"Balls to the Wall"
You're doin' some great things Joe. But this age situation is getting serious, man. Not a joke!
Happy Friday, music (and current events) fans! OK, lighter in tone and quicker in tempo this week.
And to review for newbies, CeeGees is a music musings s#!t sandwich with current events commentary as the filling. Most music commentary covers classic metal/rock/pop/country that I’m much much much too young to have consumed, I got the music bug from my way way way older mysterious cousin “Moneybags” Melvin Moore from Monaco. I just speak in the first person because it’s…easier that way.
THE TOP PIECE: The Sound Shoppe, My (i.e. Melvin’s) Music Sanctuary
For our second look at one of my (i.e. Melvin’s) old cassettes, we continue down from the top-left. It happens to be a big one for me, so thanks in advance for the indulgence.
What was your musical heaven growing up? Specifically the record store where you rushed to after school every Tuesday to devour all the new albums that had come out that day?
[EDITOR’S NOTE: For you younger CeeGeesies, “albums” were collections of songs recorded by artists at roughly the same time and released for purchase together as a single product. This was a physical product, something you could hold in your hands, the format being what we called a “compact disc” (or “CD”). If you’re really old you might have instead purchased in cassette tape format. Or if you’re really old, vinyl disk format…which I guess if you’re really young you might actually have heard of vinyl too since they are back in style.]
My heavenly haven for (mostly) hard rock was the Sound Shoppe right on the town square of Bryan, my 8,000-person home town nestled in Northwest Ohio farm country.
I could dance, and I wanted to! (I’d even leave my friends behind…)
My first-ever record purchase—not that I bought with my own money, but just that I consciously decided I wanted and asked my mom to consider buying—was, ironically, not a very good “album.” Men Without Hats just had the one big hit, “The Safety Dance.” But I wanted the big record, not the small record, so I asked for the full-length album rather than the single, not knowing what the difference was.
And I got it home and started to get really good at lifting the needle on the record player after “Safety Dance” was done playing and dropping it in the groove before the song so I could listen just to “Safety Dance” over and over instead of having to trudge through the rest of the record. (I should probably revisit that record, Rhythm of Youth, though—who knows, maybe it’s good?)
But that Men Without Hats transaction went down at a K-Mart. As MTV increasingly lured me into its programming, K-Mart’s limited selection quickly became insufficient. So we went allllll the way on the other side of town to the Murphy Mart. They had even less selection—although I did have Mom buy me my first-ever music magazine at Murphy Mart, a Hit Parader whose cover featured a band I was curious about called Kiss. I knew that in previous years they wore crazy makeup and were real-life superheroes (I was young enough to truly think they were literally real-life superheroes), but had never really considered that this rock “band” played music.
And when I got that new purchase home, that was all she wrote. The hardest-rocking song I’d gotten into to that point was The Police’s “King of Pain” (which still ties with Stewart Copeland’s “Miss Gradenko” as my fave Police tune). And sure, Sting looked cool amongst all those candles in the “Every Breath You Take” video. But he didn’t look like the guys in this magazine.
And it was indeed always all guys in these rock mags, of course—although Joan Jett did find a way to sneak into that first Hit Parader. (In the band listings on the cover, her name even secured a higher billing over both Kick Axe and Zebra.) But otherwise it was Dio, Judas Priest, Mötley Crüe, Ratt, Van Halen, Scorpions, Def Leppard.
A Rock ‘n’ Roll Alter on Which a Budding Metalhead Might Worship
One Friday, Dad picked me up from Grandma and Grandpa’s and asked if I wanted to stop by the music shop owned by a friend of his from high school. “Oh great,” I thought, “maybe we can walk out of there with another Creedence Clearwater Revival album, or maybe some Chicago. 🙄” (Of course, I secretly loved Creedence and Chicago, on my way to really loving Creedence and Chicago later on.)
The Sound Shoppe looked like such a tiny place from the outside, but it was deeeeep (at least to me). By then I’d graduated to preferring cassettes, so I—skeptically—shuffled past the vinyl record section and…
And there were tapes. And tapes. And tapes and tapes. Twice as much selection as K-Mart. I started scanning through the ‘A’ section and immediately found a record from Accept. I didn’t know what they sounded like or why they were called Accept (still don’t), but I knew they were featured in that Hit Parader magazine.
“Waitaminute. If this store has a record by this weird band led by this tiny little singer with the blond crew cut, foreign-sounding name, and head-to-toe camouflage outfit, then…”
Neither K-Mart nor Murphy Mart ever had any Kiss. I remember they had some Beatles compilations, and some Led Zeppelin. But…who the hell were the Beatles and Led Zeppelin?
It was the moment of truth. Time to skip ‘B’ through ‘J.’
And there they were. “They.” As in, multiple Kiss titles. But did they have the only Kiss album I’d ever heard of? Thanks to that February 19## Hit Parader [EDITOR’S NOTE: precise year omitted to protect author from suggesting he’s way, way older than he actually is], that album was called Animalize. I probably ignored the band’s more popular ‘70s releases like Destroyer, or the best live album in rock history, Alive! (don’t argue, just accept what you begrudgingly know is true). Because there it was. I would have picked Animalize anyway because it was the only tape with the actually supercool Kiss logo right there on the spine! And in COLOR, no less!
In the interest of time and risking sounding even more self-indulgent than usual, we can skip talking about the songs on that album, like the hit, “Heaven’s on Fire” (sacrilegious?). Or the song after it that had a cuss word in its very title!! (“Burn Bitch Burn,” a truly deplorable song lyrically, in all ways. But that opening riff…). Or the track that I was almost positive said the F-word, even though it wasn’t written in the lyrics (“Get All You Can Take”).
Let’s just say that purchase, and my dad’s assistance in helping me discover the Sound Shoppe, changed every last thing. My wiring was forever altered.
THE FILLING: Sorry, But…the Age Thing
Did you hear about Joe Biden getting cleared by the special prosecutor of any criminal wrongdoing in his own “stolen” classified documents case? The prosecutor pretty much said he wouldn’t bring a case because Ol’ Joe is too senile.
That’s the story that jumped out at me most in current events this week, that a high-profile public figure called out Biden’s ability to recall important dates and events from his vice presidency. Here’s a CBS News article:
Prosecutors said it was possible that Mr. Biden would "present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory." During his interview with Hur, the special counsel wrote that the president was confused about the timeline of events and was unable to ascertain questions about his time as vice president.
I hate to ask you this—especially if you’re reading this while winding down on a Friday night because I said I was going to take things more lightly this week—but if an alternative choice to Biden for president in November does not step forward, is Trump going to win?
I’m not ready to say that, but I can’t help but just resent it that no massive can’t-miss figure like Oprah, or Tom Hanks, or, I think, Jon Stewart will step forward. I know it’s a huge life undertaking and all, but dang, man, this is important! I don’t think I ever knew what “existential” meant before 2016. But I do now: this is an existential crisis. As in, if Trump wins, American democracy will no longer exist. We’ll be one giant leap away from Elysium (call-back from last week!).
I just can’t help but dwell on Biden’s showing in the Democratic debates four years ago, when he was but a young whippersnapper at 77. (He’ll turn 82 two weeks after the election this year.) he was a true and total disaster at times, making weird references like how poor moms can’t even drop the needle on a record and…something-something-something, lemme find what he said…….
Y’know, it’s not quite as cringeworthy as I remembered it, but I think that probably has to do with our becoming desensitized to his lack of sharpness.
As my dad said back in 2000 [paraphrasing]: “No, George W. Bush isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, but he’s surrounding himself with good people.” And that fact, however accurate it might (not) have been, made it OK to vote for Dubya.
As my mom said back in…well, back on Sunday, “But who’s the alternative to Joe, then?” And she’s right, the answer is nobody right now. And it should have us all very afraid. Because in this instance there do seem to be good people around him, but not to the extent that everybody knows who they are and is comfortable voting for Joe knowing that his cracker-jack staff is guiding him in the right direction.
As my younger roommate Dave has said, if the attitude toward Biden of the younger people he hangs out with is any indication, he doesn’t think Biden has a prayer in November.
THE BOTTOM PIECE: Pick a number, any number…
And as always (I know this is only the second time we’ve done it but let me have this, OK??), the bottom music piece of the CeeGees shizz sandwich requires an AI bot (Lord help us) pick a number from 1 to 965 that will determine which of the 965 songs I muse over in my Spotify playlist called “Recollection Records: Music That’s Entered My Head Out of Nowhere.”
And the wiener is: 712.
Oh geez. I mean, the image that first comes to mind is the cover of the cassette I got during a trip to Defiance, Ohio (you know, the big city! Because Mom and Dad had already bought me the five Kiss titles the Sound Shoppe had to offer.) But it wasn’t Peter’s entire solo album (released on the same exact day as his three other Kiss bandmates’ solo albums; this marked the beginning of the end of Kiss’ ‘70s heyday in my view). It was a German import (I’d already graduated to buying German imports, y’all!!) that featured (to Germans, I guess) the best three songs from each solo album.
I couldn’t believe my luck that this Sam Goody’s had this tape. I had seen the images of the four faces from the solo album covers before, but I didn’t know about the actual solo albums. Jackpot!
The tape had a weird yellow spine. And what was this “Casablanca Records?” I knew record labels were a thing from their gaining mention in Hit Parader, but I thought Kiss was on Mercury? (Casablanca was the infamous label mostly known for disco in addition to breaking Kiss.)
And the name of the tape was weird, “The Best of Solo-Albums?“ Even at that age I knew that wasn’t proper grammar. (And I am now cursed with the persnickety eye of a copy editor, doomed to annoy any would-be writers who might dare deliver so much as an errant emdash.) AND THAT LOGO! Where did the cool double S’s go?
Of course I didn’t know until later that this was, indeed, an imported album from Germany. And in designing an early version of Kiss’ logo, lead guitarist Ace Frehley (unknowingly, he insists) used two S’s that together looked remarkably like the Nazi officer’s SS.
So that logo was a no-go in Germany.
But anyway. I loved Gene Simmons’ “Radioactive” (spooky!), and Ace’s three songs from his solo album all ripped. But I wasn’t all that sure about the other stuff on the compilation. It was certainly no Animalize. (Now Paul Stanley’s solo album is a close second to Ace’s for me.)
That said, “Hooked on Rock ‘n’ Roll” was by far the best of the three Peter songs. But it was the last song on Side One of the tape, and thus would’ve required stop-and-go fast-forwarding to get to. So I’d usually just rewind back to the beginning of that side and re-listen to Ace’s songs. (Sorry, Peter! I think it’s a real nice album as an adult, the ‘50s throwback stuff just didn’t resonate with my zygote ears…)
That’s all I got! Thanks for reading!!
Yours,
~Dean
P.S. In the spirit of the modern-day media industry, I have not proofed the above, ‘cuz I just wanted to get it out there so it could get some traction and I could move on to the next thing. Maybe I’ll get to reviewing it if I get any spare time. “Perfection is the enemy of the good,” after all. 🤢
P.P.S. Accept band name history here!
If this band name history synopsis didn’t meet your expectations, this P.P.S. will self-destruct in exactly 10 seconds. Have a nice weekend!