the beatles

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!

Part 108: Building the Store, Part 2

RECORD STORE TALES PART 108: Building the Store, Part 2

Last time, Statham posted something about a dream he had, of us putting together our own record store. I wish I could have had the experience of opening a store without doing work!  The reality of it varied.  On the couple of times I helped set up a store, it was hardly glamorous.

The first time was when we opened up the first store that I managed.  It was the biggest one so far, lots of stock, all crap. Junk. Shite.  Basically what we did was, maybe starting six months in advance,  just buy lots and lots and lots of stock.  Before long we had, I dunno, maybe 5000 discs, all garbage.  Dozens of Jann Arden, Spin Doctors, Michael Bolton…I had so much Michael Bolton that he took up three fucking rows!  I even had rare Michael Bolton.  Nobody had rare Michael Bolton!  Nobody wanted rare Michael Bolton!  Then you’d go to the Metallica section, nothing.  Kiss, a couple copies of Kiss My Ass.  And we had soooo much country.  We had buckets of country.  And rap artists that you nor I have ever heard of. 

Waltz back over to the rock section and browse the classics.  Did we have any Floyd?  Nothing.  Led Zeppelin?  Just the tribute album, Encomium.  Meat Loaf?  Bat 2, but not Bat.  We had a couple of Rush discs, like Counterparts, but nothing from the 70’s.  No Maiden.  No Miles.  No Dylan.  No Hendrix.

We had no standardized pricing scheme back then.  So, if I was pricing Eric Clapton’s Unplugged at $9.99, the guy next to me might have priced it at $11.99 because maybe he liked it more.  It was very subjective.  Sometimes you knew what a CD was worth brand new and based it on that, sometimes it was so common that it didn’t matter, and sometimes nobody had a fucking clue.  We’d try to fix the pricing it as we went, but it was slow.  After we opened, a customer would come up with three copies of the same album.  “This one is $8.99, this one $9.99, and this one $11.99.  Is that because one is more scratched?”  Logical question!  But no, we just cocked up.

It took weeks to manually input and price all those discs.  Shelving them took a couple more days. Making the header cards, setting things up, all told we were at it for maybe a month.  Then the big day came and we did our opening.  We were only half-equipped:  there was no second computer yet, and only half of our CD players for listening station had been bought.  Signs were still arriving to be put up.

I’ll never forget our sign that showed up that said, “WE PAY CSAH FOR YOUR USED CDS!” 

Regardless of how crappy the stock was, it sold!  I couldn’t believe it!  There were only a few decent albums and I figured once they were gone, that was it.  That wasn’t the case at all.  People kept buying the old rap and country discs.  Tanya Tucker?  Check!  We had lots!  And people were buying it!

Then, used stuff started coming in at a rapid pace.  Crazy stuff too.  I remember this one huge Tangerine Dream box set coming in, on the Thursday of the first week.

After we opened and good stuff started coming in by the box full, all the hard work seemed like it was paying off.  But the setting up was long and tedious, and I couldn’t stand Todd, who was also on setup duty.  But who gives a crap?  I spent weeks doing nothing but data entry while listening to music (our own music, which we brought in – of course).  I rocked a lot of Deep Purple those weeks.  It was awesome.

I remember that I had just found two Purple albums that I wanted:  Concerto For Group and Orchestra, and King Biscuit Flower Hour.  I also rocked Purpendicular, which had just come out, as much as I could.   Todd didn’t understand the music at all.  All he was interested in listening to was Floyd, nothing else.  He played Bush once or twice, but otherwise it was all Floyd.  He really, really liked P.U.L.S.E.  And he just murdered Floyd for me, for a long time.

When I listen to albums like Concerto and Purpendicular, it brings me right back to doing data entry in that store.  Not a bad soundtrack to work to.

Part 101: Record Store Long Weekends

There was never a guarantee that you were going to get a long weekend off.  But when you did, and the temperature was above 12 degrees, you went to the cottage!

Going to the cottage, in the era when I only had a cassette deck in the car, meant picking out the best “road tapes” for the mood.  Depending on the time of day (some music works best on evening drives), my favourites for the cottage were these:

SLOAN: 4 Nights at the Palais Royale

From driveway to driveway, this album is exactly the length of the drive!  Plus it’s one of my top five live albums of all time. Day or night, this was my #1 pick.

QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE:  Songs for the Deaf

It’s pretty much designed for a road trip, but it also just captures that vibe of the long highways at night, and serves to keep you awake!  This was a night drive album.

BLUE RODEO:  Tremelo

Also a night album.  Very mellow, for those laid back cottage weekends.

THE BEATLES:  The Beatles (the White Album)

I don’t always listen to the Beatles.  But when I do, I prefer the White Album.

JOHNNY CASH:  At San Quentin

My favourite Cash album of all time.  Of all time!  This was great for the weekends that I drove my grandma up.  I have it in box set form now, so it’s a real nice extended treat today.

Have a great, safe long weekend, folks!

Part 46: Integrity Mix

 

 

 
Integrity Mix.

This was an idea that came from Kevin.  For a while there, he was making a new mix CD every month, made up of the best stuff he was listening to in the last 30 days or so.  The idea was, you’d have a neat chronicle of your most impactful listening experiences.  And a good mix CD in general.

Knowing that I was into making mix discs, Kevin passed this concept down to me.  I held it faithfully for three months.  Then it became every other month…every six months…when I felt like it…etc.

But, the end result is, I do have a chronicle of whatever period I’m capturing on those discs.

And I called them Integrity Mix.

For example, I have one here that was made in October of 2004.  It has goofy stuff (William Shatner).  It has stuff that reminded me of friends (“Mr. Bad Guy” by Freddie Mercury) and enemies (“Asshole” by Gene Simmons).

But there’s also a subtle common thread in some of the songs.  This was during a long stint in Oakville.  I was sinking pretty low at that time.  I was spending 2 1/2 hours commuting every day, minimum.  I was working long hours and I wasn’t eating right.   I was stressed beyond my limit.  But mostly I was lonely and homesick a lot of that time.

So you see songs with titles like “Wish I Could Be There”, “Comin’ Home”, “We Stand Alone”, “To Be Alive Again”, “By the Grace of God” and “The Battle Rages On”.  The sounds are equally melancholy:  “Loosen My Strings” by Deep Purple is an example, but it doesn’t get any sadder sounding than “This is the Day” by Captain Beefheart.  The mix disc from the following month, November, got even darker.

On the other hand, I have the mix CD from the month Jen and I got married.  It has tunes on it by Kiss (“And Then She Kissed Me”), The Darkness (“I Believe in a Thing Called Love”), the Beatles (“Here Comes the Sun”), and Zappa (“Peaches en Regalia”) which to me reflect a much more positive state of mind!

It’s cool that I have those discs, and they are always a great listen no matter what state of mind you’re in.  Think about it:  It’s the best of the best of the best shit you were listening to for any given month of your life.  I don’t get embarassed by what I was listening to 10 years ago, and we always have a blast playing these in the car.

Make your own Integrity Mix.  Try it!

REVIEW: The Beatles in Mono (box set)

THE BEATLES – In Mono (box set, 2009, currently $260.00 on amazon.ca)

I’ll be brief here, mainly because this is The Beatles, and this music is so ingrained into everybody’s psyches now.   Nobody wants to see me blather on about these songs.  I was very happy with my purchase of The Beatles in Mono, despite the price. I was not lucky enough to get a first run, but Amazon hooked me up with the second run when it was in stock.

The Beatles in Mono is, as far as I know, a complete collection of every mono mix they’d ever done. The Beatles were hands-on with their mono mixes, where George Martin and his staff tended to helm the stereo mixes. This is, therefore, the mixes that the Beatles intended you to hear back in the 60’s. Playing them remastered on a modern stereo today makes them sound that much more fierce and aggresive, noticeably different from their stereo counterparts. In addition many of the actual mixes are drastically different. “Helter Skelter” is the one in particular that jumped out at me. It sounds like a completely different version of the song. Really refreshing after only having the stereo version for 20+ years!

There are some Beatles albums not included in this set, but that’s OK. Let It Be, Abbey Road, and Yellow Submarine were not mixed in true mono. The mono mixes once available of those albums were not mixed by the band.  They were just “fold downs” of the stereo mixes. I guess if you were dying to hear them, you can make your own fold-downs from The Beatles in Stereo set. What is included here is a new compilation called the Mono Masters (a companion piece to the Past Masters) which includes all the non-album mono mixes, and some previouly unreleased ones like “Across The Universe”.

This box set is for anyone who calls themselves a true Beatles fan, anyone who wants to own the versions that the Beatles themselves mixed, or any completist.

Is it worth the price? Well, the packaging is very nice, each CD is housed in its own little duplicate LP packaging with the white, square box. That means you get the full booklet from Magical Mystery Tour and all the goodies enclosed within the White album. Very nice. The CDs slide in and out, which may not be to your personal taste especially after spending this much money. The call, ultimately, is yours. There is also an exhaustive booklet to consider.

5/5 stars

Part 1: The Beginning – “Run to the Hills”

 

RECORD STORE TALES PART 1:  The Beginning – “Run To The Hills”

I still remember the first time I heard Iron Maiden.

Maybe it’s this way for some when they remember the first time they heard the Beatles, or the Stones. Or for those younger, maybe it’s like the first time they heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or “Fake Plastic Trees”. The first time I heard “Run To The Hills” was monumental to me, but I didn’t realize yet what the massive impact would be.

It was Christmas of 1984. I was a mere 12 year old looking for musical direction.  I hadn’t been much interested in music prior to that.  I had albums by Quiet Riot and Styx, but my majority of my collection was John Williams’ movie soundtracks.

I really wasn’t interested in music yet. I had yet to dedicate myself to any particular style. At the same time that I would listen to Quiet Riot, I somehow also thought Billy Ocean was cool.

Well, the video for “Loverboy” was nifty….

I had always been kinda afraid of heavy metal bands.  Guys that wore spikes, like Judas Priest or Iron Maiden. Kiss literally scared me when I was buying my first comics (there were always ads for Kiss posters inside comic books), and I know I wasn’t the only one. The neighbor kid was scared to death of Gene Simmons spitting up blood. Bands like Maiden and Priest looked like a bunch of hooligans, definitely up to no good, definitely out to hurt people, including kids.

Boxing Day, Bob came over. It was tradition, every Boxing Day, Bob and I would get together and compare our Christmas scores. Bob scored a cassette tape called Masters Of Metal Volume 2 and I was given an Atari game called Snoopy Vs. The Red Baron.

In my basement, we sat down to play the video game. Our goal was to take the game as far as humanly possible, to see what happened when you shot down so many planes that the Atari didn’t have enough characters to display it anymore. (Incidentally, disappointingly, like most Atari games, it just starts counting up from zero again.) We sat there playing that game so long that Bob had to go home and eat lunch, then come back. But what he left behind while eating was Masters Of Metal.

“Run To The Hills” came on. Some people speak of moments of clarity: That was my moment. The music was fast, powerful, dramatic and melodic. The lyrics were cool and you could mostly sing along. Most importantly, the music and lyrics seemed to combine with the game experience. When Dickinson was singing “Run to the hills, run for your lives!” it meshed perfectly!  Too bad Aces High wasn’t out yet!

A moment like that could quickly pass into history and be forgotten for most people.  As the day wore on, I realized that I had found something. This music kicked ass!  I was brought up on movie soundtracks.  This stuff had the same drama, but with guitars!   This was even better than Quiet Riot and AC/DC, so I said at the time.

It didn’t end there of course. We played through Masters Of Metal, finding a few more diamonds. “You’ve Got Another Thing Coming” By Judas Priest was definitely a close second to “Run To The Hills”. We were fixated on Accept’s “Balls To The Wall”.  We’d play it over and over again laughing hysterically at the lyrics.  But the song still rocked!  I can still remember when MuchMusic started the Power Hour, and they played that video.  There’s little Udo Dirkscheider, in his camo pants, and crew cut, rocking with these skinny German guys with long hair.  It was fucking hilarious!

We skipped (what we then thought was) the crap…Lee Aaron, Anvil, Triumph.  I grew into them later, particularly Triumph.  Something to do with double guitars, maybe.  I digress.  We always came back to Iron Maiden.  Always.

Bob would bring other tapes over as the months and years went by. W.A.S.P., Motley Crue, Black Sabbath. Now Bob’s a father of four who doesn’t listen to rock music anymore, which makes me sad in a way.  I’m not sad for him, because he’s got a great family and always has.  I’m more sad because I don’t think he can ever appreciate what impact our shared experiece of rocking out had on me.  Listening to Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, and the rest.  The was it, the beginning.