Welcome to another New Year's Eve: in this case, the rainy, cold, windy ass end of a rather...shall we say, dramatic 2005, and hopefully the start of a far more agreeable 2006.Granted, a more sedate and calm new year free of financial surprises might portend a less vitriolic and/or miserable blog, I think I'll take that trade, thank you very much.
Aside from yesterday and today's relative business, the last week has been surprisingly calm at work. The day after Christmas turned into our best day-after we've had in the new location, with a sales figure more in line with the run-up to Christmas than the wind-down afterwards. From there, it was almost immediately back to normal business: a rather curious departure from last year's holiday season, where it was the week after Christmas that saved our winter storm-stalled momentum. We also managed to nail that half-million mark for the first time since we left Great Lakes Mall in 1997: a milestone that, if nothing else, tells us that we are doing something right in this Best Buy/Wal-Mart world.
Alright, without further ado, I Am A Bug presents a nice one-stop recap of the highlights and low tides of 2005 ...
January
Our first run-in with the infamous Inspector Scene in November 2004 is finally resolved with some slapdash hammering of wooden slats into the downstairs bathroom wall, immobilizing it and allowing the door to said area to close correctly at last (this repair lasts maybe three months).
Counterbalancing this, our ex-landlord kindly sues us for leaving our previous lease six months before it expired, despite our best efforts to resolve this matter with in advance of the move. Looking back on this from a year later, this kind of started the ball rolling right then and there.
February
January is the month that nothing happens in my business, but February is when all of the big tour/album news starts to fly fast and furious. As a result, there was much news of varying activities from many of my favorite artists this month. U2 announce a Cleveland show waaay early on, but my attendance this time was just not in the cards. The same is true with Nine Inch Nails, who announced a new album and tour as well. Bruce Springsteen came back from Limbo to announce Devils & Dust, which becomes one of my faves of the year. I then just about leap for joy when I read that The Cocteau Twins have reformed to play the Coachella Music Festival. However, a few days later it becomes apparent that no one had asked singer Elizabeth Fraser what she thought of this idea, and the whole thing fell apart before the good news had even started to sink in. Dead Can Dance also reformed for a tour, but there was to be no Cleveland date. Bugger.
On another musical note, I start writing what became a weekly column for 45RPM, a weblog run by my friend and ex-Record Den co-worker Mike Beaumont.
March
Without exaggeration, the snowiest freakin' winter in Northeast Ohio history continues unabated.
Thanks to the kindness of a regular customer at the store, Sarah and I head downtown to see Duran Duran and VHS Or Beta (the only concert we will see this year ... we just didn't know it then).
In an ominous sign of Things To Come, my car develops a rather expensive problem with the cooling system that requires immediate attention.
April
I get pretty damn sick at the beginning of the month: sick like I haven't been in years, really. Hell, I can't even think of the last time I called in sick to work, it was that nasty.
Spring joyously arrives a couple of weeks later and finally ends a terrible, endless winter.
A second car repair job in a month (as well as a couple of rather unpleasantly big heating bills) leaves me temporarily poleaxed financially.
May
I get an unannounced raise at work, which helps a bit to catch up with my car repair woes.
I also get to revisit my childhood one last time as Revenge Of The Sith finally comes out, which at once ends 28 years of being a drooling Star Wars nerd and reveals Darth Vader to be a complete rube with a hardon. Sad.
June
Life is ever-so-briefly Good as the weather is wonderful and I have no worries with money.
I am very pleasantly surprised that not only do I greatly enjoy War Of The Worlds, but that having Tom Cruise (in the midst of his public Cool Meltdown) as the lead character doesn't detract from the experience one iota.
Then, in the shocker of all shockers for the year, Pink Floyd announce that they will re-unite to play the Live 8 concert in London. With Roger Waters. Holyshit.
July
Following nineteen years of very public acrimony, David Gilmour and Roger Waters not only deign to be on the same stage as each other, but they smile and wrap arms around each other's shoulders during the group bow at the end of Pink Floyd's fucking amazing 23-minute reunion set. I am geeked up to an extent unseen since at least the summer of 1995, if not 1994. It's not a pretty sight.
From this high, it's only a few weeks until things head rapidly for rock-bottom. The tailspin that characterizes the second half of 2005 gets going at the end of the month: while trying to get my car to pass an emissions test, it seems like just about everything that can go wrong does goes wrong, and I get a whopping $1400 repair bill accrued in a matter of days, which pretty much atomizes my recently-rebuilt finances and sets me behind on bills and everything else for the next five months. Wheee.
August
Following a run of freakishly bad luck, running around, and very nearly losing my cool with people at all stops along the route, my car passes emissions and is back in my possession ... but oh, the cost ...
My friend Dave Lynch came to town for a Sunday and we headed down to the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, watched the remake of Dawn Of The Dead, and he spent the night on our new hide-a-bed with Moe as a new best pal and bedmate.
Sarah also switched jobs at Case: in effect, going from working with people to hanging out and playing matchmaker with a gazillion immune-compromised mice. After eighteen years of dealing with other people on my job, I can't say I blame her.
September
I watch, appalled, as the United States Government goes to Hell in a handbasket in front of the whole world following the near-loss of New Orleans and a wide swath of southern Mississippi following the arrival of Hurricane Katrina (one of, like, five or so to hit the U.S. mainland this year). This is quite possibly the most embarrassing and infuriating moment in a very embarrassing and infuriating last five years. The prospect of three more years left to go under with these jokers in office just fills the heart with dread, doesn't it?
While all that is going on, my lower-left wisdom tooth (the last of these still in my head) begins to ache on a regular basis. Marvy.
October
Fall shows up and promptly screws up all the wonderful weather we've been having since the end of May, but also brings along the drama and edge-of-your-seat action of the League Championship Series followed by another anticlimactic World Series. While the Cleveland Indians went to hell at exactly the wrong time of the season, at least the Everfucking New York Yankees didn't win the title. In fact, they didn't make it past the second round. Bwaahaha.
Just after mid-month, 45RPM (or, to be more direct, Mike's ISP) gets threatened by the RIAA over the posting of a Strokes track and we pull the plug for the time being.
I also develop a nastier seasonal bout of what feels like bronchitis than I've ever had before, and it turns out later to be a mild form of asthma triggered by allergens (i.e., two cats) and crappy weather. Laid low by this attack, I make a partially successful attempt to quit smoking that lasts a whole month and change. Wheee.
Lastly, our Halloween is spiced up considerably by news of Sarah's bank account/debit card being hacked into and overdrawn by nearly $2000. That's a hell of a lot of online poker. Grrrr.
November
Winter arrives very early this year, as snow is on the ground a week before Thanksgiving for crissakes. Oh noooo.
I attend a funeral for my friend (and ex-Record Den co-worker) Jim's mother at midmonth.
My toothache recurs in a big way around the same time, and a big day-long spat of cleaning reactivates my asthmatic tendencies in a big way. Fed up with the wheeze and cough that this entails, I make arrangements to visit a doctor at the Lake County Free Clinic and get some free Albuterol for my troubles. I also set up an appointment with my dentist to have my wisdom tooth repaired, and to my surprise, I am directed to an oral surgeon for the procedure instead.
At the end of the month, said tooth was removed at a cost far greater than I'd expected to spend at the dentists' office. Life (or at least the holiday season) looks rather bleak at this point in time.
In a nice break from the unremitting gloom, Inspector Scene does his thing and finds absolutely nothing at all to bitch about for this year. Wooo!
December
I spend the first week of the month in misery from my tooth removal, which had far more lasting effects of discomfort than any I'd had done previously.
By the time all is finally copacetic once again, I have lapsed back into smoking, largely as a result of additional stress from another unplanned car repair. Luckily, this one goes far more smoothly than the rest, and at considerably less cost, but I am edgy as hell, regardless.
By midmonth, however, following months of worrying, my being able to participate in Christmas finally becomes a reality. Ho ho ho.
Incidentally, you gotta love Northeast Ohio weather sometimes: it snows like a son of a bitch for the entire first half of this month, and then the latter two weeks are full of the kind of weather that wouldn't seem out of place in, oh, April ...
Alright, back to a relaxing evening hanging out with the kitties and possibly tuning into America's Rockin' Eve (or whatever they call it these days) in morbid curiosity later on this evening. In case you haven't heard, they are planning on wheeling out dear old Dick Clark at some point during tonight's festivities. My money is on Dick's return to the public eye being previously-taped in case he should ask Ryan Seacrest for a handful of tapioca pudding and a blankee. At best, it'll be nice to see Clark still up and about again, if usurped as MC by Seacrest, the ultimate gigglemuppet. At worst, this could be one of those all-time cool bits of trainwreck T.V. that happen only once every few years.
Happy new year to all!
NP Eurythmics Ultimate Collection
I was going to be paying $230 for a goddamned new tire with a snazzy official Beretta rim when all I needed and wanted was a plain old black steel donut instead. Luckily, a mechanic nearby was one of the guys who had worked on my steering system over the summer and remembered all the hair-pulling and wild tossing about of money from back then and I'll be damned if he didn't steer the manager quickly away from his $230 hustle and down to a simple $75 replacement wheel instead, which is pretty much what I'd had in mind in the first place. It would probably be a few hours or maybe a day before a replacement tire was in the shop, but I was too relieved to care at that point.
Life I said earlier, that day was a pretty life-changing event: from that point onwards, I have been scared out of my fucking mind of the dentist's office. Even almost entirely positive dental office experiences that followed (including one visit where I was blissfully stoned out of my entire being on nitrous and novocaine) failed to wipe out the psychic stain of that one visit. I've had three wisdom teeth out over the last 15 years, all of them with no complications or suffering whatsoever (save for the one time I waited a half hour too long to pop my first pain pill afterward -- hoo boy), yet during my most recent procedure about 5 years ago, I remember sitting alone in one of the exam rooms, reclined in the chair and visibly trembling in irrational fright during the few moments between my examination by the hygienist and the arrival of my current dentist.
As you might have inferred from my current user photo, I have recently been on a bit of an 
The story of the original Ultraman series (not to be confused with the seemingly several dozen other series that followed) goes like this: this guy Hyata (seen standing to the right) is a member of the Science Patrol, who function kind of like the X-Files unit of the Japanese CIA, if you will. Members of this team wore these really awful loud orange suits with red ties, button-down lapels, and modded white motorcycle helmets. They also used ray guns and flew around in a kinda hybrid airplane/rocketship that launched from the top of their headquarters building (which itself was the size of a city hospital).
Of course, Hyata and Ultraman being one and the same has to remain a secret. Thus, Hyata becomes a kind of Clark Kent figure at times, having to slip away from the other members of the Science Patrol in order to turn into Ultraman and kick some monster ass before all of the balsa wood sets could be completely flattened by the "guest" monster.
It was all about timing: the post-punk New Romantic movement, with its legion of bitchin’-haired snappy dressers practicing their best cod-Bowie croon, was uniquely suited to take advantage of the infant form of music video. While it wasn’t quite “money for nothing and chicks for free,” as was widely assumed, the lure of being in a band and being on T.V. (and, by extension, an instant fashion-plate to an impressionable audience of millions) proved irresistible to hundreds of struggling musicians in the U.K. at the time.
Balancing their vast sonics with a pop songwriting standpoint, A Flock Of Seagulls came off as more of a synthrock band than many of their peers ever dared to be, and it was in this area of that Reynolds became the band’s secret weapon: some of his solos recalling the direct, yet celestial sound of David Gilmour (he also seems to share a bit of the latter’s love for delay and reverb effects). With such a stinging, distinctive tone layered onto atmospheric synth chords and a propulsive rhythm section topped off by the band’s “futuristic” stage appearance, the Flock soon became one of the first signings to the newly-created indie label Cocteau Records.
Most of the debut EP (including “Telecommunication”) made its way in re-recorded form to the combo’s full-length debut album, which was released in the spring of 1982. From the outset, 
While “I Ran” remains to this day the song they are best known for, A Flock Of Seagulls have some real gems buried away in their catalog, some of which, like their follow-up single “Space Age Love Song” and the Grammy-winning (!) surf-tinged instrumental "D.N.A." were in a similar melodious, epic vein as “I Ran.” A decent-sized follow-up hit, reaching the lower end of the Top 30 in February of 1983 (following a similarly lengthy climb as its predecessor), “Space Age Love Song” was a more outwardly emotional, even romantic piece that featured Reynolds’ guitar work effectively making the five-word choruses work in spectacular fashion.
Those awaiting more of the same on the second Flock album were in for a bit of a surprise as Listen offered up a rather different listening experience than the debut. It wasn’t hard to identify that this was the same band or anything: that intoxicating sweep and sense of space was still there, but the feel of the music was colder, darker, and more overtly synth-driven than what had come before, which was fully the band's intent. A lot of this is likely due to the record being recorded in Germany in the studio owned by legendary Krautrock producer Conrad Planck (though Howlett was manning the boards again). Listening to other tracks like the failed second single "Nightmares," the bracing techno-rocker "Over The Border," or the chilling instrumental "The Last Flight Of Yuri Gagarin," it's easy to hear echoes of Neu! and Kraftwerk in the final mix.
The next couple of years for the band weren’t pleasant for anyone involved as some pretty massive changes fundamentally altered the direction and sound of the band, the most damaging being the departure of Paul Reynolds. A bit of a fragile soul during the best of times, Reynolds apparently descended into serious drug and alcohol abuse as a result of stress and constant rigorous touring. By all accounts, Reynolds was a physical and mental wreck and leaving the band probably saved his life. At the time, however, the loss of his highly distinctive guitar work (a crucial part of Flock’s signature sound) really took the wind out of the band’s sails.
Very few biographical details exist anywhere about Taco Ockerse, so we'll cut to the chase fairly quickly: born in Indonesia (yet of Dutch descent) and raised in Germany, Ockerse studied theater and dance before making a name for himself around Hamburg as the frontman of the band Taco's Bizz.
In true "one-hit wonder" fashion, Taco seemed to vanish just as quickly as he had appeared. Despite After Eight climbing up to #23 on Billboard's album chart and ultimately selling half-a-million copies, Taco became persona non grata at Top 40 radio from the instant "Puttin' On The Ritz" slipped off of the hit parade. Another cover tune, "Cheek To Cheek" (which probably sounded too much like "Puttin' On The Ritz" for its own good) was worked by RCA as a follow-up single, but there was no interest whatsoever from the public and the song failed to list on any chart stateside. Ouch.
Abandoning the U.S. market, Taco concentrated on the German market from that point forward, starting with 1985's Swing Classics In The Mood Of Glen Miller, and, it is said, recording the soundtrack to a movie called Whiz Kid. Incidentally, one of these albums sports a truly dreadful disco rendition of "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" that is so awful I just had to share the pain ...
While it's fair to say that Stewart's striking vocals would probably have drawn attention to this song no matter what the production style, this production was designed from the ground up to grab attention, which is exactly what it did. While Floyd's "Knock On Wood" was a midtempo bluesy number that simmered on the radio like a sultry July evening, the Leng-produced Amii Stewart version moved like a relentless freight train, indiscriminately mowing down everything in its path. Most importantly, "Knock On Wood" just sounded incredibly huge in a dance club, with its thundering beat, oddly-creaking synthesizer lines, laser-bright horn sections, insistent percussion effects, and ominous underlying bass hum all compressed together into an explosive mix that Jeff Lynne himself would have killed to create.
From that point onwards, Stewart never returned to the U.S. music charts, though she eventually found herself popular enough overseas that she was able to keep a career going on that level alone. Within a couple of years, she had reached the point that her Georgio Moroder-produced 1986 album Amii never even saw the light of day on these shores (nor have any of its follow-up projects with such luminaries as Ennio Morricone, for that matter). With the writing on the wall now too big to ignore, Stewart eventually left the United States for the rolling landscapes of Italy where her multi-faceted singing talents have yielded her an ongoing career that extends to the present day.
