affective disorder?
I guess that’s something I can explore with my mental health team this winter, as I try new strategies to stave off the S.A.D.ness. We have some tentative plans and vitamin D is on the menu. Let’s make the most of it.
RECORD STORE TALES #1071: Hot Town, Summer in the City
Setting: The 1980s. Southern Ontario.
Our summers always began with a week at the cottage. For a kid, being out of touch with friends from home, not to mention the latest happenings in WWF wrestling and music videos, it was a challenge! We took everything we had for granted back then, and what kid our age didn’t? The cottage was not a place I looked forward to going. I didn’t like the isolation. Sometimes I wonder if I’d dislike cottage vacations today as much as I did then, if we didn’t have high-speed internet and all the entertainment and connection that it brings. Literally the first thing I do when I arrive at the lake is connect to my family and friends and tell them we’ve arrived safely, often with a photo or video. But back then….
For me, the summer excitement didn’t begin when we arrived at the lake. It began when we got home from that first week’s vacation! I’d race into the house and check my mail. Would it be comic books straight from Marvel? Or a cassette from Columbia House? Mail was the most exciting thing about coming home, and it sucked when there was no mail!
Next up: check the VCR. Did the many hours of WWF wrestling that I had programmed record properly? Usually not! Programming a VCR was tricky back then, and you had to count on power failures resetting everything. There were many times that I would come home to find no wrestling! Other times, it would record like a charm. If successful, the morning after returning home would be spent watching the wrestling I missed.
Speaking of the almighty VCR, the week spent at the lake would mean I missed at least two installments of the Pepsi Power Hour. What videos and interviews did I miss? I preferred not to think about it. In the summers, there was a lot of metal that I missed. I didn’t want to set the VCR to record whole shows – I was compiling music videos and interviews, ad-free.
After the July holiday, I’d come home with some new music purchased at the lake, and want to show my new albums to my best friend Bob. In 1989, one that I was particularly enthused about was The Headless Children by W.A.S.P. It took Bob some time to believe me when I said it was great. Later that year, the ballad “Forever Free” convinced him. Meanwhile, Bob would be filling me in on anything important happening in our neighborhood. It wouldn’t be long before we were back at it, getting into mischief in the summer of the city.
Our interests changed as we got older and more independent. Bob was driving by the summer of ’90 so we could go virtually anywhere we wanted to. We made excursions downtown to buy music! There we had Encore, Sam the Record Man and Dr. Disc all waiting for our dollars. Today it’s just Encore, who have moved twice but is still alive! The longest serving record store in Kitchener still lives today. I can recall bringing home treasures such as Rocka Rolla by Judas Priest. Vinyl, of course – cassettes were impossible to find of that oldie. The idea was, if you went downtown, you wanted to score something that you couldn’t get at the mall. It had to be something special. A single, an import, a record you couldn’t buy on cassette in these parts. The city had record stores, but so did the cottage. What the cottage didn’t have was Sam’s, Encore, and Dr. Disc. No access to music that was hard to find. Coming home to the city meant buying rarities.
We rocked hard and we played hard. Summer meant basketball, baseball, and tennis. Usually with music blasting! Sports weren’t my thing but they were a thing that we did. Hours spent at the park. In driveways. In backyards, playing. Or we’d be getting into trouble, exploring the nearby woods on our bikes. We did a lot of exploring. We came back scraped and bruised, and it was awesome. Constantly exploring!
Occasionally we’d go to the waterpark at Pioneer Sports World, which no longer exists. I can still smell the chlorine! One thing about summer in the city, you can smell the chlorine from nearby pools. Chlorine always smells like summer. Of course, for non-chlorinated water fun, we set up sprinklers at home. One summer, we built an obstacle course in the back yard with lawn chairs and sprinklers. Only we understood the rules, but it was a race against the clock! My new digital stopwatch was timekeeper. Just couldn’t get it wet!
Sprinklers gave way to water balloons. Bob and I would go to the store and buy a few bags of balloons. We made such a mess! Parents would be furious about the wasted water and rubber fragments all over the yard. Those rubber bits always took a while to clean up. Parents did not enjoy water balloon days at our house.
The next door neighbor George was always a misfit. One day Bob and I decided to hurl water balloons at his bedroom window. The barrage of water was never acknowledged, but I do recall Bob and I remarking how dirty his windows were! The water revealed years of accumulated dirt on his screens.
Playing outdoors was the thing. Parents didn’t want us in their personal spaces. In the olden days, we would have played GI Joe or Lego in the yard. Later on, we’d grab our guitars, amps, tape decks and power cords and record! Whether on the front patio, or in the garage, we recorded a lot of garbage. It didn’t matter how bad it was, just that the record button was on. I have seven cassettes called “Mike and Bob…” littered with garbage we recorded!
Bob and I would raise hell for a month or so, but then it was time again. My dad usually had two weeks of vacation booked for August which would be spent at the lake. Sometimes he’d go home for a day and bring us our mail, but there was rarely anything good. The two weeks of isolation in August was worse than July because the weather was wet and cold. Worst of all, the TV would start showing “back to school” ads. Now that was something in the city that we didn’t want to return to. By the time we got home, kids were already sporting their new “back to school” haircuts, and had new shoes waiting for the coming year. All we had left was Labour Day and then back to the daily fall grind!
Time changes everything. Once Bob finished highschool, he was allowed to drive to the cottage. No more friend-less holidays! Then we got phones, cable TV, and VCRs. (There are actually three VCRs in storage at the cottage right now!) When these things changed, so did my attitude. Now I’d rather be there, than anywhere else in the world!
I wonder if Bob’s up for a garage jam session this summer!
Happy fourth of July to my American friends and acquaintances! While your party is beginning, we are recovering from ours!
Jen and I have returned from an amazing five day weekend at the lake. It’s amazing how I can “rest” for five days and come home completely exhausted! I’m not getting any younger. My right arm and hand are in bad shape with arthritis and even though I slept 12 hours, I could use 12 more.
Summer’s officially here. Lots of projects on the go! Grab A Stack of Rock will be back later, as I work on these projects:
A super-secret taping with Tim’s Vinyl Confessions
Another with Grant’s Rock Warehaus
A pro/con Vinnie Vincent Invasion show with Peter Kerr
A live Helix show with Grant and Tim
And that’s not including the projects I am cooking up with Harrison and Jex!
Although it might be hard, I need to take this July slow and steady.
Cousin Geoff’s grandparents on his dad’s side owned a huge piece of property in the country with a swimming pool, and the most amazing landscape to explore. Grassy fields gave way to trees, and I don’t think we ever hit the end of the property when we went walking. It simply went on forever. Any time we went there, it was a treat. We spent a few days at the property that summer, swimming and running pretending we were Jedi or superheroes. The house had an amazing “back yard”. There was a steep downwards incline, which you traversed via a series of stairs and landings. To us it was huge! It seemed like you were climbing down a mountain. At the bottom: the swimming pool and all the land you could run through for hours. –Record Store Tales #909
RECORD STORE TALES #939: The Frog in the Pool
The most precious of childhood memories took place around that swimming pool. I remember my grandpa picking me up like I was a rag doll and tossing me into the water. Then I’d swim back and ask him to do it again.
There’s a funny old picture of my grandpa at poolside. I remember that he liked to roll his own cigarettes. I remember the tobacco tins and my mom having to explain to me what he was doing. Well apparently he really loved to do it. In this photo, he obviously packed up all his tobacco and rolling gear, and just sat there at poolside rolling cigarettes! He looks so happy with a huge pile of tobacco in front of him. It strikes me as hilarious that he brought all that stuff with him to spend a day at the pool.
Sergeant Winter reporting for duty.
There’s one notable event that happened at that pool that we don’t have pictures of.
I was really young. Just a few years old. And I must have had to go bad, so I pooped in the pool. I remember the little teeny brown nugget at the bottom of the pool. “Nobody will notice,” I told myself.
Well they noticed a lot sooner than I thought, so I resorted to my “plan B”. I thought the little poop looked like a frog at the bottom of the pool, so that’s what I claimed it was. “Just a frog”. Nobody bought it and somebody got a pool scooper and picked up my poop. I probably denied that it was mine right to the very end. This might actually be my first admission that I pooped in the pool!
Ah, 16! The age you’re supposed to get your driver’s license and go on dates with girls. Maybe even get a part time job. Except I did none of that.
The summer of 1988 was much like any summer. It was marked by new music, trips to the cottage, and another visit from Captain Destructo, my cousin Geoff. Predator was in the movie theaters and WWF wrestling was hot. Summer was not going to suck.
Super Mario on the NES
I was well tanned from days at the beach, and when Geoff and family rolled into the cottage that July, Geoff brought his new toy: a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). This was a whole new world for us. I had never seen Super Mario Brothers or Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out. I sure saw a lot of them when Geoff came to visit. Saw. Not played. I played a little bit, but Geoff monopolised the game. I’ll never forget when he was playing Punch-Out and he was down to the second last boxer. He thought he was going to knock him out and move on to Mike Tyson. However my dad walked in front of the screen, Geoff started screaming, and lost the game. You would have thought he lost the invasion at Normandy for all the fuss. Me, I just would have liked another turn at the game.
Video games were exciting, but nothing was better than playing outside. With Predator hot in the cinemas, and lots of plastic guns to play with, we scattered into the forest hunting for the stealthy alien. Geoff insisted he was Dutch (Arnold Schwarzenegger). That made me Blain (Jesse Ventura). We forced my sister Kathryn to play Hawkins (Shane Black), the worst character and first one to die in the film. Eventually we let her play Billy the tracker (Sonny Landham).
I love how this trailer gives away the whole movie.
Leaping, dodging, climbing. We owned that forest.
There is so much joy running through the woods with plastic guns pretending to hunt a space alien. And the best part was, in the movie the Predator was invisible for most of the time: we didn’t need anybody to play the bad guy. It didn’t take much imagination to pretend to see movement in the forest. We were a team of three on a quest. I know that this is one of the happiest summer memories for all three of us.
After a few days at the lake, we returned home to Kitchener, with Geoff still in tow. We hung out in the basement watching WWF and the Pepsi Power Hour. Cinderella were hot with “Gypsy Road” and I had to get that album. Long Cold Winter was an odd title for a summer album, but it was most definitely a summer album. I could not wait to get it but I had a birthday coming and I wasn’t allowed to buy stuff for myself until after.
For what was probably the last time, we went with Geoff to his grandfather’s huge property for an afternoon in the pool. One last splash, in the bright figure-8 shaped pool. That giant pond behind us in the background. Maintaining that summer tan.
The three big albums for me that summer were Long Cold Winter by Cinderella, Second Sighting by Ace Frehley, and Ram It Down by Judas Priest. I loved it for all its flaws. It was heavy and I thought it had five potential single-worthy songs: “Ram It Down”, “Heavy Metal”, “Hard As Iron”, and “Blood Red Skies”, in addition to the already-released “Johnny B. Goode”. Only the Chuck Berry cover made it to music video form. I waited all summer for a music video for “Blood Red Skies” to finally hit. I could always predict the next single, and I just knew it had to be “Blood Red Skies”. Week after week, I waited. I dreaded missing it during vacation at the cottage. I just knew it would be any week now. I had a dream one night of what it would look like. There Priest were on the bridge of some kind of spaceship, hovering over the landscape beneath the blood red skies. It never came. I thought if Priest released a video for “Blood Red Skies”, it would chart. Into the fall, Priest never released another single. A disappointment and a mistake.
Into August, I finally got my copy of Cinderella. After one listen correctly predicted that “Don’t Know What You Got (‘Til It’s Gone)” would be the second video. I always looked forward to the new videos by bands, but like Judas Priest, Frehley disappointed me by never releasing a second video for Second Sighting. I thought there were a number of potential hits, such as “Fallen Angel”, “Time Ain’t Running Out”, “New Kind of Lover” and “Juvenile Delinquent”.
In Stratford, visiting my Aunt and Uncle, I picked up Live + 1, also by Ace Frehley. The Space Ace had two releases in 1988, with one being a live/studio EP. This weekend was the first time I experienced strong insomnia. I remember tossing and turning the entire night, not falling asleep once for even a minute. Seeing the sun come up. I was getting more and more upset that I couldn’t sleep, which made it worse.
Another cassette picked up that summer in Stratford was High ‘N’ Dry, which became an immediate favourite. Def Leppard were the biggest band in the world that summer. Hysteria was selling like hotcakes. It didn’t take off in ’87, but when “Pour Some Sugar On Me” hit, that was all it took. Many nights were spent listening to the radio at the lake, waiting for “Pour Some Sugar On Me”. Hysteria‘s singles were harder to predict. I didn’t expect there to be seven of them, but I definitely thought “Love and Affection” would make it before “Rocket” did.
We visited with our friends the Szabos, we played games, and we listened to a lot of music. I had my heavy metal, my sister had Glass Tiger and was starting to get into Def Leppard. Our Walkmen came with us everywhere. As the summer drew to an end we made a trip up to Tobermory to take the S.S. Chi-Cheemaun to Manitoulin island. I loved boats and islands but the trip was a bit of a bore. The gift shop didn’t have a lot to keep us entertained. I bought one of those black and white wrestling magazines, and a wooden postcard to send to nobody. It took a while for me to get my sea legs. I felt nauseous and wasn’t sure I could eat. Eventually the rocking of the boat became fun. The wind on the top deck was exactly like the “Jack, I’m flying!” scene in Titanic.
There was more, much more, but who can remember it all? Watching Rob Halford interviewed on the Pepsi Power Hour, recording it, and watching it over and over again. Seeing new Van Halen (“When It’s Love”) on TV. Suffering through rumours of Kiss breaking up. Looking for the latest Def Leppard 7″ singles at Zellers. So many memories, jumbled and out of order, hard to keep all straight.
The summer ended on a high, but what I didn’t know is that was only a precursor to my happiest school year, grade 11. Hair metal was peaking but it was about to get even bigger in ’89. Everything was in sync. Summer, music, school — all extraordinary in 1988.
After three days in paradise, returning to the stink of the city and the daily grind is depressing. It is a hard feeling to shake.
What makes it harder this year is the uncertainty. Because of Covid-19 there are no guarantees when we’ll be able to go back.
For three days, Covid was so far from our minds. No masks required when you’re isolated by yourselves in the woods. The only time I remembered Covid, it was too late. A neighbour was having car trouble and needed a lift to where he left his car on the highway. Without hesitation I told him to jump in and I drove him to his vehicle. Only on the way back did I remember Covid, and that we were not wearing masks in the car.
When I’m there in paradise, I’m up at the crack of dawn with a coffee in my hand, listening to the symphony of the forest.
When I’m back home, I can’t get up without hitting the snooze button a few times. The roar of traffic can be heard from the highway.
I hope you all are making the best of this summer as possible.
Like an old termite-ridden stump, summer 2019 is burned up.
We planned to spend as much of the summer outdoors as possible. We did that. I didn’t want to use the precious summer months pounding out words about music. So I wrote as much as I felt like. I didn’t get to comment as much. I had to sacrifice something to make the most of my favourite season. Music was there with us every day. I just wanted to enjoy the moments instead of figuring out how to write them down.
Hard to believe another summer has burned away.
There was no single artist who dominated this summer (like Blotto did in 2018). We enjoyed a variety of Van Halen, Judas Priest, Stompin’ Tom, Whitesnake, Deep Purple, Rainbow, and Helix without rhyme or reason.
It’s already getting colder. The nights are starting sooner. I can feel the end of the season creeping, and our summer at the lake is over.
GETTING MORE TALE #685: First Signs of Sausagefest
To quote Bon Jon Bovi, it feels somethin’ like summertime.
Ever since my first time back in ’06, summer is about Sausagefest. It’s just a month away now and I can already feel the cool waters of the Beaver River on my feet.
It has been hot in Ontario this past week. I have been sporting my hair long, but the sweaty heat is a severe deterrent. I originally wanted to try have bangin’ long hair at Sausagefest for the first time this summer. That’s not gonna happen. I have surrendered to the summer. The hair is gone. The first sign of Sausagefest has arrived: my shaved head.
Before & After
Other preparations are under way. Several weeks ago, Uncle Meat gave me the list of songs for me to introduce. I’m very excited because the ideas started poppin’ right away. I have been gathering funny audio bits for almost a year now, but I have pared them all down to the funniest. I learned from last year when I took everything to excess, and I think this time I have distilled all my stuff down to the crème de la crème. Trimmed away a lot of fat.
Just as, I hope, the Lamb Lord will be trimming the fat on his massive side of lamb for the BBQ once again.
Now that the hair decision has been made, I have been pondering some new purchases for this year’s Fest.
This will be the last Sausagefest for the old Pontiac. I’ll be getting something bigger in the fall. Space in the car is an issue, since I drive two people and all their stuff. But I want to make room for this baby below.
Someone brought Jon Snow’s sword one year, and I have been known to sport a machete on my belt. This year, perhaps a more practical weapon would be something that could light our way in the darkness after sunset: a Kylo Ren lightsaber.
These beauty “weapons” are dropping in price, and wouldn’t it be super cool to have one as a nightlight? It would sure beat glow sticks. Not a small investment, however, and you wouldn’t want it to get damaged up there.
What do you think, LeBrain readers? Is this a worthy investment? Stand up and be counted in the poll below.
Keep in mind I could use that money for many other, more practical things. New shoes. New glasses. A new tent. New Guns N’ Roses and Def Leppard box sets.
Check back and see where the poll leads and take part in the discussion in the comments.
Back to work on my recordings for song intros. Can’t wait to see the reactions this time.
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