My god Facebook can be an ugly little sandbox to play in. It seems populated by narcissistic bullies who feel it is their right to yell as loudly as possible about what their beliefs are and try to shame you into seeing things their way. There is no compromise, there is no fear of repercussions, and there is little or no consideration of other’s feelings. If it was a bar I walked in to I wouldn’t even order a drink.
A short rewind this week to May of 2005 and a road trip to Cleveland to see the re-united New York Dolls. It first appeared in Gasoline Magazine which was owned by Darryl Fine from the Bovine. It was a great full-colour glossy free mag but ran out of money when the ads stopped coming. Darryl, photographer Laurence Laberge, and I loaded into my Toyota Highlander and headed off to the home of the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame.
All the sins blamed on “disco” (such as it was at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s) — cocaine, amyl nitrate, sexually transmitted disease, The Ritchie Family, Andy Gibb — are nothing compared to the ugliness of “Disco Sucks.” The stigma’s so powerful that even now, nobody would dare call it disco. It was “house” for a while, and these days people call it “EDM,” a clumsy catch-all acronym that stands for “electronic dance music,” although it sounds more like another disco-era sexually transmitted disease. (“I’m sorry, but the only remedy for EDM is a series of painful injections, taking this foul-smelling tincture six times a day and applying this stinky salve to the affected area…”)
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When I was growing up in Stockton California, music was the connecting tissue between friends, and one of the most important touchstones of our daily lives. Everybody listened to the radio. Everybody went to the dances and the house parties and brought their favourite 45s to share in basement rec rooms and around the pool. Everybody had transistor radios. Everybody went to the record stores and spent their babysitting or paperboy money on the latest records. We discussed our favourite artists and songs, we debated the worth of Elvis VS Boone, Beatles VS Stones, and everything in-between. We were ravenous…and constantly on the lookout for music that touched us, made us think, made us dance, made us alive…and kept us appeased until the next release from our current heroes.
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Kids today will never know the joy of endlessly browsing in a record store with no set agenda. The hours that were happily wasted on Saturday afternoons at Sam The Record Man, Records On Wheels, A&A’s or The Record Peddler are immeasurable. It was time well spent. CD shopping is just not the same and digital shopping/hunting is an aural and not visual experience. The album cover was a great size, 12” X 12” (versus the miniscule 5” X 5” of a CD). An album cover could capture your attention, demand you to pick it up and read the back for the vital information which would or would not persuade you to shell out your six or seven dollars.
Let’s continue our journey of missing musical venues. We were (and still are) very fortunate in and around Toronto at the amount of great clubs at our disposal. Some of the best (and worst) are long gone. When all of these clubs were at their heights beer was cheap and usually sold in ten ounce glasses by the tray and there was outrage when the price of cigarettes went up to a dollar in the cigarette machines. The air was thick with smoke and the stale scent of smoke and beer soaked carpets hit you like a ton of bricks when you walked thru the door.
The Nails
How much did I love the song “88 Lines About 44 Women”? Well, my daughter’s middle name is Seattle and the first time I ever heard that name was in that song. “Seattle was another girl who left her mark upon the map”. The band was formed as The Ravers in Boulder, Colorado in the late seventies and at one time employed a crew member by the name of Eric Boucher. Eric would leave Boulder and head to San Francisco, change his name to Jello Biafra and form The Dead Kennedys.
Bullseye Records of Canada
