test for echo

#943: Irate With a Beeper!

RECORD STORE TALES #943: Irate With a Beeper!

There was once a time before we had our infamous “no questions asked” return policy.  In 1996, we were able to…shall we say, “express ourselves” more freely as managers of Record Stores.

We learned from the best, and we didn’t take kindly to someone trying to rip us off.   Some time in early September 1996, I received a call from T-Rev at his own store.  “Mikey,” he said, “Just a warning.  There’s a guy coming your way with the new Rush CD, that he wants to return.  Now I had a look at it, and it is just hacked.  There was no way he opened it like that.  I wouldn’t let him return it.  You’ll see what I mean when he gets there.  He’s this little short guy with glasses and short hair.  You’ll know him when you see him.”  A prepared myself for the Rush fan with Napoleon complex.

The new Rush album, Test For Echo, was received with mixed reactions.  We started seeing used copies early on, traded in by ordinary fans (albeit impatient ones) who simply didn’t like it.  T-Rev and I both thought it was a step down from Counterparts, while acknowledging that sometimes a Rush album needs time.  We liked a couple tracks, and disliked a few as well.  (“Dog Years” and “Virtuality” were on the shit list.)  We were not surprised to see people returning it, but Nerdlinger here was unique.

The little guy stormed in, straight up to the counter, and asked to return the Rush CD.  “I don’t like it,” he said simply.  I dutifully opened the case and, as T-Rev has warned, the disc was mangled.  Probably due to a car CD deck, which were common and had a habit of murdering discs.

“I’m sorry,” I began, “but I can’t take this back.  It’s seen some pretty serious use and it’s scratched up really bad.”  I didn’t know what else to say.  “I’m sorry,” I added lamely.

He was irate.  “‘Seen some serious use’?” he quoted back to me.  “How?  I just got it at your other store.  It’s a day old!”

Customers always asked “how” their CDs got scratched.  How the fuck am I supposed to know what he did with it?

“I don’t know how it got scratched up this bad, but they don’t come this way out of the shrinkwrap.”  I grabbed our store play CD to show him.  “See, this is one we just opened a few days ago and we’ve been playing it every day.”  He glared through his glasses at our copy.

He insisted he didn’t scratch it, that he bought it that way from T-Rev’s store and he wouldn’t return it.

I didn’t know what else I could say.  “Well, I showed you what they look like coming out of the shrinkwrap.”  Then, poking the bear just a smidge, I chided, “Did you drop it?”

“NO, I didn’t drop it!” he expressed in a mocking tone.  Knowing he was not going to get anywhere with me, he left.  And, much like many tenacious customers of his guilt-free mindset, he returned later that day on the night shift.  A time he assumed I wouldn’t be working.  But he didn’t get anywhere with the night staff.  They knew something wasn’t right about it and asked him to return when the manager is in.  So, like any douchebag worth his salt, he left a pager number for me to call the next day.

“Oh, joy” I said to myself upon seeing the note waiting for me.

I never called a beeper before.  I noted the occasion for its novelty.

A short while later, Nerdlinger stormed back into the store with his Rush CD.  He must have been so dejected upon seeing I was the manager.

And so for a second time I refused to return his CD, and he did the usual expected temper tantrum.  I’m never shopping here again, I’m telling all my friends, I’m this and you’re that.

And life got incrementally better, knowing I’d never have to see that fucking Nerdlinger again.

 

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#826: Promo Postcards (From the Edge of Rock)

The trick is hanging onto the good stuff and throwing out the junk!  I’ve accumulated a lot of junk and not always made the wisest decisions when I throw things out.  Keeping things that don’t take up a lot of space is easiest, and postcards take up very little space.

These postcards came from a variety of sources and only one could be from the Record Store!  I’ve said it many times:  a used CD store gets nothing promotional.  Record companies assumed we would just turn around and sell it.  Which we made a point of never doing anyway.  But we rarely got anything from bands that I liked when we did get promo material.  It was the 90s after all.

I have two of these Test For Echo postcards from Rush.  You can tell I didn’t get them from my store since they’re from Future Shop for a MuchMusic contest.  I don’t know how I ended up with two.

I also have two of these Slik Toxik postcards.  My best guess is that these were packed inside my subscription of M.E.A.T Magazine.  There were perks to subscribing and I didn’t let my subscription lapse.  Slik Toxik were one of M.E.A.T’s pride and joys.  They were behind the band from a very early stage.

Another pair of postcards!  Deadline sent these to me for my birthdays in 1994 and 1995!  Little did they know that I’d still be promoting their band, 25 years later and long after they disappeared.

Then and now, I think this is a really cool touch.  It’s not like today, seeing somebody’s birthday on Facebook and wishing them a happy one.  Somebody had to keep a file with the fan club birthdays and mail these out at their expense.  Glad I hung onto these treasures; I even have my membership card!

 

Finally, the last few postcards here are from a mixture of sources.  I was a Sven Gali fan club member, and for Christmas they sent out of a fully signed postcard.  My membership must have expired shortly after.  The W.A.S.P. card is from their dreadful K.F.D. album, not a disc that I particularly treasure.   This is the only one that could have come from the Record Store, though it’s an unusual item for us.  And the Star Trek shuttlepod is there because I had room on the scanner bed.  No story; no idea where it came from.

REVIEW: Geddy Lee – My Favourite Headache (autographed)

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GEDDY LEE – My Favourite Headache (Atlantic, 2000)

I have owned this album twice now. I bought it when it first came out, then a couple years later Lemon Kurri Klopek hooked me with up with a copy autographed by Ged himself! As a diehard Rush fan, this album is one of my prized possesions.

I just don’t enjoy it as much as Geddy’s Rush discs.

The title refers to Geddy’s love of music — a source of satisfaction and frustration, his “favourite headache”. Personally, I was disappointed by the album. I thought the songwriting was not up to standard, treading familiar waters already crossed on Test For Echo. The playing is competant enough. I mean, you can’t go wrong with Matt Cameron and Jeremy Taggart on drums, can you? Ben Mink is a fine multi-instrumentalist, but there is no shredding like you’re used to on Rush albums.  (Geddy also plays guitar himself.)

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Can a listener separate Geddy as a solo artist from Rush? It is very difficult to do. Whatever Geddy writes, sings, and plays is going to automatically sound something like Rush. But without Alex and Neil, of course it won’t sound exactly like Rush. And that is more the fault of the listener (me) than the artist (Geddy). I personally cannot separate the two.

There’s some monstrous playing here — just listen to that opening bass on “My Favourite Headache”.  There’s also some decent riffs (“The Present Tense”).  There’s some passion (“Working at Perfekt”) but very little that stands out as memorable, as classic, or something you just crave to hear again.  In general the songs here are all pleasant, solid rockers (with a few slower tunes). Geddy’s lyrics are weak at times (“Home on the Strange”) but his singing is good and the production is excellent.

Best tune:  The final one, “Grace to Grace” which is the only one that really cooks.

The cover art is pretty disappointing. I’m sure it meant something to someone along the way, but to me it’s just a generic cover that could have been on any album in the faceless morass of the 1990’s.

3/5 stars. Not bad, but no stand-outs.

Part 154: Cassettes Part IV – LeBrain’s Tapes (What Remains)

RECORD STORE TALES Part 154:  

Cassettes Part IV – LeBrain’s Tapes (What Remains)

I used to have a lot of tapes.  So many, that T-Rev converted my closet doors to shelving, just to store my numerous cassettes!  It was quite a feat of engineering on his part.

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If you’ve read the other three parts of this series on cassettes, then you’ve already seen some of the awesome artwork that T-Rev used to come up with for his tapes.  Doing those articles got me nostalgic, but very few of my own tapes remained.  A year or two before I met Mrs. LeBrain, I briefly dated this one girl who was getting into hair metal.  I had succeeded in replacing most of my tapes on CD (although still incomplete; I need a copy of Live Fast, Die Fast by Wolfsbane, and Phenomenon 1).  All my tapes were redundant, and I gave her boxes and boxes full of them.

God knows where those tapes are now.  I doubt she took them back home to Thunder Bay when it was all over, they probably ended up in a landfill.  No big loss really, the only shame of it is that, like T-Rev, I used to make a lot of my own custom artwork.

Mrs. LeBrain and I were visiting her mom yesterday, and I found some of my old Beatles tapes that I had made, at her place!  Her dad drove a delivery van with nothing but a tape deck inside.  He was more than happy to receive my old Beatles tapes, and he loved them.  And there they were, still at the house, complete with my computer generated J-cards.  Nothing elaborate, although I did paste the cover for Abbey Road onto that tape.

This inspired me to dig through some boxes here, and see if I had any of my own tapes left.  Surely there must be something here, with some of my own custom cover art!  There was just a handful left, stuff that I wouldn’t have parted with at the time, and lo and behold, there was my old artwork.  These sure brought back memories!

Back in the early record store days, cassette was my primary medium.  They were portable, you could leave them in the car and not worry about them getting banged up, so I recorded everything onto cassette.  It wasn’t until I had left the record store in 2006 that I got my first car with a CD deck.  Before then, I had one of those adapter kits to play a discman in the car, but it sounded shite.  I was glad to find the following treasures tucked away in a box!

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Ahh, Spinal Tap.  A Spinal Tap Reunion was recorded from a 1992 TV special.  Unavailable on DVD today, as far as I know.  That’s a shame.

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I bought Grande Rock by The Hellacopters on vinyl, to get that bonus track “Angel Dust”.  Or, more accurately, one of my record store compatriots got it for me at Orange Monkey Music in Waterloo.  I dutifully recorded it to cassette without making elaborate packaging, but I did put some effort into the cassette spine.

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You Fat Bastards by Faith No More was the full show that was released on CD in truncated form on the Live at the Brixton Academy CD.  This was from a VHS release.

Guns N’ Roses did a couple cool TV specials.  I recorded Live at the Ritz off T-Rev, who stuck on some demos for bonus tracks.  The cover was made by adapting an old Appetite For Destruction J-card.  I think this turned out pretty cool.  Invade Paris! was a TV special from 1992.

These two Maiden tapes were from VHS releases.  It’s a shame that Raising Hell was never released on a CD.  Here’s hoping the band will put that out on a future box set.  It was Bruce’s “final” show.  I just edited out the crap sections with “magician” Simon Drake.   Maiden England is also taken from VHS, but this is the full show.  The CD release omitted two songs:  “Can I Play With Madness”, and “Hallowed Be Thy Name”.  My cassette didn’t!  I thought my J-card for Maiden England turned out pretty cool, using an old Seventh Son cover as its basis.

Unfortunately, this is all that remains of my old cassette art.  I did some much more elaborate things, which Thunder Bay Girl probably tossed out.  One was for Savatage’s Dead Winter Dead.  When I recorded that one to cassette, I actually painted the gargoyle onto a J-card.  Wish I kept that one.  Rush’s Test For Echo may have been the most elaborate one I’ve done.  Using some old cardboard and a full-page ad for the album, I created my own digipack for that cassette.  It would be nice to still have.  Ahh well.

It seems funny, in today’s age of mp3 files and players, that a format as crappy as cassette was anyone’s main format.  But there you go.  Before I could play CD’s in the car, they were the best way to bring music with me.  I’ve always believed a music collection was for showing off as much as listening to, plus I enjoyed making the artwork.  I’m glad some still survives today!