A busy day today at Grab A Stack of Rock HQ, as I make yet another appearance on Tim’s Vinyl Confessions! When you’re done watching Tim and I on Slogan’s Rock and Metal Extravaganza, then check out Tim and I on the TVC!
Today’s topic was a super, super fun one: Top Ten Live Albums of the 80s. The stipulation: each album had to be released in the 80s, containing at least some material from the 80s. Some of my picks may prove to be oddballs, but this was a fun episode and informative as well. What are your top ten live albums of the 80s?
This is what too-kind-Tim had to say about the show:
Sir Mike of Ladano of @GrabAStackofRocK fame joins me to discuss some fab live albums that came out between 1980 and 1989. It’s our Top 10 live albums of the ’80s!
A longer episode, but worth it: A treasure trove of memories unfurled on Friday night. How did we discover heavy metal music? What did we listen to before that? What were our earliest metal records? Johnny Metal (My Music Corner on YouTube) came prepared with stacks upon stacks of rock (and Johnny Mathis). Metal Roger brought a younger perspective, highlighted by Elvis Presley and Slipknot. Reed Little left us spellbound by the stories he weaved of his Heavy Metal Origins! Growing up watching MTV and MuchMusic, together we reminisced about Kiss videos, getting music from friends, finding our musical identities and generally rocking out to heavy music. Family man Jex Russell joined in shortly after, with stories mix CDs, buying a turntable in 2004 (way before it became trendy again) and hearing the Heavy Metal soundtrack.
Several artists came up repeatedly. W.A.S.P., Dio, Kiss, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, Accept. Regardless of some of the age differences here, certain albums were common to our stories. Reed and I share a background involving a love of science fiction and discovering Kiss at an early age. We also shared an aversion to rock music that was from a prior generation, for “old people” such as…Deep Purple! Obviously we all grew in the years since, but when we first discovered metal, all of us went head first, all-in.
I hope you enjoy this show and this exceptional panel. See you in two weeks with Jex Russell on Good Friday at a special afternoon time!
GRAB A STACK OF ROCK With Mike and the Mad Metal Man
Episode 55: METAL: Point of Entry
We are back to live streaming this week! Tonight I am joined by John Clauser of My Music Corner, Metal Roger, Reed Little of the Contrarians, and Jex Russell joining in a little later at 8 PM! The topic tonight is a simple discussion: What was our “Point of Entry” into Heavy Metal music?
It’s an important question. We are all passionate about the music we love. We all have a story about how we got there. What’s yours?
We will show off some old records, and talk about how we discovered and fell in love with this genre of music. I will run some old promo clips from MuchMusic to illustrate our stories, and the fun will flow like molten lead!
Topics to cover:
What music did we listen to before metal?
What metal band or song changed that?
What were our first metal albums?
What were our earliest memories of listening to metal?
There will be vintage MuchMusic clips and lots of records. All this and more with our fantastic panel!
Friday March 15 at 7:00 P.M. E.S.T. / 8:00 P.M. Atlantic. Enjoy on YouTube,or (HOPEFULLY) Facebook!
Happy 50th episode to us! This was a special episode to me. Watching it back now, what made last night’s show really special wasn’t so much the cassettes. Rather, it was the stories! The memories came flooding back as we looked at piles of cassettes from ages past. With Dr. Kathryn’s recently exhumed cassingle collection on hand, we were joined by Jex Russell and John T. Snow for a nostalgic evening.
Playing “Bad Boys” by Inner Circle at a fancy wedding.
Buying cassingles by Van Halen in Frankenmuth, Michigan.
The value of Bryan Adams’ live B-sides.
Collecting a rare Cult cassette box set with all the extras.
Bands that Kathryn has seen live and owns on cassette, such as Roxette and Rod Stewart.
A US version of a Def Leppard single vs. the Canadian.
Songs/version that are still exclusive to the cassette format.
Whitesnake every Christmas.
Collecting bonus tracks on cassette and throwing temper tantrums when the CD didn’t have the bonus track.
Summery memories of Bon Jovi, ZZ Top, Cheap Trick, Britny Fox and Poison.
Ratt, Dangerous Toys, “Digalog”, “Q-Sound” and more.
We also took a peak at Tri-Con in Kitchener, where Dr. Kathryn met members of the Degrassi cast, Rob Daniels, and some Mandalorians. She had much praise for the Degrassi folks, and you’ll have to make sure you don’t miss this segment at the end.
Congratulations to Marco D’Auria, last week’s special guest, for the nomination of his film Mystique: Standing on the Firing Line at the Canadian Independent Film Festival! The DVD is on sale all February.
Stay tuned for John Snow’s “The Collection” starting February 20.
Bonus: We unboxed the recent reissue of the rare Starchild album Children of the Stars (featuring Greg “Fritz” Hinz of Helix), and a recent Rock Candy reissue of Europe’s The Final Countdown with more bonus tracks than before.
Apologies to Facebook; the Streamyard streams have not been working on Facebook at all and their team is still looking into it.
See you again next week for Too Much Music Part 2!
Welcome to the 50th episode of Grab A Stack of Rock! Special occasions require special guests.
Dr. Kathryn recently dug up her 80s cassette collection. Like her brother, she was interested in collecting rarities and B-sides on singles. We will see a number of cassette singles from the pop rock realm including Bryan Adams, Cheap Trick, Glass Tiger, and more. John Snow, Jex Russell and I will also be bringing the vintage cassette tapes for this special show & tell.
Additionally we have a slideshow from Tri-Con at the Museum in Kitchener last month, where Dr. K met some celebrities from Degrassi Jr. High, and saw some cool props from Doctor Who and Star Trek. There may have been some Mandalorian sightings as well!
Tune in tonight and take part in the comments with our special guests and cool collectibles from the 1980s.
Friday Feb 9 at 8:00 P.M. E.S.T. / 9:00 P.M. Atlantic. Enjoy on YouTube,or Facebook!
Music videos of the 80s could, in theory, be broken down into three major categories:
Conceptual videos. Sometimes with a storyline intercut. Occasionally the musicians got to act. Other examples have no musicians at all. (Iron Maiden’s “Can I Play With Madness”.) Conceptual were majority of music videos — usually combining the conceptual part with the band performing on some kind of stage. Not to be confused with…
Stage videos. Or, as Harrison calls then, “fake live videos”. Lipsynching the hits, on a stage, sometimes in front of a crowd, with no conceptual content. Sometimes these were simply live concert videos dubbed over with the album tracks. “Thrills in the Night” by Kiss, for example.
True live videos. Many Van Halen videos we grew up with, from “Unchained” to “Best of Both Worlds”, were live in concert — audio and video both. In some cases you could not buy these live tracks on any kind of release.
Of course there are more categories and sub-categories, just less significant. Some videos are entirely animated, which is more common today. We also have something new — the lyric video.
I can remember the sixth grade. Mrs. Peterson’s class. Van Halen’s 1984 was out and Quiet Riot were burning up the charts. These were pretty much the only bands I heard of. I hadn’t seen the music videos and I didn’t even know what Quiet Riot looked like. The only pictures I had ever seen of Quiet Riot were the buttons that the masked guy is wearing on his vest on the front cover of the cassette version of Metal Health. I squinted hard, but the Kevin DuBrow I imagined on that button looked nothing like the real deal.
The teacher was getting us started on simple surveys. To make it fun, she took a survey of all the most popular music in the class. Each kid got to name one favourite artist. I named Quiet Riot, and Kevin Kirby named Van Halen. Michael Jackson and Duran Duran were the top two.
As the discussion proceeded, many of the kids mentioned that they liked the music videos. Michael Jackson was at his peak, and he was the pioneer of the modern music video. Other artists like Culture Club made an impact with their image, which came across best on video. The teacher was curious about all this, so the class explained what a music video was. Something dawned on the teacher, and she exclaimed, “So to be a music star today, you not only have to be able to sing, but you also have to be able to act!”
No, and yes. You didn’t have to “act” per se, but you did have to be able to present yourself and play to a camera. David Lee Roth was not an according-to-Hoyle actor. Some would say he’s also not a singer, but he is a master at playing for the camera. Staring deep into the lens, gazing with the come-hither look, just so. Doing easily what other rock stars couldn’t, or didn’t want to.
So yes Mrs. Peterson, in a sense, to be a star in 1984, you had to be able to “act”. Video didn’t kill the radio star but it sure took a bite out of them.
Kids used to catch the videos on various cable shows. There was one called The Great Record Album Collection on WUTV that I sometimes caught before dinner. The Canadian movie channels (Superchannel, First Choice) would run music videos in the dead minutes after the credits rolled, to the top off the hour. Until MuchMusic came along, we Canadian kids didn’t have a one-stop-shop to watch all our music videos. Fortunately, having MuchMusic coincided with getting our first VCR.
Once we became seasoned in the way of the music video, we developed clear favourites. 12 and 13 year olds didn’t have a lot of money. We also had never attended a concert. Therefore, live videos with music that wasn’t what we were getting on the album were rarely favourites. We preferred the “fake live”, as Harrison the Mad Metal Man calls them. Then our immature ears could hear the songs clearly, and that would help us decide if were going to spend our nickles on a new tape.
Best of all though were the conceptual videos. Some were not good (just ask Billy Squier), but some really captured our imaginations. In Record Store Tales Part 206: Rock Video Night, we discussed some of my favourite clips to show to younger folks who weren’t there in the 80s. They were all conceptual clips. Many of them involved a band on a mission of some kind. There were so many of that kind. Thor had “Knock ‘Em Down”, Queensryche had “Queen of the Reich”, and Armored Saint had “Can U Deliver”. These videos featured, at least partially, a band on a quest. They also featured scantily clad women, and lots of “fake live” footage.
But the “fake live” footage often featured cool angles and close-ups. That meant we could examine the finer details of the outfits and guitars. You couldn’t just look up pictures of your favourite stars on the internet back in 1986. “I want hair like that!” Bob said about Eric Brittingham from Cinderalla. “That would look cool in red!” Meanwhile, I wanted Rob Halford’s leather jacket from the “Turbo” video. Of all these videos, we liked the Iron Maiden clip for “Wasted Years” best, which we watched in slow motion, pausing to identify every single Eddie. There were many we had never seen before.
We just weren’t as interested in purely live videos back then. For example, MuchMusic had two versions of Judas Priest’s “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin'”: the original and the live one from Priest! Live. After the live video came out, that’s the one they primarily played. It was disappointing because if I was going to only hear Priest on TV once that week, I preferred the original. Frankly, we didn’t buy a lot of live albums as kids. When we collected bands, we would try to get all the albums including the live ones. But when we wanted to buy one tape from a band, we didn’t go for live ones. Some live albums we heard scared us off from the format. The Song Remains the Same wasn’t the kind of thing we had patience for.
That all changed for me in highschool. I wanted to buy a Triumph album. It would be my first. On recommendation from a kid in my history class, I picked Stages. And it was like a lightbulb went off in my head. Virtually every song was awesome! In fact the only track that wasn’t was a studio track! And then I had the joy of making those live versions my first Triumph loves. When I got the studio renditions, they seems thinner and colder by comparison. I never had that experience before.
I wonder if any of this will be interesting to anyone at all. Videos are irrelevant today as far as heavy metal goes. Today, we are not interested in the same things we were in our youths. We don’t care what the singer is wearing or what the drummer did to his hair. We care more about how the band is sounding, and how the crowd is responding. A new music video by a metal band is not as interesting as pro-shot live footage from Wacken. We want to listen carefully for backing tapes, we want to see the band gel on stage, and we want to cheer along when it’s good.
It is incredibly fortunate to have grown up in the 80s, when videos were in their prime, and still be rocking today when all that stuff is available at our fingertips any time we need a blast of nostalgia. Younger readers will never know the tense excitement of hitting “record-pause” on a VCR and waiting for the premier of the newest video by Maiden, Priest, or Def Leppard. Seeing the carefully edited stage moves paired with salon-fresh hair. It was a glorious time even if was completely ridiculous.
That was intense! What follows is two hours of stories, friendship, music, hardship, music, childhood, Record Store Tales, music, and emotion. I don’t think I’ll be able to do a show like this one again. But I’m glad I did it and thank you for watching.
This episode may not be for everyone and I will warn you right from the start that there are some serious heavy, raw emotions about to outpour. This is your trigger warning. There is very little in this live stream that I have not written about in the past so if you have been reading Record Store Tales and Getting More Tale, then you’re all caught up anyway.
It has been a heck of a week here at LeBrain HQ and I can’t wait to tell you all about it. This week’s theme was suggested by Superdekes (I hope he doesn’t start sending me bills for all his ideas). I’m calling this one the Nostalgia Stream because, once again, we’re talking about the 80s. Music will be heavily involved, but what does that have to do with events of this week? You’ll find out tonight at 7:00 PM E.S.T.
There will be no lists, no notes. I’ll be freestyling it like I did the first couple shows, but all within the framework of this week’s theme. I’m really excited about this one. Expect the usual fun and frivolity, and hopefully lots of interaction. It’s the usual time and place at Facebook: Michael Ladano.
You gotta give Aaron from the KMA credit for several things. One, for bringing the Community together. Two, for his thoughtful and generous nature. And three, apparently, for clairvoyance.
Long before I decided on this week’s KISS theme, Aaron sent me a birthday gift. You won’t believe it. Clairvoyance? Obviously!
This was an action-packed show and to help you navigate, here are the highlights:
I included the pre-show portion of the stream in this video. To hear two awesome Max the Axe tunes, “My Daddy Was a Murderin’ Man” and “Magnum P.I.“, go to 0:01:20 of the stream.
For the epic Aaron Unboxing, check out 0:12:20 of the stream.
To begin 80s KISStory, go to 0:18:20 and rock!
For a sneak preview of a comedy bit that I recorded for Sausagefest 2020 (spoiler free), skip to 0:25:00.
To check out a host of cool ReAction figures, go to 1:26:00. They Live, Ghost’s Papa Emeritus, Aliens, and the Transformers.
When I need a particular piece of audio hardware today, I just have to decide what I want and order it. It’ll be at the house two days later. Oh, I need some more RCA cables to plug my tape deck into my PC? No problem. What colour and how long? We have become soft and spoiled today, with the convenience of everything we desire at our fingertips. Want a frozen turkey delivered to your front door? No problem. I’ll get you a turkey. Or RCA cables. Anything.
In the 1980s, we had to improvise.
When I first discovered music, the second most important music-related activity (after listening of course) was taping. It was the easiest, cheapest way to get new music and there was a social aspect to it as well. You had to borrow an album from someone, go to their house to tape it, or vice versa. Most kids had a budget price dual tape deck. I had a single-deck Sanyo, eventually getting a dual deck boom box for Christmas of 1985. By today’s standards, recording tape-to-tape on a cheap deck yields horrendous results. In 1985, it was the next best thing to owning the album yourself. If you were in a hurry, you could use the high speed dubbing feature but that always created speed and warble issues that we could even hear as kids. Regular speed dubbing was the only acceptable way to copy a tape. However sometimes we had to think outside the box.
The most notable instance of improvising with what we had was using speakers as impromptu microphones. It’ll work if you have nothing better to use. We used speakers as microphones frequently back then, but what about copying music tape to tape?
Let’s say I was making a mixed cassette, and that mix was going to have some live songs on it. There was no practical way to do a fade-in or fade-out on a low end dual tape deck. In this case, I would use a Walkman as an audio input to my recording deck. The sound was, shall we say, harsh. But you could do it. You could take a cable and go right from the headphone jack to the microphone-in jack on the deck, but that sounded pretty terrible. A better way was to use a cable that had a headphone jack on one end, split to RCA left and rights on the other. But I didn’t have one of those. I had to make it myself by splicing one to the other. Improvisation! We couldn’t just buy everything we wanted. Cables are still expensive today and finding the right ones in stock at a given time wasn’t a guarantee. You made due with what you had until you could afford to do better. Using the Walkman’s volume control, I could now fade in any live track I wanted. A small thing, but I was already ambitious. I enviously eyed pictures of mixing boards in guitar magazines.
Another issue I had was recording vinyl. I had never heard of a preamp. But I realized that my old turntable sounded better when plugged into something else first. My parents had an old receiver with an 8-track deck and radio. The 8-track didn’t work anymore but I used that gigantic unit to boost the signal from my turntable, before going into my tape deck. The sound was messy to say the least, but at least I was able to listen to and record my LPs.
I had a little shoebox full of stuff I needed to push my audio capabilities, a small but mighty toolbox of essentials. A tape head demagnetizer. Isopropyl alcohol and lint-free wipes. A record cleaning kit. A little magnetic screwdriver for taking apart cassette tapes. A gnarly pair of grey RCA cables that were the top of the line that I could afford. My prized possession: an RCA Y-connector. That baby enabled me to take a mono signal, like from the family VCR, and split it to faux-stereo for recording to cassette. Until we got a stereo VCR in the early 1990s, that Y-connector saw weekly usage on my Saturday mix tape sessions.
I had a little soldering kit that I could use to splice wires together, but one thing that I could never fix was a cheap set of Walkman earphones. The kind with the little foam earpieces. Utter shit, but that’s what we all had. The headphone jacks on those things would not take long to start shorting out. You’d go from a stereo signal to a mono signal to no signal back to mono without even moving it around. I tried everything and could never fix those damned shitty earphone cords. So you’d buy a new pair for $10 at the local Bargain Harold’s. Those would be good for about a week before starting to give you problems. Otherwise, everything that broke had to be fixed.
Maintaining your tape deck at home was essential, hence the isopropyl alcohol. Hold your breath, dab some of that on a lint-free cloth, and gently clean the rollers and capstans inside your treasured boom box. It would be remarkable how black that cloth could get. I used my tape deck a lot. I was constantly cleaning it, but it always had speed issues. This was probably more due to poorly made, tightly wound cassette tapes than the deck itself. Still, those old Sanyo tape machines were not designed to be worked as hard as I worked mine. If I had known what a Nakamichi Dragon was back then, I might have been more motivated to get a part-time job! But such machines were not available on an eighth grade allowance, nor was such a beast even known in these parts.
Using my limited resources, I was able to listen to and record from every format I had. My turntable was so old that I could even play 16 and 78 rpm records (not that I had any). Then a new format came along that slowly but surely digitised my entire world: the compact disc. I received my first CD player/tape deck for Christmas 1989, a mere four years after my first dual cassette. An eternity in teenager time. A significant fraction of my life to that point was spent meddling with tape decks and cables trying to get them to do what I wanted them to do. Now this compact disc comes along, allowing me to hear the most perfect audio I’d even been exposed to.
My first CD player on top of an old Lloyd’s 8-track/radio/receiver. The old setup!
I remember playing one of my first CDs, Motley Crue’s Dr. Feelgood, for my buddy Bob and his brother John. I skipped ahead to “Time For Change”, and then fast-forwarded to the fade out.
“Just listen to that!” I said with a proud look on my face, as I cranked the volume all the way to 10.
After a pause, John asked “What are we supposed to be hearing?”
“The silence! Listen to that silence!” There was no static on the digitally recorded, mixed and mastered fade out.
Bob and John weren’t as excited as I was, but the compact disc represented a new standard. The stuff I had wasn’t going to cut it forever. Soon, as long the source was digital, I was making mix tapes that sounded better than store bought.
As much as the results were often dicey, improvising with audio equipment was tremendously fun. Working with your hands, the satisfaction of getting something to work the way you wanted…it was a fun way to spend a Saturday in the 80s. Even if the only people who got to hear your handiwork were a handful of your neighbourhood friends and classmates.
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