tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15367793343014272092024-03-12T22:19:55.671-07:00SHADES BELOWShades Belowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18061550082451669721noreply@blogger.comBlogger108125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1536779334301427209.post-35126290242467130522021-09-18T21:12:00.000-07:002021-09-18T21:12:06.533-07:00McExperience<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEireF3HxQPuqHRKkE_yXM6rH7w-cOHiXYIPD2dSXg_Ow144rM0Bpf7vv0GkLG9gyqoGorKJCM7TDRH8xQw-_DhCjHyVcmCYBNg4BNwoiy8934cEteTvtLgaUxqSb79uqKF6nQvDP8F3xCc/s975/1ex.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="650" data-original-width="975" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEireF3HxQPuqHRKkE_yXM6rH7w-cOHiXYIPD2dSXg_Ow144rM0Bpf7vv0GkLG9gyqoGorKJCM7TDRH8xQw-_DhCjHyVcmCYBNg4BNwoiy8934cEteTvtLgaUxqSb79uqKF6nQvDP8F3xCc/s400/1ex.jpg"/></a></div><br><br/>
In February of 2003, I visited the Experience Music Project with a few friends from Guitar Maniacs, which I had never been to, but had heard a lot about since its opening some years before. It was pretty cool, to say the least. It was cool to see the Jimi Hendrix Experience's full stage and gear set up, as if it were on stage, but I thought that the guitars, drums and amps should still be out there in the world, somewhere, with plenty more stories to tell. I also remember seeing clothing items worn by Jimi, and also Eric Clapton's jacket that he wore on stage at Cream's farewell concert. <br><br/>
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After we were done, we planned to visit Jimi's grave over in Renton, at the Greenwood Memorial Park. This was when it was still the block of granite in the ground; the memorial that was evenutally built there was a few years off in the future. <br><br/>
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When we were done with that visit, we went to the McDonald's across the street for lunch. There was something familiar about the place, like I'd been there before, and while we were eating, it finally came to me. <br><br/>
Back in the later part of the '80s, I was made to be part of a Sunday School class, and there were a few times that we took a field trip to places like Winslow, Snoqualmie, and even Vancouver. Not something I recall with any fondness, because the others were teenage girls who were a few years older than me, they lwere into Debbie Gibson and Madonna (who were very popular at the time), and they played tapes of their music on these long trips, and I heard far more of that than I care to remember. Somewhere during the course of one of those trips we had actually stopped at that very McDonald's...only I didn't know that Jimi's grave was located right across the street from the place. If I had, I would have gladly announced to the others, "You go ahead end enjoy your McGarbage...I'm going to go visit Jimi!". <br><br/>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlfZ4Jr8JP0zPcgFX0dS-ARz8ipJ1221Dt8zOx9prJLyoho4rwFBSh88BtxQajFNjmSXEEiGknIN8jV5sbX9mff0HigdVmEK37oEwkaFAyZXPP3p-i6rRSGfwoiXKvUIlkjnnd42GrM8k/s847/1jimi.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="847" data-original-width="600" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlfZ4Jr8JP0zPcgFX0dS-ARz8ipJ1221Dt8zOx9prJLyoho4rwFBSh88BtxQajFNjmSXEEiGknIN8jV5sbX9mff0HigdVmEK37oEwkaFAyZXPP3p-i6rRSGfwoiXKvUIlkjnnd42GrM8k/s400/1jimi.jpg"/></a></div>Shades Belowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18061550082451669721noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1536779334301427209.post-62098473180071302732021-09-04T07:52:00.009-07:002021-09-05T17:32:41.377-07:0040 Years OnStrange thing to say, that.<br><br/>
In all honesty, it really doesn't feel like it. <br><br/>
I remember seeing a meme somewhere that said something like, "What if all these years we've lived through was just a dream that we're all having while we're asleep at nap-time in kindergarten?". That's definitely one of those cases of "If I knew then what I know now, I'd definitely make use of that knowledge!". <br><br/>
That period of time has really been occupying my head-space as of lately, flashing back on memories of that period, and reflecting on what I'm doing now. <br><br/>
It had been a great summer, getting very hot at times. It got so hot in the house that my sister Angie once proposed that we pitch a tent in the backyard, and all sleep out in the back. We didn't have a tent...but we had a clothesline that ran from the house to the garage, so we clamped a good-sized blanket to it with clothespins, put a good-sized rock on each corner of the blanket to hold it down, and we all slept in it that night. It was fun, even though we never did do that again for some odd reason. Another overly warm evening found all four of us cooling off in the wading pool that Angie and I had, right on the patio out in back. <br><br/>
We had our friend Mitchell, who lived across the street. For some reason, he had gotten this idea that we should all go to the B&I store, which was way out on South Tacoma Way....just us three, no grown-ups, and we took the bus out there. How we managed to do that is a mystery to me to this day, and still feels like it happened in a dream. Especially when we found out (the hard way) that the local bus only <i><b>went out</b></i> there, and not back, so we hoofed it from there all the way back to 9th and J, which is quite a long way (it must have taken us about five hours!). <br><br/>
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Along our long journey back, we walked along the outside of the Tacoma Cemetery and we noticed this wall that ran along the top of the hill on one end of the park. Some teenage stoners had spray-painted a big cross and the words "BLACK SABBATH" on the wall. We wondered what it all meant, and what was behind it. We went up there, Mitchell hoisted himself up, got on top of the wall (now guarded by a fence), and saw what was there. Behind the wall is the Tacoma Cemetery graveyard. When he jumped down and told us what was behind the wall, we belted ass out of there so fast, our feet hardly touched the ground, and we didn't stop until we reached the next corner. You can bet we were exhausted by the time we made it home! <br><br/>
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The family had gone on a camping trip with Dad's friend Fred, and spent a few days out in Alder Lake, which is pretty close to Mount Rainier. When we came back, the house was overly hot from being shut up for the last few days, even with the windows being opened up, and since there was something that Dad really wanted to see on TV that night, he put the TV and the TV stand it was on, right on the front porch, and so we parked ourselves out on the front lawn, and what was on that night was <b><i>The Blues Brothers</i></b>. I had never heard of it, and didn't really know any of the people in it, but I was blown away by it, and thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen at that point. Oddly enough, that was the only time we ever did that! <br><br/>
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I started kindergarten that September, over the Bryant Elementary School, which was about half a mile up the street from our house. This was the only school year where Angie and I went to the same school with Mitchell. They were both in the second grade at the time, but I was a newbie to all of this. I was rather prepared by a number of years by watching <b><i>Sesame Street</i></b>, plus lots of books and reading material at home, so I was a little ahead of the others in class. So much so, in fact, that I went to the nearest first-grade class for my reading assignments and lessons. I was also the narrator for the class play, which was <b><i>The Elephant's Child</i></b> by Rudyard Kipling. Sadly, no pictures or audio of my first public performance (of sorts) exist. <br><br/>
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Sometime in September, the whole lot of us (along with Red Fred) hopped a Trailways bus and went to Seattle, where we visited their fair, instead of the usual trip to the one in Puyallup. It was awesome, and much more fun. Red Fred played some sort of ring-toss game, and one prize he won was a sound-alike copy of the "Sgt. Pepper" movie soundtrack (the one on the Springboard label). This was my first trip to Seattle, and in the years since, I have only been there exactly twelve times since then. <br><br/>
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Dad beckoned me into the house one evening, while we were the only ones home, and invited me to join him in watching this movie he was watching on Showtime...something about a family looking after a massive hotel somewhere in the Rockies. I think we know what he was watching (I've written about it <b><a href="https://shadesbelow.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-shining.html">here</a></b>), and it completely blew out the inside of my fragile little mind. I was the same age as the young boy in that movie, which really drew me in, and made me see it through his eyes (so to speak). Maybe Dad saw some of me in Danny Torrance? I don't know, but I'm glad he let me watch it with him that night, and I was blown away again when I got to watch it again a week or two later with Angie and Mitchell, who also loved it. <br><br/>
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Speaking of Seattle, in October, Dad hopped a Greyhound bus, and went to see the Rolling Stones at the Kingdome, to the tune of sixteen dollars, which was (if you can believe that) considered expensive at the time. Not one of his favorite concerts, as he was way up in the "nosebleed" seats, and was watching the onstage action on the video-screens on either side of the stage, while the band looked like teeny little ants; he later said it was like watching TV the whole time, and that he might have well have done that at home. I thought they were the bee's knees at that time, and was excited for him that he was there, while wishing I had been. It wasn't until 2002 that we saw them together at the Tacoma Dome, even though the ticket price was quite a bit higher that time, but the show was more enjoyable. <br><br/>
At a place called the Music Exchange on 11th Street, Dad got hold of an 8-Track player, and some 8-Track tapes, since they were cheap, as most people were moving over to cassettes, and no-one wanted 8-Tracks anymore. They didn't last too long around the house (he got rid of it, and went over to cassettes as well), but two of them had a major impact on me. <br><br/>
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The first one was Iron Butterfly's <b><i>In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida</i></b>, which Dad had an album copy of, but I hadn't actually heard until he plugged the 8-Track of it into the player one afternoon, and--again--it blew me away completely. I really liked the keyboard playing in it, which was played pretty much as a lead instrument, and I decided right then and there that they keyboards were one day going to be my instrument, even though we didn't have anything remotely like one around the house. The other one was <b><i>The Best Of The Guess Who</i></b> by The Guess Who; Dad turned me onto this one with the song "Bus Rider", which was a tight, perfectly-crafted rocker, but I found that I liked everything else on this album. In fact, I fell in love with it, and I don't know how many times I played that 8-Track on days I wasn't in school. <br><br/>
As the 40th anniversary of that magic period is currently hanging around me, there are also a few sad notes that are connected to it. Charlie Watts, the Stones' legendary drummer passed away in late August, as did Ron Bushy, Iron Butterfly's drummer. I'd enjoyed their works and contributions to the music that they helped make all these years, and it was hard to see them leave us. And then there was something else from that period that was also a bit sad.
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One of my favorite friends from kindergarten was another boy named Michael, who lived just a couple of blocks up from where I lived, with his parents and younger brother. I remember, when his birthday came around, I picked out a book for him of something I'd recently enjoyed; since a "Little Golden Book" of something like <b><i>The Shining</i></b> or <b><i>The Blues Brothers</i></b> wasn't an option, I settled for <b><i>Pete's Dragon</i></b>, which he seemed to like. Sometime during that school year, he moved away, and I never did see him again. His house on L Street was pretty much the only thing I had to remember him by, the one scrap of our friendship still in existence.<br><br/>
I'd always wondered what became of him, where he went to, and what he could be doing now. I went to one of those "people search" sites online, typed in his name and age...and sure enough, he seemed to have in lived in Tacoma for all these years, even though our paths never crossed. No photo of him, though. Who knows...he's probably 6'6", with a shaved head, tattoos and a ZZ Top beard. His profile had a massive list of places he'd been living at, in and around town, some not lasting more than about six months on average. When I clicked on "most recent address", it showed the address of what was the local jail down there on Tacoma Avenue, a stone's throw down the hill from the old neighborhood. I guess there wasn't much reason to look in any further. <br><br/>
Shades Belowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18061550082451669721noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1536779334301427209.post-17671447371440972202021-07-04T23:48:00.000-07:002021-07-04T23:48:29.266-07:00"The Very Best Of Richard Pryor" (1982)<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNryyEAXPaL21bo-Sn7aglOH8BzmVpVoVa6Rf8xqg5cIqPJkzNHGPItxXTdfgO35KrqDzKL9LNJ1KOLh-VFFC4Nle1InK2JKxD2vOqqm9YI0obI_7nCnoDJNRPkGogORllPrs9a2ucyyE/s1600/1r1.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1598" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNryyEAXPaL21bo-Sn7aglOH8BzmVpVoVa6Rf8xqg5cIqPJkzNHGPItxXTdfgO35KrqDzKL9LNJ1KOLh-VFFC4Nle1InK2JKxD2vOqqm9YI0obI_7nCnoDJNRPkGogORllPrs9a2ucyyE/s400/1r1.jpg"/></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOAszEeMsESojbKcHY2GpFaIAiMLojlibLdxIlSBi706Q7Y6QU9pRbRPhLPD04j1ncZhlWV7bD1BUEA3nHTfbpvlTUzNt9wmxWvJPy1eGE1UorQSxUSfdrfa4xyIAzenMaEZeZfyOOd3U/s1600/1r2.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="1574" data-original-width="1600" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOAszEeMsESojbKcHY2GpFaIAiMLojlibLdxIlSBi706Q7Y6QU9pRbRPhLPD04j1ncZhlWV7bD1BUEA3nHTfbpvlTUzNt9wmxWvJPy1eGE1UorQSxUSfdrfa4xyIAzenMaEZeZfyOOd3U/s400/1r2.jpg"/></a></div>
I've known about this one for quite a while, but just never got around to picking it up. Maybe because (going by the record labels) it consisted of things that I already had, and I pretty much knew that it wasn't going to contain anything "new" or different here. I found an eBay listing, where I bid $1.50 for a used cassette copy...and I won it. And then it showed up in my mailbox four days later. <br><br/>
I was right. Nothing new here. The over-excited intro from <b>Are You Serious???<i></i></b> opens the show, as does Richard's whispered intro from that set. Then it cuts to the version of "Super Nigger" from <b><i>Who Me? I'm Not Him</i></b>...but as soon as Richard announces, "with x-ray vision that enables him to see through everything except Whitey!", it abruptly cuts over to a lengthy section from the <b><i>Craps</i></b> album (pretty much the "title song" of it, so to speak), and then side one continues and concludes with the last few minutes from side one of <b><i>Are You Serious???</i></b> with the bits about the submarine pep-talk, and the hillbilly guy calling cadence in the Army. <br><br/>
Side two...no better. More selections from <b><i>Are You Serious???</i></b> and <b><i>Craps</i></b>, plus a bit about Jesus from the <b><i>Outrageous</i></b> album. And then side two concludes with--you guessed it!--yet <b>ANOTHER</b> presentation of "Black Ben" (aka "Prison Play"). Producer/compiler David Drozen must have really liked this bit to have included it on so many of RIchard's Laff albums.<br><br/>
The album cover seems a little strange and eerie now...back when it was released, it would make you think of Richard's otherwise hilarious bit about being busted by the cops while sneaking home at night, but in the day and age of Trayvon Martin and George Floyd, the back cover now seems disturbingly prophetic. Shades Belowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18061550082451669721noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1536779334301427209.post-32975556455386936242020-08-08T22:32:00.004-07:002021-02-25T21:56:04.382-08:00The reunion that wasn't!<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbO24r9EmSp1cKiWXS3SyTHBvzHBm9tdDlQJkvVFPfomrYtJZyyec2cM5c_QXYhAVq3LeUKgNEcU-qWnTdDuZirAP32u7XumSFVIj2yTwos0LLQBTnkhdvVv6QXi5dW37t96vLKQIsGv0/s771/1jz.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="503" data-original-width="771" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbO24r9EmSp1cKiWXS3SyTHBvzHBm9tdDlQJkvVFPfomrYtJZyyec2cM5c_QXYhAVq3LeUKgNEcU-qWnTdDuZirAP32u7XumSFVIj2yTwos0LLQBTnkhdvVv6QXi5dW37t96vLKQIsGv0/s400/1jz.jpg"/></a></div>I had a very strange dream on the morning of February 15, 2017. <br><br/>
I was on the 6th Avenue bus, riding towards downtown, and I noticed a sign there announcing a reunion gig of The Pace over at Jazzbones. I wondered <b>What the hell...???<i></i></b>, as I hurriedly got off the bus and walked into the place just as the other guys were setting up to play, but they looked like they'd rather be anywhere but there. I was thinking to myself, "<b>Nobody told me anything about this!<i></i></b>" as I made my way onto the stage, and sat down at a set of Roland V-Drums that were up there.<br><br/>
Before I knew it, we were playing away at some of the old songs we used to do, and after about three songs, it was quiet, the stage seemed to be empty of anyone else, and there was hardly anyone left in the crowd.<br><br/>
I left the stage, walked around to the back of the place, and saw that there were only about six people there. The atmosphere of the place was very sullen and glum for some odd reason. A couple came in, smiling and talking, but stopped as soon as they noticed the rather dour atmosphere.<br><br/>
Then, the other guys were back on stage and had started up again, playing "Magic Bus" (I quickly thought, "<b>We never played this one!<i></i></b>"), and the original Pace drummer Josh Kilpatrick had joined them, but was not playing the drums for some odd reason, just singing backups with Lincoln.<br><br/>
I got up on stage again, got behind the drums (which had now been replaced with white plastic buckets arranged like a drumset for some reason), and began plowing away on them, but it all went quiet yet again. <br><br/>
Next thing I know, the guys had put down their guitars and were sitting on some chairs just off to the side of the stage area, grumbling and growling about "We should have done this back in 2016!". I was just about to add my two cents that I was sort of having fun, but then that's when the alarm went off. <br><br/>
I have to admit, the dream actually put me in a not-so-great mood for the day, but as soon as I got home from work and wrote it all down on Facebook, I realized how weird and hilarious it sounded in retrospect. And not only was it realistic for a dream that didn't last about ten minutes, but it almost seemed the exact way that it probably would have happened in real life! Shades Belowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18061550082451669721noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1536779334301427209.post-80379631023121153912019-01-28T16:25:00.001-08:002021-07-04T23:48:41.131-07:00Faubion's Fabulous Junk<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5U5pfCvDo7EgBV89VbV9cvRKQZjgdDhW0AZvWqNd7OS0drWthrlG46iH0j4Blk4FisjVVaB3h1SEr6QH4qmgn7-ajuj3O18t78MesPEK03msztevbvxZeCR7hmHdjcpR1x1uhcVsoNB0/s1600/Faubion.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5U5pfCvDo7EgBV89VbV9cvRKQZjgdDhW0AZvWqNd7OS0drWthrlG46iH0j4Blk4FisjVVaB3h1SEr6QH4qmgn7-ajuj3O18t78MesPEK03msztevbvxZeCR7hmHdjcpR1x1uhcVsoNB0/s400/Faubion.jpg" width="400" height="300" data-original-width="640" data-original-height="480" /></a></div>
At the end of summer 2018, a new Starbucks opened at the corner of 38th & G Streets, displacing the taco truck that had been occupying the space since the early 2000’s. Before that was there, it was just an empty space for a number of years. But there was something in that space that I always think of when I go by that area. <br><br/>
Back in the fall of 1988, on that corner, was what used to be an old service/filling station, and off to the left of it, a tire shop. When we first moved into that area that April, it was Eagle Radio & Appliance Repair, but sometime in the summer, they’d moved over to Yakima Avenue. In November, Dad had something interesting to tell me when I got home from school one day. Seems the place was now a “junk” shop, with lots of second-hand stuff antiques and whatnot. But what made it interesting was that they had records there. And <b>boxes</b> of them! <br><br/>
Next thing I know, we walked up there together, and in the old place where he’d gotten his Kenwood receiver serviced about six months before, was a really cool place with...well, like I said, but there were a number of tables set up, with cardboard boxes of albums in them, filled to the brim. It was still in the “work in progress” stage, but welcoming, and the boxes of albums had all kinds of interesting stuff in them. Dad found a copy of the Beatles’ <b>Let It Be<i></i></b>, I found Jethro Tull’s <b>Repeat: The Best Of, Vol. II<i></i></b> for a buck, and also snagged a paperback copy of <b>The Amityville Horror<i></i></b> for fifty cents. <br><br/>
Well! This place instantly became my go-to place on weekends, or late afternoons after school. They had a nice-looking, colorful parrot in a large cage, alongside furniture, toys, car parts...you name it. One thing I was happy to find there was a Fisher-Price Movie Viewer, with a couple of cartridges, notably a “Sesame Street” one, and the Mickey/Donald/Goofy cartoon classic “Lonesome Ghosts”. <br><br/>
About that tire-shop...sometime after the turn of 1989, they branched out and put all of the records in there, leaving that section pretty much to itself. I can’t imagine how many hours I spent in there total, looking through them, finding ones I wanted or had heard about. If I knew then what I would know about in a few years’ time, I could have made out like a bandit, since they generally charged only a dollar apiece for the albums, maybe a little more if it were a double-LP set, or something in nicer condition than the usual stuff. I was heavily into Grand Funk Railroad at that point, and I found <b>Mark, Don & Mel<i></i></b> there for a couple of bucks, <b>E Pluribus Funk<i></i></b> for a dollar, and even <b>Shinin’ On<i></i></b> for a dollar, but with the poster <b>and</b> the 3-D glasses still intact. I also found a really good copy of <b>The Greatest Of The Guess Who<i></i></b>, with cover art by MAD Magazine’s Jack Davis. I also came across a Richard Pryor album I’d never seen or heard of before called <b>Who Me? I’m Not Him<i></i></b>, which I got for fifty cents, since it had seen happier days, but it became a long-running favorite at home. <br><br/>
I made a couple of <b>really</b> good scores there. One was a sealed Quadraphonic copy of Ten Years After’s <b>A Space In Time<i></i></b>, for just one dollar...and on another visit, we found a German pressing of the Quad version of <b>Dark Side Of The Moon<i></i></b>, which had seen happier days, but was still playable...one dollar! <br><br/>
And, it must be noted, I still have all of these albums in my collection to this day.<br><br/>
As my 7th grade year wore on, my visits there trailed off after a while, as I wasn’t finding anything “new”, and hadn’t really discovered anything I needed to be looking for at that point. By the time school let out, the place closed down. But what I didn’t know was that they decided to move the place downtown, on 9th and Broadway. We visited there once, as we saw that they had the boxes of albums on the outside, set up like it was in the old days, but they didn’t last very long there, and Faubion’s closed up for good after that. <br><br/>
It was a good ride while it lasted, though, and I made some lifetime scores that I still have, and not only do I still remember the place fondly when I play the albums, I still think of it whenever I pass by the Starbucks, sitting on where it once stood. As for the old location, it became a beauty salon for a few years, but burned up sometime in the mid-’90s, and was torn down in 1996.
Shades Belowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18061550082451669721noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1536779334301427209.post-3889470344597946832017-06-14T17:06:00.000-07:002017-06-14T21:51:25.666-07:00King Crimson: Seattle 6/13/17<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibId1R5T8j4yzdGkhoD-_9F_poe5xMHuNlSWY8UDqo0dNp2YYLTN4anTpRFkkh9Uz1N5S2nruIMP3RTpcaZIk9a_6iYya6NtULPlpQpb95U98Wk-lpY1JgGdhAEc8jcNvl4zknohkiHkY/s1600/sign-ii.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibId1R5T8j4yzdGkhoD-_9F_poe5xMHuNlSWY8UDqo0dNp2YYLTN4anTpRFkkh9Uz1N5S2nruIMP3RTpcaZIk9a_6iYya6NtULPlpQpb95U98Wk-lpY1JgGdhAEc8jcNvl4zknohkiHkY/s400/sign-ii.jpg" width="400" height="300" data-original-width="640" data-original-height="480" /></a></div>
I saw King Crimson at the Paramount Theater in June 1995, and I’ve always regarded it as the best live performance I’ve ever seen. Now, I think it’s been superseded by their show at the Moore Theater, which I saw last night. <br><br/>
This would be the first time they went out as the “8-Headed Beast” with three drummers, and though I’d heard a couple of previous live releases with the 7-piece band, it would be no comparison to what they actually sounded like live. <br><br/>
They came on at 7:45, preceded by Robert Fripp’s announcement that everyone should put away their cellphone/cameras and just take it all in and enjoy the moment. Then the band came out to thunderous applause. Just as they were settling down to play, one guy off to left asked out loudly, “Can we take pictures now?”, which got a laugh. <br><br/>
Well! They went straight into “Neurotica”, followed by “Pictures Of A City”, and wended their way through things I never thought I would hear live, such as “Cirkus”, “Fracture”, “Dawn Song > Battle Of Glass Tears > Prince Rupert’s Lament”, and even “Islands”. <br><br/>
I was very impressed with everyone up there. I couldn’t see Fripp very well, due to being way up in the balcony (and thanks to a hanging PA-speaker stack), but I could see that he was playing a lot of keyboard when he wasn’t playing his guitar. Mel Collins was their secret weapon, and he shone just as well as his gold-colored saxophone. I was very impressed with new drummer Jeremy Stacey, who also doubled on keyboards when not playing drums, but when he was, he was definitely a powerhouse on them. Jakko Jakszyk was in fine voice throughout the whole show.<br><br/>
After a twenty-minute intermission, the three drummers did an instrumental piece on their own, and--launching into “Level Five”--preceded to tear the place up. I’ve never heard them play so loud and so hard, even surpassing the Double Trio lineup. After a while, it was pretty much a John Wetton tribute, playing “Easy Money”, “Exiles:”, “Red”, “Fallen Angels” and “Starless”. The latter was crowned at the end by bathing the band in deep, dark red light. What a nice touch!<br><br/>
After a short break, they came back on and did “Larks’ Two”, “In The Court Of The Crimson King”, David Bowie’s “Heroes”, and closed it with “Schizoid Man”.
Wow! There was no light show, no dry-ice fog, no lasers, no props, no boring stories/announcements, and no rear-screen video images...just eight sharply-dressed gentlemen up there kicking ass for nearly three hours. That, to me, is how you get up there and do it.<br><br/>
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<b>Set One</b>
1. Walk On: Islands coda pre-recording
2. Neurotica
3. Pictures of a City
4. Radical Action III (new)
5. Cirkus
6. The Battle of Glass Tears (full, from Dawn Song to Prince Rupert's Lament)
7. The Letters
8. Fracture
9. Islands <br><br/>
<b>Set Two</b>
1. Hell Hounds of Krim
2. Meltdown/Radical Action 2/Level Five
3. Easy Money
4. Exiles
5. Red
6. Fallen Angel
7. Starless <br><br/>
<b> Set Three</b> (encores)
1. Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Part Two
2. In the Court of the Crimson King
3. Heroes
4. 21st Century Schizoid Man/Gavin Solo/Drum Trio/Schizoid Man (Coda) Shades Belowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18061550082451669721noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1536779334301427209.post-50739372767560048032017-06-02T22:50:00.001-07:002017-06-04T08:03:46.491-07:00"The Fun Factory"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4hqKLhx4R9rjJbXk20XHFQnX9zJpHyuBwoQi-FAusP54ngMn2QI9j3RX70ELNQp7L5DxCihosvfnVql80H5HoGFeD1krU8NNUPR6Z7C39Jn9heIIp4VhK3lDgNXFu9-ttbpuZhaDK__k/s1600/box.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4hqKLhx4R9rjJbXk20XHFQnX9zJpHyuBwoQi-FAusP54ngMn2QI9j3RX70ELNQp7L5DxCihosvfnVql80H5HoGFeD1krU8NNUPR6Z7C39Jn9heIIp4VhK3lDgNXFu9-ttbpuZhaDK__k/s400/box.jpg" width="400" height="300" data-original-width="640" data-original-height="480" /></a></div>
Down in the basement, there is an old cardboard box down in one section that has always been somewhat of a mystery ever since I found it down there. It's of an old GE stereo cassette deck that seems to be from the '70s, which included two microphones, but it does not look familiar to me at all, as I never saw a tape deck in the house in my very early years. Dad didn't even get a cassette deck until 1980 or so.<br><br/>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-8WecW85OhOlOM831AHrbxRlxoLCEkrYgMjO6NlfCCQ-sXluFOeKH_ApI44RNfPesAlGsA6LGkE5Zozs-qcXa5bRF38knwXu2ENJ21-jYeJKWZTe_N4ULa9wvsobz7RiajtslE2AdPJU/s1600/ampex.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-8WecW85OhOlOM831AHrbxRlxoLCEkrYgMjO6NlfCCQ-sXluFOeKH_ApI44RNfPesAlGsA6LGkE5Zozs-qcXa5bRF38knwXu2ENJ21-jYeJKWZTe_N4ULa9wvsobz7RiajtslE2AdPJU/s400/ampex.jpg" width="400" height="237" data-original-width="700" data-original-height="415" /></a></div>
But it reminds me of an evening sometime in my kindergarten year when grandma came to the house with yet another item she'd found down in the basement, and handed over to Dad. It was a battery-operated tape recorder, with a cassette in it. One of those older-looking tapes with a white shell, and labels attached to either side. <br><br/>
After she was gone, Dad loaded the cassette into the tape deck on his stereo, and hit the "play" button. What was on this tape seemed to be some kind of collage of things that he had put together from various things in his album collection, strung together rather roughly, and perhaps after he'd had a few beers (and--perhaps!--a few bong hits), but it was obvious that he was definitely having fun making it. <br><br/>
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I remember hearing the classic David Frye comedy routine about Nixon smoking grass in the Oval Office, which I had heard before and thought was funny, even though I didn't know who Nixon was then, but I at least appreciated the humor in it. Sometime after that was a few cuts from The Mothers' <b><i>Fillmore East, June 1971</i></b> album, which I had never heard before. As soon as "Bwana Dik" ended, the voice of Dad came on, sort of like a deejay, saying something like "Hey! This is Fun Factory, and...you ever wonder what it would sound like if a midget fell through the floor of an outhouse?". <br><br/>
Then the recording cut to a sound effect from <b><i>Chilling, Thrilling Sounds Of The Haunted House</i></b>, where a guy is crossing a bridge, which collapses, and you hear him yelling <i>Yarrrggghhhh!</i> as he falls down into water, far down below. Then, the tape switched to yet another sound effect from the same album; this time, it was of a dripping-water noise, but Dad had gotten onto the microphone and had added some grunting and groaning noises of his own, as if he were sitting on the toilet. Pure insanity. Also, somewhere on the same side of the tape, I remember hearing "Why Don't We Do It In The Road?" from the Beatles' <b><i>White Album</i></b>, with Dad singing along to it. Oh, boy...again, pure insanity, but whenever he had recorded this tape, he definitely had that crazy sense of humor even before I came along! <br><br/>
The next day, after school, I had the tape-recorder up in the bedroom, and I was listening back to the cassette again, but about a third of the way through it, the tape snarled in between the capstan and pinch-roller, ruining the tape, and rendering it unplayable. The tape was, sadly, tossed in the trash. If only I'd had the knowledge to have repaired and saved the tape then, I would have done that, but...I didn't, and I can only wonder what the rest of the tape had on it. Dad would occasionally make weird tape collages such as that, but nowhere near as weird and wacky as "The Fun Factory".Shades Belowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18061550082451669721noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1536779334301427209.post-5709965604471216982016-01-13T22:09:00.001-08:002016-01-13T22:15:34.285-08:00Led Zeppelin<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirdVppZN7HDPAP8Jnzxn-nEBCESup97aY1octUONB_BqiWh9sG48Q8Gv_lEypGPpPJf5PLPyIJGxttC6lkP4aHm83A5RaQL7iVdeXxPdXVRNbqhshUanLi8idpmaruNJ0IV6HSsArutQU/s1600/zep+ii.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirdVppZN7HDPAP8Jnzxn-nEBCESup97aY1octUONB_BqiWh9sG48Q8Gv_lEypGPpPJf5PLPyIJGxttC6lkP4aHm83A5RaQL7iVdeXxPdXVRNbqhshUanLi8idpmaruNJ0IV6HSsArutQU/s400/zep+ii.jpg" /></a></div><br><br/>
This is another one that I'd heard at the Blue House for the first time. Angie and I were running around and climbing underneath the pool table while the grown-ups played, drank beer, and were listening to the stereo playing. There was an album cover that was mostly brown, with some people standing around while a large, white thing was pointing up in the sky, emerging from colorful clouds of smoke. I liked the big, golden blimp that was on the inside, although I had no idea what the object really was supposed to be. One thing that struck me as odd was one song where the singer sang something that (to me) sounded like "You need Kool-Aid!". <br><br/>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjM0Sp2D6NvYnCrPDz06ZneR65wwzhyphenhyphenXMrpZk7o2Sae4NwEVOFqfb5_27HMWLoT0LWDX74x4RboE_L-Fo4-OWR5iieQJCQuaXEjsoPMvVawknueH9Q1gLswEgnKfkuxyZbVfJT1E0lZlLU/s1600/zeppelin-v.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjM0Sp2D6NvYnCrPDz06ZneR65wwzhyphenhyphenXMrpZk7o2Sae4NwEVOFqfb5_27HMWLoT0LWDX74x4RboE_L-Fo4-OWR5iieQJCQuaXEjsoPMvVawknueH9Q1gLswEgnKfkuxyZbVfJT1E0lZlLU/s400/zeppelin-v.jpg" /></a></div><br><br/>
Next thing I know, it's bedtime, and we were sent off to bed...and the music played on. It was dark in the room, and I could still hear through the wall what was being played. Dad had put on side one of Led Zeppelin IV, but I had no idea what it was, what the cover looked like, and wasn't even sure if it was the same band. When "Black Dog" was playing, I remember being a little weirded out when the music would stop and the singer was going "Ah-ah, Ah-ah, Ah-ah, Ahhhhhhh.....!". <br><br/>
Sometime after that was one that was starting out kind of quietly, and I was hearing what sounded like was about someone "borrowing" a stairway to heaven...whatever <i>that</i> was. The song went on, getting a little louder, more electric, and then rocking out really hard, coming to a sudden stop, with the final line about borrowing that stairway again, and then...silence. I lay there in the dark, completely blown away at what I'd just heard. <br><br/>
It wasn't until we'd moved into the Green House that we really started playing them a little more, and more often. They were one of Red Fred's favorite bands, and you could count on Zeppelin being played whenever he was around. <br><br/>
Not long after we'd moved into the house, Grandma had come to the house, and brought over some stuff that was down in the basement, and needed a new home. Most of what she'd brought over was a small cache of ultra-cool blacklight posters that Dad had put up on the walls of the basement...the way he would talk about it, he made it sound as if it were quite the Party Central spot! Among these posters were ones of Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, a massive coiled-up cobra...and Led Zeppelin! <br><br/>
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This one was really cool, all done in blue, yellow and green, against a black background, with a peace-sign, and even a little blimp flying overhead in the back. The old black-light was dutifully attached to the wall, and this one was placed right underneath it. Somewhere, in one of the photo albums, is a picture of the family in the living room, and this poster is fully visible on the wall behind us. <br><br/>
They were one of Dad's favorite bands throughout the '70s, and he even got to see them in Seattle in late 1972 or so. He said it was a great show, almost four hours long. He would always tell me about making his way down to the front of the stage, looking right up at Jimmy Page in front of him. Joints were being passed around all over, and he suddenly found himself with one in each hand. Decisions, decisions! <br><br/>Shades Belowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18061550082451669721noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1536779334301427209.post-43978618648353437472015-04-25T00:07:00.002-07:002015-04-25T00:07:53.559-07:00Emerson, Lake & Palmer<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgatB-ZsKhlFfms0Ku2gheKuXJGjN-S3UTuYJ1LtgmhKsBrbi-dM9H_iE8SWjOMu3NF8ac-P-0Sz4QHUVJDUSnTI4ji60mlwkDEe850-QxYPlSeuxqmZu6st5CtzoBbz_P2uds34Q382Xk/s1600/BIRD.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgatB-ZsKhlFfms0Ku2gheKuXJGjN-S3UTuYJ1LtgmhKsBrbi-dM9H_iE8SWjOMu3NF8ac-P-0Sz4QHUVJDUSnTI4ji60mlwkDEe850-QxYPlSeuxqmZu6st5CtzoBbz_P2uds34Q382Xk/s400/BIRD.jpg" /></a></div>
This is another one that stems way back from hearing it for the first time at the Blue House. This time, however, was different. I was lying in bed, supposed to be asleep while Dad and Mom had some company over, and Angie and I had been sent off to our room for the night. I remember hearing a song about a "lucky man" of some sort, and then the song dissolved to a siren-wailing Moog synthesizer, with the drums carrying it along, until they both collapsed in a heap at the end. I liked what I was hearing...the only bad thing was, I had no idea who it was! <br><br/>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-HZATNdSA_MW3SBeGnYhplyaOjzlXI94ZaVijqCR9Tav9_MeIanld5WduIeyA-5LHvUQS5iBsKPAThNo7KvZQ5ncNcKqnFzKchBcJqo4mtXxYhpMKn6HjGujIkchTh3U_k9jB4UX11ZM/s1600/Trilogy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-HZATNdSA_MW3SBeGnYhplyaOjzlXI94ZaVijqCR9Tav9_MeIanld5WduIeyA-5LHvUQS5iBsKPAThNo7KvZQ5ncNcKqnFzKchBcJqo4mtXxYhpMKn6HjGujIkchTh3U_k9jB4UX11ZM/s400/Trilogy.jpg" /></a></div>
Sometime later, at the Red House, Dad pulled this one out, with three guys on the front cover, who seemed to be Siamese triplets, gazing into a setting sun on the back cover. He played "From The Beginning", which was very impressive, with awesome acoustic-guitar figures, wonderful vocals, and--again--with fizzy, gurgling Moog sounds bringing it to a close. <br><br/>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRGVYhE85Hs3tp2yPagXlwb1SX_kZXZ70UliQB1te-WUqQzkmDKbU0p6gNsRVbl30LWCgyVkNB5de7reNhkr-ykIyF0dRap8AUm1JV8-sg9x0tH1ygr8VkRzJG2zW5HRDOLdgivltG5zk/s1600/pictures-at-an-exhibition-open-gatefold.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRGVYhE85Hs3tp2yPagXlwb1SX_kZXZ70UliQB1te-WUqQzkmDKbU0p6gNsRVbl30LWCgyVkNB5de7reNhkr-ykIyF0dRap8AUm1JV8-sg9x0tH1ygr8VkRzJG2zW5HRDOLdgivltG5zk/s400/pictures-at-an-exhibition-open-gatefold.jpg" /></a></div>
This was another one that intrigued me, but had never heard. On the outer front cover was a gallery of gold picture frames with nothing in them, but on the inside, they now contained some pretty lurid images of strange landscapes and structures. What could this sound like? Now that I knew how to use the turntable, I put it on one afternoon, and had to hear what it sounded like. From the start, it was a live album, recorded in front of a loud, cheering crowd who definitely loved their heroes. <br><br/>
I had never heard anything from Mussorgsky's <b><i>Pictures At An Exhibition</i></b>, and this was my first introduction to a major piece of classical music. Although the music was written by a Russian composer, it was like a little trip to Europe, as listening to the music filled my head with images of castles and cathedrals. The sounds coming from the synthesizers and Hammond C-3 organ hooked me in, and I couldn't believe that it was just three guys making all of that sound. I loved the entire album, and it was soon one of my most-played and well-loved albums. <br><br/>
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<b><i>Brain Salad Surgery</i></b> had not only the strangest title, but also a suitably strange album cover that opened up down the center in the front. The first thing that Dad had played for me from it was something called "Karn Evil 9: 3rd Impression", a 9-minute epic that almost sounded like the soundtrack from a <b><i>Superman</i></b> movie, with frantic tempo changes, churning organ solos, and a bizarre synthesizer loop at the end that spewed from speaker to speaker. This became another favorite as well. The keyboards sure sounded like a fun and interesting instrument to play someday, with limitless capabilities to them. <br><br/>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQPwjHwps91Nydl6fQlXMpTlqWmJ9ebojsnN8cu0xWXuFZ7F0tQ1sdEUqE11WKbjNJvJHanR3whxfJDsKQcmLE-4tTt8omQKLCKOUZBHyMvl12sBZJnPqiQlGHTXB39fwekI1RSaXbcRA/s1600/ELP+3LP+cover+pic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQPwjHwps91Nydl6fQlXMpTlqWmJ9ebojsnN8cu0xWXuFZ7F0tQ1sdEUqE11WKbjNJvJHanR3whxfJDsKQcmLE-4tTt8omQKLCKOUZBHyMvl12sBZJnPqiQlGHTXB39fwekI1RSaXbcRA/s400/ELP+3LP+cover+pic.jpg" /></a></div>
As the years went on, I still played them regularly, but eventually wondered what the bands that the three members had once been in sounded like. That led me to seek out some albums by The Nice, King Crimson and Atomic Rooster; it was all great stuff, and the latter two would have immeasurable influence on me as both a player and a writer.Shades Belowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18061550082451669721noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1536779334301427209.post-60918857453752250552015-03-15T07:49:00.002-07:002015-03-15T07:51:30.114-07:00The Guess Who<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhH7d8ASyWOkcG0EbAW64TthrmDXgtrXEj4XY5TwMHWuS6Pc0RfOge67FzBgAM4ihi2aY-C7FgrsoobcEq_6uX2OaPZrH_FKP8rs31xkkRxx6X4CM_SIyZX_VpabfiMoZR_9U7_TDJZzQ/s1600/guess+who+best.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhH7d8ASyWOkcG0EbAW64TthrmDXgtrXEj4XY5TwMHWuS6Pc0RfOge67FzBgAM4ihi2aY-C7FgrsoobcEq_6uX2OaPZrH_FKP8rs31xkkRxx6X4CM_SIyZX_VpabfiMoZR_9U7_TDJZzQ/s400/guess+who+best.jpg" /></a></div>
It was sometime in the start of my kindergarten year when Dad pulled this one out, and asked me if I'd ever heard "Bus Rider". I honestly had never heard this album before, though I had seen it in the collection, but it had never been played around me. It sounded like something we could identify with, since we didn't have a car, and pretty much traveled everywhere by bus, courtesy of Pierce Transit. <br><br/>
He put the album on the turntable. The first thing I noticed was that the album had a piece missing out of it on the outer part, as if it had been dropped, or something hard fell on it, and so the opening song on either side was permanently (and literally) cut out. "Bus Rider" played, a two-and-a-half-minute perfect explosion of Rock & Roll, great hooks, great chorus, and fun lyrics. A hit single, if there ever was one. <br><br/>
That did it, and I was hooked. <br><br/>
Dad also had the 8-Track tape of this album, and I began to play it on the stereo on days that I was at home from school, and he was at work. I could not get enough of it. Awesome songs all the way through it, and I loved Burton Cummings' bluesy rasp. When Angie saw the cover, she thought the guys were standing around in a sewer. The songs played through my head as Mitchell, Angie and myself played at Wright Park throughout that school year, and well into that summer. <br><br/>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3DYYDqMHcq2BYI2Q71JkQfoD1O4SfhuJgqM2PSQVUyHuSraXh9tJZJmv66CwSflEiDSGpm9adlQemBVyqX8PTer3wwNMZ2ViQWfG8wVBeKRGT1DlbPZF3eyMXEbQYF2ysMyopSZoD1qo/s1600/guesswho-thegreatestoftheguesswho(1).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3DYYDqMHcq2BYI2Q71JkQfoD1O4SfhuJgqM2PSQVUyHuSraXh9tJZJmv66CwSflEiDSGpm9adlQemBVyqX8PTer3wwNMZ2ViQWfG8wVBeKRGT1DlbPZF3eyMXEbQYF2ysMyopSZoD1qo/s400/guesswho-thegreatestoftheguesswho(1).jpg" /></a></div>
When we got into the cassette format, I put this album onto cassette, and played it all the time. One interesting way to fill in the gap with the two missing songs was that Dad also had another "greatest hits" album that featured "These Eyes" and "Hand Me Down World", and I was able to record them onto tape in their original running order, and not miss a thing. Plus, it also had songs like "Star Baby" and "Clap For The Wolfman", which I also liked. <br><br/>
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Dad also told me that he saw them in concert at the UPS Fieldhouse in 1971 or so, around the same time that The Best Of had come out, so it was the same lineup on the album cover. A great show, but the one thing that he always remembered was that Burton Cummings skulked around the stage all night, smoking a lot of cigarettes (one after the other), and made it seem like he didn't even want to be there. Later on, I felt that maybe it was around the time that he found out Jim Morrison had died, and maybe that's what put him in such a mood. <br><br/>
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As I grew up, I still played it often, knowing all the words, and also teaching myself how to sing by singing along to them. And as time went on, I began to find their albums and picked them up as I found them. There were lots more great songs on albums like <b><i>Canned Wheat</i></b>, <b><i>So Long, Bannatyne</i></b> and <b><i>Rockin'</i></b>. I also began picking up some of their albums on 8-Tracks, which I would find at the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store. If I liked what I heard, then I would go and pick up the album on my next vinyl safari. One that I loved and played all the time was of their 1974 album <b><i>Road Food</i></b>, which I found at House Of Records on my fourteenth birthday. <br><br/>
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A year after that, I found a vinyl copy of <b><i>The Best Of The Guess Who</i></b> that had a black-light poster included in it. I wasn't aware that the first pressings of the album had a poster included in it, but there it was; a similar shot of the guys underneath the pier, standing in shallow water. I bought it for that, and also to replace the copy at home that was pretty much worn out, and the poster went on my wall. It's still up there. <br><br/>
Flash forward many years, and one of Geoffrey's favorites is "Bus Rider", followed by "Rain Dance" and "Sour Suite". Why he likes the latter song is kind of a mystery, as it's a bit melancholy, but it's one of his favorites. Shades Belowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18061550082451669721noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1536779334301427209.post-69944411504022775662015-02-11T21:48:00.000-08:002015-02-11T21:48:25.517-08:00Harry Chapin<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXm91EoNfWl1tJ-7nauxSOJRs5UL7ZO5kTY47n5w2xtIErDwI5OKp1AJ83oq1T6XpClV-W4voRDzB4VIdaiACh2VK6fCa-62RaEv3JzXrHj545SVw3ulr6zROLCOx1kxr3prVpVwAorfo/s1600/harry+chapin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXm91EoNfWl1tJ-7nauxSOJRs5UL7ZO5kTY47n5w2xtIErDwI5OKp1AJ83oq1T6XpClV-W4voRDzB4VIdaiACh2VK6fCa-62RaEv3JzXrHj545SVw3ulr6zROLCOx1kxr3prVpVwAorfo/s400/harry+chapin.jpg" /></a></div>
This is another one that actually harkens back to the Blue House, where I heard this for the first time. Dad went out with a friend for a beer-run one evening, and came back with not only that, but also a couple of big containers of popcorn. The next thing I know, side three of this album was playing. It started off with "Cat's In The Cradle", then "Taxi", and finally "Circle", which almost sounded like something from <b><i>Sesame Street</i></b>. I liked what I was hearing, never having heard it before, and this album got a few more spins while we were living in the next few residences. <br><br/>
Sometime toward the end of the summer of 1981, Dad came home with a page from The Seattle Times, with the headline that told about Harry Chapin's death in a car accident over in New York. I couldn't believe it. He just seemed like such a great and funny guy, as well as a wonderful songwriter. <br><br/>
One of my other favorite songs by him on that live album was "30,000 Pounds Of Bananas". I didn't quite catch onto the rather tragic story of a guy who jack-knifed while hauling all that fruit...I just enjoyed the chorus, the way the song sped up, and John Wallace's ultra-low voice when he was called on to sing. After reading the news, I went out for a spin on the sidewalk on my Bigwheel. I had the song going through my head, pedaling along, but as the song played faster, I began pedaling faster along with it. I was racing up and down the sidewalk like a lunatic before a neighbor lady stopped me, maybe out of genuine concern I wouldn't harm myself, but maybe she'd had enough of the noise as well. That was my tribute to Harry that day!Shades Belowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18061550082451669721noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1536779334301427209.post-76520179227060121122014-11-28T07:49:00.001-08:002014-11-28T07:50:13.143-08:00The Moody Blues<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivButtOjktxfyq60Ac2sQtXmUR3-DAxfoOO0mYyRffawT6tC0bYvV-KOzGSZnZZubbFKROPeEDpYKXDFfc4O2uJWEUFjFy7TmQ6QcpY8cmIMz-cPGy1keauNiiOg1aPGaHVzBhwEBpPAI/s1600/bee.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivButtOjktxfyq60Ac2sQtXmUR3-DAxfoOO0mYyRffawT6tC0bYvV-KOzGSZnZZubbFKROPeEDpYKXDFfc4O2uJWEUFjFy7TmQ6QcpY8cmIMz-cPGy1keauNiiOg1aPGaHVzBhwEBpPAI/s200/bee.jpg" /></a></div>
It was at the Red House, when I got stung by a bee outside. I'd seen a bumblebee sitting on a leaf on the rose-bush next door. I wondered, <i>Is it dead? Is it sleeping?</i> I reached out and poked it with my finger to see if it would do anything. It woke up, got onto my finger, and stung me. Damn, that hurt! <br/><br/>
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Dad was in the living room, playing this album that showed a sheaf of album covers stretching out into the night sky. The Threshold labels were almost matching: dark blue, with some sort of swirly fireball-looking logo. The song that was playing was some sort of ghostly, haunting song about a guy named Timothy Leary who was not only dead, but was "outside...looking in". I was drawn in by the bending Mellotron notes, and the different instrumental sections. My hurt finger was completely forgotten about as I heard some more cuts from this album: "Ride My See-Saw", "Tuesday Afternoon", "I'm Just A Singer In A Rock & Roll Band" and "Nights In White Satin". <br/><br/>
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This was the only thing that Dad seemed to have by them, though I would see pictures of their other album covers on those London/Deram innersleeves that were inside of albums by the Rolling Stones and Ten Years After. I was intrigued by the cover for <i>In Search Of The Lost Chord</i>, although I wouldn't hear that until some time later. <br/><br/>
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In that summer, just before entering school, there was a new album by those guys that just came out. A little more poppy than the material I'd fallen in love with, but there were some good cuts on it, such as "The Voice" and "Gemini Dream". <br/><br/>
As I was in my final year of high school, I was teaching myself how to play the keyboards, and one of the first things I showed myself how to play was the Mellotron lines from "Nights In White Satin", whilst playing along with the album. My Casio PT-100 was no Mellotron, but it was something to play along with.Shades Belowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18061550082451669721noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1536779334301427209.post-1716290476725617722014-10-18T22:51:00.002-07:002014-10-18T22:54:41.228-07:00If only for a moment...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPE_vFhyphenhyphenWzD0L4va3TFNoHpL6_HnvQrVV3TBdIA0_8RE52LqFwA0eBpfAZs5L7h7wE32UYRBVkqQbBsQdo0_7AxJHY1DxaML-IPZ18CEiEmErOM9UQnL3rAbqxMND8gccJ7gokYSJRUBY/s1600/11th+street.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPE_vFhyphenhyphenWzD0L4va3TFNoHpL6_HnvQrVV3TBdIA0_8RE52LqFwA0eBpfAZs5L7h7wE32UYRBVkqQbBsQdo0_7AxJHY1DxaML-IPZ18CEiEmErOM9UQnL3rAbqxMND8gccJ7gokYSJRUBY/s320/11th+street.jpg" /></a></div>
There is one moment that is permanently etched onto my memory, and though it was just a short-lived realization, it will always live on whenever I am in the area, and particularly that time of year. <br/ ><br/ >
It was October of 1983, sometime in the mid-afternoon. Dad had taken me to a dentist appointment down at Bates Technical College, and after it was over with, Dad decided we would walk downtown and go to Woolworth's, just to take a look around. We made our way down 13th for a few blocks, walking by the old Samson Apartments, making a left onto Fawcett Avenue, and then down a few more blocks down 11th Street. <br/ ><br/ >
As we walked down this street, with the afternoon sunlight turning gold as it was just beginning its descent, everything just felt right at that moment. We had just been through some rough seas within the last number of months; after he and mom had divorced, the family had been ripped in half as a result, and you can't forge ahead as if nothing had happened, even though we had both been doing that for a while. There would be some more rough seas ahead of us as we forged ahead in the new household situation, but for a moment, where we had been bonding together pretty good, everything just felt right at the moment, with no worries to be had. <br/ ><br/ >
We had just seen the Beach Boys at the Puyallup Fair the month before, and had a great time. We were having fun watching a plethora of new movies on TV, and were soon going to appear on <b><i>The Rock Show</i></b>. Plus, Halloween was on the way, and that (along with the subsequent holidays) was always a great time to look forward to. Down at Woolworth's, we looked through the albums section, and one of us found a copy of Richard Pryor's album <b><i>That Nigger's Crazy</i></b>, which went home with us. <br/ ><br/ >
Flash forward 27 years later to October of 2010. I found myself walking down 11th Street one golden afternoon, the sun beginning to set as I was heading to the bus transit-center, and the long-ago memory of that afternoon came to me. I was now a dad myself, and I was wondering if I was going to be walking down this hill with Geoffrey one day, with him taking it all in and enjoying the moment. As the sun was setting that afternoon, I later reflected on this moment that the sun was now setting on the final days of having Dad around, which wasn't going to be that much longer before he was taken from us. He really loved Geoffrey, perhaps thinking of the days when I was that young, and maybe it was like having me from that time back home again. <br/ ><br/ >
Funny how a fleeting and seemingly insignificant moment from so many years ago seems to last forever.Shades Belowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18061550082451669721noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1536779334301427209.post-28986199360943619952014-09-26T23:57:00.000-07:002014-11-28T08:05:22.935-08:00Paul Revere & The Raiders<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiENA7N32BzI-bpauWcwH02rXIjwOAqqfUD8b_2Tw-J71OH14lMF_4EdStS_lJ_d1Fm39Vpgi9yXgWXq2Sp2C5z-2YzXqaOabSOyOuaWQa7ML9gVfJYfRgLtm9wuUpDoaQFld_Y_uCHm5U/s1600/paul+revere+hits.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiENA7N32BzI-bpauWcwH02rXIjwOAqqfUD8b_2Tw-J71OH14lMF_4EdStS_lJ_d1Fm39Vpgi9yXgWXq2Sp2C5z-2YzXqaOabSOyOuaWQa7ML9gVfJYfRgLtm9wuUpDoaQFld_Y_uCHm5U/s320/paul+revere+hits.jpg" /></a></div>
This was one of Dad's favorite bands, while in his teens, not unlike the Rascals. I often wondered what it must have been like to have grown up with all of these great bands out there. It must have been hard to choose what the hell to go out and buy, what with so many picks out there! <br/ ><br/ >
He played this one for me, and I found that there were some great garage-rock cuts on it. Kind of a shame you don't hear them much anymore, not even on the "oldies" stations, apart from "Kicks", the only song they seem to be remembered for these days. They rocked a little harder than they got credit for, but always got stuck in the "teen band" penalty-box.<br/ ><br/ >
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Another album he had was called <b><i>Something Happening</i></b>, which had almost a completely different band lineup, but a few very strong cuts on it, kicking off with "Too Much Talk", with gnarly fuzz guitar and some very cool basslines. "Don't Take It So Hard" was also another favorite of mine from it. I remember seeing this one back at the Blue House, where I'd heard it for the first time. Angie's school friends were there when Dad played it, and I was more impressed with it than they were.
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A few years onward, in the second grade, we were visited in our class during the course of a week by a guy named Jim Valley, who sang, played the acoustic guitar, and wrote songs like "Rainbow Planet" and "The Computer Song", also singing songs for us like Bobby Darin's "Splish Splash". What I didn't know right away was that he had once been the lead guitarist for the Raiders for a few albums, and he was one of the guys on the cover, wearing the red slip-on shoes. Wow, how cool was that? Stupidly, I never brought it in to have him sign it! <br/><br/>
<b>EDIT</b>
I was shocked to hear of Paul Revere's passing not long after I originally posted this. There were loads of tributes to him by many musicians and friends of his on Facebook, which was touching. I had to go and score vinyl copies of the two original <b><i>Greatest Hits</i></b> collections. Geoffrey absolutely loves "Don't Take It So Hard"; I'll hear him singing it around the house, sometimes even just the middle section of it, word for word.
Shades Belowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18061550082451669721noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1536779334301427209.post-83094434468799105632014-09-26T23:41:00.001-07:002014-09-26T23:41:53.494-07:00Johnny Rivers<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHYcsNjNNiHhqx_2o3_7-pt7BRmLm7aMPKG1BT6IywEdf1AXjDd3ZQHHjirWDDHL9o3sT2Aqvh6MxSUX7cLMKORQ58GZziPnAlo9jBRdiu4GXF027atmN051jy40J88kzaZ9a6DYfgGTA/s1600/JR+best.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHYcsNjNNiHhqx_2o3_7-pt7BRmLm7aMPKG1BT6IywEdf1AXjDd3ZQHHjirWDDHL9o3sT2Aqvh6MxSUX7cLMKORQ58GZziPnAlo9jBRdiu4GXF027atmN051jy40J88kzaZ9a6DYfgGTA/s320/JR+best.jpg" /></a></div>
This was one that Dad plonked onto the turntable, and it drew me right in. The cover, not so much. It looked like one of those sort of generic labels one would see on a bootleg 8-Track cartridge. The back cover was not much better, having the song titles listed again, flanked by a few hand-drawn trees, which reminded me of Wright Park. The run of songs on there inlcuded a handful of Chuck Berry tunes, "Secret Agent Man", "Mountain Of Love" (still a longtime favorite), and "Rockin' Pneumonia / Boogie-Woogie Flu". Great stuff. Mom also played this album, but seemed to favor the ballads on it, such as "Poor Side Of Town" and "The Tracks Of My Tears".
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The album art was so generic that there wasn't even a picture of the artist himself anywhere on it. Dad had only one other album by him called <b><i>Realization</i></b>, kind of a psychedelic/introspective album, with the excellent "Summer Rain". On the photo-collage on the back cover was a guy with dark hair and thick glasses; for a second, I thought it was Doug from <b><i>The New Zoo Revue</i></b>!
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Much later on, reminiscing about some of the classic stuff with Winter while we were in The Pace, he half-jokingly suggested that we should over-dub a gang of girls to shout, hoot and whistle while the songs were going on, sort of like the cover versions of "Maybelline" and "Memphis". Too bad we never did that!Shades Belowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18061550082451669721noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1536779334301427209.post-79394136908345201902014-09-14T23:49:00.002-07:002014-09-21T00:07:22.446-07:00MTV<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitCCwDIpiQvfA43d-vkocBFgwylEPFDDiC2y3VM_uK1elfKJLmWvBcNwrvzWOv1ZM8o0X20tVGbGbMrIg26FgLNmJ-lbJmV_cwjn8Bqc6xIziajlJNgFD9YQphyphenhyphen4tZbz-sBSp9vkPn0ec/s1600/mtv+moon.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitCCwDIpiQvfA43d-vkocBFgwylEPFDDiC2y3VM_uK1elfKJLmWvBcNwrvzWOv1ZM8o0X20tVGbGbMrIg26FgLNmJ-lbJmV_cwjn8Bqc6xIziajlJNgFD9YQphyphenhyphen4tZbz-sBSp9vkPn0ec/s400/mtv+moon.jpeg" /></a></div>
I don't remember seeing it from the first day of its initial broadcast, but the TV was now all but permanently anchored onto this new channel called MTV, which showed music videos all day and all night, hosted by a revolving gang of cool people who introduced videos, or told the latest about who was putting out a new album or touring. <br/ ><br/ >
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It was an interesting mix within the first year of the channel starting out. We saw videos by old favorite bands who were still plugging along (The Who, J. Geils Band, the Rolling Stones), new bands and singers coming out (Asia, John Cougar Mellencamp, Survivor, the Eurythmics, Bryan Adams), and a plethora of "new wave" bands, often one-hit wonders (Human League, Madness, Bananarama, A Flock Of Seagulls, Romeo Void, ABC, and the Buggles, who launched the whole thing off with "Video Killed The Radio Star"). <br/ ><br/ >
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Some of the stuff was good, as well as stuff that was rather questionable; one that was hated around the house was "I Know What Boys Like" by the Waitresses, but would soon be followed up by another new band called Huey Lewis & The News, which was much more tolerable. And then, almost as comic relief, there were videos by funny guys like Madness, and Men At Work, whose videos were not only hilarious, but the songs were equally as good and memorable. <br/ ><br/ >
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As the years went on, the channel got a little more complex, with live concerts being broadcast via satellite, like the <b><i>Asia In Asia</i></b> concert in late 1983. Another feature we enjoyed was a half-hour show called <b><i>Closet Classics</i></b>, which showcased a lot of videos from the German music show <b><i>Beat Club</i></b>, and I got to see clips by bands like Cream, and Blue Cheer. And a few years after that, they broadcast the now-legendary <b><i>Monkees</i></b> marathon over an entire weekend, and I was hooked from there (more on them later). <br/ ><br/ >
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Like anything else that starts out great, it went to rack and ruin over a quick period of years. They introduced "Yo! MTV Raps", game shows, movies, reality shows, and then by the time the channel was twenty years old, anything that made the channel what it once was didn't even seem to exist anymore: the music video. Not that there was anything left that I wanted to see or hear (I'd given up years ago), but what it was built on wasn't there anymore. VH-1 was another great music channel until they, too, caught the same plague. Another childhood memory left to dry out. Ah well, there's always YouTube if I want to see the old videos again. <br/ ><br/ >
In retrospect, and not unlike the K-Tel albums I'd been subjected to in my earlier days, there was more trash to rummage through in order to get to the good stuff, but I gave up after a point. Even then, a lot of the new stuff coming out had a superficiality that I couldn't get into, with new styles coming and going at alarming rates. Less and less to hook me in, or even hold my interest. Shades Belowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18061550082451669721noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1536779334301427209.post-35486737908376513332014-09-04T23:58:00.000-07:002014-09-07T12:52:09.191-07:00"The Shining"<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esaGu1w1K1g"></a>
I had just started kindergarten in September of 1981. I don't think I'd been more than a week into starting my schooling when something happened that not only polarized my future upbringing, but also blew out the inside of my mind completely. <br/ ><br/ >
I was playing outside in the backyard by myself one evening, and it was just starting to get a little dark; Angie was next door with friends, and Mitchell wasn't there. Dad came out of the shed that was tacked onto the rear of the house; he invited me to come in, and that there was something on that I had to come and check out. <br/ ><br/ >
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What could it be? I came into the living room, and there was a movie on, showing something I hadn't seen before. It was about twenty minutes into it, so I had to sort of piece together what was going on as I was watching. It seemed to be about a family who was in this massive (and empty) hotel somewhere in the mountains, looking after it. What drew me in right away was a tight shot of a kid around my age on a bigwheel, riding all around through this huge hotel, almost in a huge circle. I had myself one of those, but--damn, that looked like fun! <br/ ><br/ >
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What was being shown was Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of Stephen King's novel <b><i>The Shining</i></b>. I had never heard of it, nor had I ever heard of those two names before. I recognized Jack Nicholson vaguely from the movie version of <b><i>Tommy</i></b>, where he was the "specialist" who tries to cure Roger Daltrey by having electrodes taped all over his face, and melon-ball cutters over his eyes. This time, he was actually acting in a movie, and I was impressed by his performance. In one sitting, I was introduced to Stanley, Stephen and Jack...wow, talk about a crash course! This was going to be an interesting ride! <br/ ><br/ >
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All I can say for my fist-ever viewing was that I was drawn in. Completely. I didn't move, didn't get up to get something to eat, or go to the bathroom. I couldn't take my eyes away from the screen for the remainder of the time that it was on. I was mesmerized by all what was going on, the settings, the atmosphere, the music...everything. <br/ ><br/ >
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The music...now <b>that</b> was an interesting facet of the movie. I was astonished years later to find out that the music (apart from the Wendy Carlos & Rachel Elkind synthesizer compositions) was not composed for the movie; it was selected from Kubrick's own picks, and all of them went perfectly with what was going on. Hearing things like Bartok's "Music For Percussion, Strings and Celesta" and Penderecki's pieces during the latter half were opening up some new doors in my head. Even hearing something like "Midnight, The Stars and You" was a little on the haunting side, almost ghostly in a way. <br/ ><br/ >
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I had some seen some stuff in the "horror" genre before, such as <b><i>Damien: Omen II</i></b> and <b><i>The Amityville Horror</i></b>, but this was something different entirely. For me, it was more "haunting" than scary. There were lots of scenes and/or images that stayed with me long after it was over. You could never forget the image of the Grady girls lying dead in the hallway, the encounter in Room 237, the conversation with Grady himself in the men's room, Hallorann's fate, and the final image of Jack frozen in the snow. So many others, and everyone has their favorite, but this was definitely unlike anything I had ever seen before, or virtually anything after that. I knew I had to be the only five-year-old watching this; actually, it was almost like seeing it from Danny's point of view, as I was exactly his age at that moment. We thought he was great, and wished he lived nearby, so we could hang out with him! <br/ ><br/ >
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Well! I couldn't wait to see it again. It might have been a week later when we asked if Mitchell could stay the night at our place, and--as luck would have it--the movie was on again, and this time I got to watch it from the beginning. And there we sat, the three of us, right up front, for the next 144 minutes. Everything really fell into place for me this time. And it was great to share the experience with Angie and Mitchell. I know they liked it. The next morning, when we went outside, Mitchell wanted to play a game (of some sort) based on the movie. Of course, <b>he</b> wanted to be Danny, and so I got to chase after the others with an imaginary axe! Oh, if only someone had a camcorder on us at the time! <br/ ><br/ >
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Another time, not long after that, we watched <b><i>A Clockwork Orange</i></b> (typical of the cable channels, they were showing Kubrick's other films as well). <i>Definitely</i> not something to be watched by a small gaggle of grade-schoolers, but we did, and were equally as mesmerized, even if we didn't understand everything that went on in it (let alone the "nadsat" slang throughout it). Although I didn't catch that Kubrick had directed this one as well, I noticed that the two films sort of went hand-in-hand for some reason!<br/ ><br/ >
Another seed of influence had been sown into me gulliver.<br/ ><br/ >
When it snowed a few months later, I was out in the backyard, and I suddenly remembered the part with Danny in the maze, making fake footprints in the snow. I went and did that myself, leading my tracks halfway toward the garage. Unfortunately, no-one noticed, and they got covered over by more snow rather quickly.
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Shades Belowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18061550082451669721noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1536779334301427209.post-7308059302550303342014-08-31T22:01:00.002-07:002015-01-11T12:13:40.968-08:00Peaches Records & TapesThere was a number of places where Dad bought his albums. One was the Sears store that was downtown, and then the Woolworth's store (which was just a couple of blocks away from that) had a good one. But there was one more that he liked to go to, and I got to go with him there a couple of times.
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It was Peaches Records & Tapes, on the corner of 56th and Pacific Avenue, across the corner from Hoagy's Corner, where the bus dropped us off. The first thing you came upon when heading toward the entrance was a square of cement, where some famous recording stars had placed their hands into wet cement (writing their names above them) while making an appearance in town at the store. I remember seeing Billy Joel's name and hand-prints, and some of the guys from the band Boston, among a few others. This was a couple-few years before the Tacoma Dome had been built, and so the major concert action took place in Seattle for the time being, but they managed to stop here in Tacoma along the way. <br/ ><br/ >
It was great to go in and see rows and rows of racks of brand-new albums, wrapped in shiny cellophane. Dad would be off, looking for something, and I would be on my tip-toes, flipping through certain sections, seeing albums by the Beatles and Pink Floyd that we didn't have at home, or seeing new ones, like <b><i>McCartney II</i></b>. I got to go with him there before, and Dad ended up getting the Rolling Stones' album <b><i>Emotional Rescue</i></b>. <br/ ><br/ >
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On our last visit to the store, just as you came into the entrance, was a pinball game featuring the Rolling Stones. Dad gave me some quarters so I could play this. I was into them at the time, and I thought it was the greatest thing I had ever seen. I liked it when, at the end of a game, it would play the riff to "Jumpin' Jack Flash". If you watch the Stones' 1984 video compilation <b><i>Video Rewind</i></b>, there's a quick scene with Mick playing this very pinball game in it.
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Dad was looking for a single called "Another One Rides The Bus" by some guy called "Weird Al" Yankovic, whom he'd heard on the Dr. Demento radio show. They didn't have that, but they did have another song he'd heard on the show by a guy named Jef Jaisun, by the name of "Friendly Neighborhood Narco Agent", in a picture sleeve, featuring an uproarious take-off of the Wheaties box, renamed "Weedies", and featuring the Zig-Zag man. <br/ ><br/ >
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The other thing he bought was by a German electronic band called Kraftwerk, with something called <b><i>Autobahn</i></b>. I wasn't sure what this was going to sound like, but I was very impressed with it once we got it home and on the turntable. <br/ ><br/ >
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Peaches Records wasn't around much longer after that last visit. It closed down and became an auto-parts store (first Schucks, and then O'Reilly). The square that once held the hand-prints of famous recording stars is still there, but has long since been smoothed over with cement. The Hoagy's Corner is also gone, replaced by a small Walgreens store. But I still fondly remember the old place whenever I'm waiting for the bus just outside of it.Shades Belowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18061550082451669721noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1536779334301427209.post-71057966578837397412014-08-28T00:04:00.001-07:002014-08-28T00:10:09.891-07:00The Blues BrothersIt had been a hot summer in 1981. One late evening in the backyard found all four of us together in the small swimming pool that Angie and I had, just to beat the heat. Angie also came up with the idea of sleeping outside in the backyard in a makeshift tent (a rather large blanket held up by a clothesline across the backyard), and no-one objected to that. We all crammed into it and slept the night away. One of the last things that occurred during that summer was a camping trip to Alder Lake, way east, toward Mount Rainier. We went there with a family friend, Fred, and we were only there for a couple of days. Nothing exciting or notable happened, but it was a fun and interesting trip, if only to get away from the house for a little while. <br /><br />When we came back home and unlocked the house, it was hot and stuffy inside. Even after throwing open all the windows, it wasn't that much better. Angie and I were playing around in the front yard when Dad rolled the TV stand out onto the front porch, with the TV on it. He'd never done <i>that</i> before. Something interesting was going to be on, at least for the TV being set up like this!
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It was the Showtime premiere of <b><i>The Blues Brothers</i></b>, but I had absolutely no idea what this movie was about, who was in it, or what was going to happen. I didn't even know about <b><i>Saturday Night Live</i></b>, and the cast of players who had been on the show, and were now making the big leap to the movie screen, although we'd seen <b><i>The Jerk</i></b> recently, and loved it. But this was not like anything I'd ever seen before. It was about two guys cruising around in an old cop car, getting into misadventures and high-speed chases with the cops throughout it. And they seemed to be on a mission of some sort of getting the old band of their back together.
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I was very impressed with the music and songs that came up, although I was not familiar with the likes of Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, or James Brown, and we took an instant liking to Cab Calloway as we tried scat-singing along to "Minnie The Moocher". I especially liked the part where they somehow won over a rowdy bar full of loud, truck-driving rednecks who threw beer bottles at the stage the entire time.
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I sat there and watched the entire movie on the front lawn of the house, completely forgetting the fact that we were still sitting outside, while the TV was on the front porch, and it was completely dark by the time the movie was over. I was impressed, and although we had never done anything like that before, we never did that again so that memory of seeing it the first time that way will always be attached to whenever I see it now. Geoffrey's seen it in parts, and his favorite parts are of Bob's Country Bunker, and "Minnie The Moocher".Shades Belowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18061550082451669721noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1536779334301427209.post-44354317578009385002014-08-27T00:00:00.001-07:002014-08-27T00:02:35.910-07:00The Mothers<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPgKqWaL5U1oyZGL6BtsrzaXiL8ixmf2Qu7xfN_7MrYyTH5iNv51XlUYfU1yv0AHve2ghLPYaBmkaa9OlucU1W8stSgkJnrDRxa-5ODnyIEO4fF3mejndFgToERJu6DJvEjBqUUWe-a9k/s1600/mothers+LP.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPgKqWaL5U1oyZGL6BtsrzaXiL8ixmf2Qu7xfN_7MrYyTH5iNv51XlUYfU1yv0AHve2ghLPYaBmkaa9OlucU1W8stSgkJnrDRxa-5ODnyIEO4fF3mejndFgToERJu6DJvEjBqUUWe-a9k/s400/mothers+LP.jpg" /></a></div>
Dad put this one on the turntable one evening, when it was just him and me there. I don't think I had ever seen this one lurking around in the collection, and I had certainly never heard it before. I liked the blue-green Bizarre/Reprise label that it was on. I looked at the white cover with the hand-written titles, and I thought that Dad had done the hand-writing himself, but he told me that that's how it was printed. All I could say that it was a weird but funny-sounding live album with a couple of guys with shrill, high-pitched voices, singing weird songs about groupies, motels, and impossibly perverted musicians. I was in hysterics at a particular cut called "Bwana Dik", which was about...well, the title said it all, really!
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Next thing we know, the band swings into a rendition of the song "Happy Together", which I had recognized from an album by The Turtles. It was hard to believe that the two lead singers of this rather tame-sounding band were the same two guys cutting up and getting gross onstage on this album.
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Although we would later go on to different and better things masterminded by Frank Zappa, this was my first introduction to his wild world of music and composition.Shades Belowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18061550082451669721noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1536779334301427209.post-51557137284085844002014-08-10T15:39:00.001-07:002014-08-10T23:27:02.528-07:00The Screensaver<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVrWK6D0Gdw53NM1a2AexHHDUC7an0VUg3HdWWwizheRjh0-C63nmNPxE4oRQrBp9IqsLcZr3yYdB9vVMuQeFR6wmyxMgw9ol5_BJ2oLek_gFM6D2QY95xWoJ7068gza3FyCK6wX-YlHo/s1600/Cable_BeFunky_Teleprompter-screen-shot-Jen-Orourke.jpg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVrWK6D0Gdw53NM1a2AexHHDUC7an0VUg3HdWWwizheRjh0-C63nmNPxE4oRQrBp9IqsLcZr3yYdB9vVMuQeFR6wmyxMgw9ol5_BJ2oLek_gFM6D2QY95xWoJ7068gza3FyCK6wX-YlHo/s640/Cable_BeFunky_Teleprompter-screen-shot-Jen-Orourke.jpg.jpg" /></a></div>
Boy...talk about a memory flogger! I remember this one very well from the days when not all of the channels on the cable box were filled up (out of 27 channels). This is one that beamed from the Teleprompter Cable company, soon to be Group W Cable. It was on channel 8, and not much was on there, except for <b><i>The Rock Show</i></b> on Friday nights, and maybe some scattered local information. Otherwise, this was on there the remainder of the time. Actually it was rather handy for the time and temperature, especially in the mornings, like before heading out to school.<br /><br />The shot above shows what it was like in the earlier days. A little later on, they added plugs for local businesses along the bottom part of the screen. Bouquets made from mylar balloons became very popular at this time, so there were plugs for those from one of the local shops in town, and there were plugs from the local TV repair shop, known as Mr. TV. The audio feed for the channel came from KISW-FM, a Seattle rock station, so sometimes there was even more reason to just let it play on its own if nothing was on!Shades Belowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18061550082451669721noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1536779334301427209.post-69825539736042172482014-08-10T00:06:00.003-07:002014-08-10T00:07:58.468-07:00Short TakesWe began exploring the new neighborhood and finding some interesting things to do, not long after we moved there. One place we discovered that was only a stone's throw down the hill was the Tacoma Public Library. I don't know who thought of doing it, but either Dad or Red Fred got the idea of renting a 16mm film projector from there, with a few films to go with it.
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Only just a few years later, VHS tapes would be commonplace to check out, superseded by DVD's by twenty years, but in the early summer of 1981, that's all there was for checking out films. I remember the group of us walking up the incline of 11th Street, some of them taking turns carrying this heavy projector up the hill. We finally got it to the house, and Dad began setting up in the living room. A poster was taken down off one of the walls, creating an "instant screen" right there on the wall. One of the films was taken from its canister and threaded into the projector. I didn't catch what they picked out, but I was excited as the light was turned out and the film started.
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It was <b><i>Hardware Wars</i></b>, the now-legendary takeoff of the original <b><i>Star Wars</i></b> film, but done in the style of an upcoming film trailer. My knowledge of <b><i>Star Wars</i></b> was pretty threadbare, but I was able to enjoy and get a good laugh out of what was going on. I especially liked Chewchilla the Wookie Monster, as he looked and sounded like Cookie Monster, going after Princess Android's hair "buns". This was also the first time I had ever seen a parody of something, and the utter cheesiness of everything in this short movie was unreal. After it was over, they didn't rewind the film, but played it backwards, just for a laugh.
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I seem to remember a Pink Panther cartoon as the other film that they rented, one where he was a rancher with a little sheep, battling a nearby rancher who sort of looked like Yosemite Sam. Angie was pleased with that one, as she really liked Pink Panther.
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Oddly enough, this was the only time we ever rented a projector from there. I think we began seeing so much good stuff on cable that we sort of forgot about doing that again. One thing we noticed on Showtime was that they would show short films if there was a ten-minute gap to fill before the next film came on. I remember being impressed with one called <b><i>Vicious Cycles</i></b>, showing a bunch of bikers tearing down the highway on invisible motorcycles. They also showed the followup, <b><i>Stop, Look & Listen</i></b>.
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One that was disturbing as it was fascinating was one called <b><i>Recorded Live</i></b>, about a guy going to an empty building for a job interview, only to be stalked and chased by two reels' worth of brown videotape. He wards them off with a big magnet he manages to find, but the tape outsmarts him in a locked room he's hiding in, covers him in the blink of an eye, and eats him on the floor. Not quite the kind of thing to show to an impressionable 5-year-old, but I managed to see it a few times, and although I'd forgotten the title for years, I never forgot seeing it.Shades Belowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18061550082451669721noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1536779334301427209.post-313565365707659002014-07-16T07:38:00.001-07:002014-07-16T07:42:45.327-07:00AC/DCOne of the things we all began doing together (once the weather started getting better) was hanging out on the porch in the evenings, watching the sun go down, listening to music. We installed a green light-bulb above the front porch, to match the green of the house itself. We started listening to the radio a little more these days, mostly the Rock station KISW, and we began hearing some newer things that sounded interesting.
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One band we began hearing for the first time was a heavy, hard-hitting band by the name of AC/DC. At the time, I had no idea that the name was an electrical-voltage reference, so I used to wonder what it meant, or if the letters stood for something. Dad got one of their albums at the Music Exchange, featuring a nutty-looking guy on the front cover, playing a broken guitar with his tongue hanging out. We began playing this one around the house, especially with company over, and it was great!
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A new one had just come out, and we liked the title track from it, but I <i>swore</i> they were singing "Dirty Jeans, Done Dirt Cheap", as if it were some sort of laundromat jingle. Regardless of mishearing the title, the song was pretty cool, and I liked it.
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One slightly confusing thing about the band (for me) at that point was that they seemed to have a new singer. I didn't know anything about the band, or any facts about them having recently lost frontman Bon Scott, so when I began hearing the title track from their newest album, I liked it, but I wasn't sure who I was hearing!
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Many years down the road, Dad began hearing cuts from the <b><i>Back In Black</i></b> album at one of the bars he would have a few beers after work at, which renewed interest in them. He started buying some of the albums on CD, and we became major fans of the band. We went and saw them at the Tacoma Dome in April of 2001, which was an amazing show, and one of my top favorite concerts that I've been to. Geoffrey's heard a number of their songs, and we'll occasionally hear him singing something from "T.N.T." or "It's A Long Way To The top (If You Wanna Rock And Roll)".Shades Belowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18061550082451669721noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1536779334301427209.post-68678401645027822662014-06-29T07:22:00.002-07:002014-06-29T07:26:33.824-07:00The Beatles (iii)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg42vyHvm0OASWG2eD7zRLSwkYmOQBCtqAHclRNz-r3MUOHE8hQBUGFP9OVgAjOLZjsvvL-IrK8oyUvFA4GnvCS9likGB07domEG9AR4LVELOtyJpgZ6mpaotyM4sGWRMnoP0P22i74ue4/s1600/blue+album.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg42vyHvm0OASWG2eD7zRLSwkYmOQBCtqAHclRNz-r3MUOHE8hQBUGFP9OVgAjOLZjsvvL-IrK8oyUvFA4GnvCS9likGB07domEG9AR4LVELOtyJpgZ6mpaotyM4sGWRMnoP0P22i74ue4/s320/blue+album.jpg" /></a></div>
This was one of the first albums that Dad scored at the Music Exchange, and I was surprised to see that there was more to discover and listen to by these guys, even though we hadn't been listening to them much in the past few months. Understandably, it was still a little hard to listen to. but I put it aside so I could try to enjoy it. I heard the first album from it in one sitting, and I was amazed how it went from baroque psychedelia to stripped-down <i>non</i>-psychedelia, and then closing with a rollicking, bollocking rocker like "Revolution". I got to hear the second record a little later, but I wasn't impressed with most of the material at first. For some reason, it sounded tired and uninspired to me; it wasn't until later on that I would hear about the tensions running through the band at that point, and then I could understand why it sounded like that to me.
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Red Fred went to the Exchange and got himself a copy of one of their albums that had just a plain white cover with only their name sort of printed on the front. I got to hear some of it when he gave it a spin; again, the same tiredness was going on through the music to me, and it didn't make for easy or enjoyable listening. I lost interest rather quickly when "Happiness Is A Warm Gun" played; it just didn't sound right hearing something like this, and I left the house without hearing the rest of the album. It wasn't until seven years later that we got a copy of the "White Album", and I thoroughly enjoyed it, spending a whole summer listening to it.
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One more little place that Dad discovered was a shop on North I Street called The Collector's Nook, which was a dusty little place filled with old newspapers, books, magazines, and a few boxes of albums in a disused corner. I got to go there with him one sunny summer day in 1981. Among Robin Trower's <b><i>Bridge Of Sighs</i></b> and Wings' <b><i>Wings Over America</i></b> was a beat-up but playable copy of <i><b>Abbey Road</b></i>. We got it home, and this was the first of the albums that he played. I was impressed with this one, maybe because I recognized most of the songs from the <b><i>Sgt. Pepper</i></b> movie, only this was the Real Thing. I didn't quite understand the ride-out of "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" with all of the hissing and distortion; I thought the previous owner had played the album with a bad needle or something, and then it mercifully cut off. The second side was just as pleasurable, although we were sort of shocked when we heard "Her Majesty", as this was a first pressing of the album that didn't have the title on the cover or the label.
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In December of 1981, there was a one-year anniversary vigil for John Lennon at Wright Park. This was something I had completely forgotten about until seeing a mention of it in the <i>Tacoma News Tribune</i> some twenty-five years later. I don't remember anything that went on at the gathering, but I do remember just Dad and myself going there for it. I guess we had really bonded together in the year since then. I knew that John Lennon had a son who was around my same age, and Sean Lennon was sort of a hero to my at that point, as he head really held himself together in the months since the incident, at least from what I would see in the occasional newspaper article on him. I couldn't imagine going through something like that. It would be a little chilling that something similar would happen with me almost 30 years to the day.Shades Belowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18061550082451669721noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1536779334301427209.post-87625342901992734912014-06-23T07:59:00.000-07:002014-07-03T08:05:15.746-07:00Green Is The Colour<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic1JWdgW8aMWUFUlEAdGWk0pGkODOc1lAbrFuAcdc6oq_OT30N6296WIQti6-jPERFa7JpB4h5p8FjBmoQL6zZTTH2yMjwWpIveYR9NWSRutirWOGeCWktU91O5j5TcBI1PnyOX22N5QA/s1600/908.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic1JWdgW8aMWUFUlEAdGWk0pGkODOc1lAbrFuAcdc6oq_OT30N6296WIQti6-jPERFa7JpB4h5p8FjBmoQL6zZTTH2yMjwWpIveYR9NWSRutirWOGeCWktU91O5j5TcBI1PnyOX22N5QA/s320/908.jpg" /></a></div>
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It was after the turn of the new year, possibly right around my fifth birthday, that we moved again. The people who owned the Red House eventually found out about us living there, and we had to move out. This would the fifth place we'd lived in within the last five years, but this one was only just over a mile down the street. It was at 908 South J Street, a two-story house that was painted a sickly green color. Eventually, the house was painted about six months later, but was painted pine-green, with lime-green trim.
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Three things had some pretty heavy and profound changes. The first was that the foundation of the family was crumbling; the cracks that appeared at the Red House had not been sealed, and were only getting worse as time went on. Indeed, in two years' time, the family would split right down the middle, never to patch up again.
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Secondly, Angie and I met a kid in the neighborhood named Mitchell, and we were completely inseparable for the next few years. We got into all kinds of hijinks and mischief that would fill out a blog on its own, and memories of those times still put a smile on my face, all these years later. Sometimes, just being among the three of us was more fun and comforting than the atmosphere at home.
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Lastly, the musical doors kept opening, and would keep doing so for the next five years in that house, and almost right from the start. There was a small place on 11th Street called The Music Exchange, just two blocks down from the house; it was a small place, but they had stereo equipment, loads of second-hand albums, and 8-Tracks for cheap, because nobody seemed to want those anymore. Dad even re-bought another 8-Track deck (and a bunch of tapes to go with it), but that didn't last too long, because some of the tapes would jam, stick or spew out their insides in the middle of playing. And so the emphasis went back over to the cassette format, where it stayed. But this place would be where I first took an interest in collecting albums.
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Another place that opened up a little later was the Hilltop Pawn Shop on the corner of 11th and K Streets. It's funny now to think of a pawn shop carrying albums, but they once did, and there would be some good ones to find. Of course, some of them would have the previous owner's name scrawled onto them with Magic Marker on the labels and outside covers, sometimes even chiseled onto the covers with ballpoint pen.
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In addition to lots of music I would discover, there would also soon be new ways of experiencing them as well that I never thought possible, or would happen so soon.Shades Belowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18061550082451669721noreply@blogger.com0