The Great Record Massacre

Somewhere between my "Crocodile Rock" epiphany and the gradual reawakening to pop/rock that I experienced in middle school, what initial interest I'd had in music was completely dissipated by other childhood interests, pursuits and distractions. It was in this era of near-total disregard for music that I shamefully incited The Great Record Massacre. In the interest of full disclosure, I will recount this event and the circumstances surrounding it...

One of the most uncaring, selfish, and downright evil stunts I ever pulled as a kid, The Great Record Massacre is not something I'm proud of instigating. In fact, considering what I do for a living now, it's a total disgrace that I was never punished for (or even asked about) this wanton act of childish destruction. Hell, I would have kicked someone's ass into the next county if this had happened to me.

To understand the motives behind the Great Record Massacre, you have to understand that we were kids, we were in our old basement, we were acting on pure, unrefined adrenaline, and it was a helluva riot at the time.

The basement of my family's old split-level house in Southfield, Michigan was a murky, sickly-green painted dungeon, absolutely forbidding as Hell to anyone below the age of twelve (like me). About once every year or so, unusually heavy rains (or runoff from melting snow) would somehow cause up to a quarter-inch of water to rise through the drainage vents scattered hither and yon, which gave the place the dank feel of a wintry swamp. There was also an ugly, faintly sinister rattan curtain dividing the laundry/washbasin "room" away from the rest of the basement, most of which was dominated by a huge white freezer fitted with a weird alien orange "night light" that shined forth evilly from the bottom, dimly lighting the dozens upon dozens of boxes filled with clothes, toys and sundry detritus that could never be thrown away but were instead stored where they would quietly mildew over years and never again see the light of day.

This cool, musty morgue was a place I entered only with all the lights on (even during the daytime, when the glow through the ground-level windows was enough to navigate by). Even then, I always made sure to exit as rapidly as possible when down there alone in order to be sure that whatever malevolent, stealthy Boogey Things that existed down there (most likely behind that creepy rattan curtain) would be unable to secure a slithery grip on one of my bare ankles as I rapidly ascended the carpeted stairs.

Yeah, I really hated and feared that room when I was the only one in it. One of the Worst Thing In The World was when our sometime-babysitter Vic Miller (the teenaged son of our next door neighbors) would send me downstairs to fetch, say, some Flav-R-Ice from that massive freezer, then shut off the lights and slam the door shut the instant I reached the bottom of the stairs. Miller would then cackle wildly as I fairly flew up the stairs screaming bloody murder and pounding the door of its hinges.

(I wish to say that, despite this treatment, Vic was actually a pretty cool babysitter who took particular delight in helping Brett and I terrorize our younger sister Megan with a Kleenex dispenser that looked like a severed head. He also once showed us what happened when you shake up a bottle of Coca Cola and open it indoors. Good times.)

Anyway, one of the other Worst Things In The World was the semi-annual day when my mother would tell us in an ill temper: "I want you all to go downstairs and clean that basement!" From our reaction, you'd have guessed that she'd just ordered us to join the Bataan Death March. This wasn't a cleaning job, you see, this was damnation and the loss of an entire priceless day of carefree goofing off. That basement was never going to be cleaned, at least not on our watch: our methods of "straightening" down there usually involved marking time until dinner was served or the sun went down without any real work ever being accomplished.

Once we were down there, the general strategy was a half-assed, surface-level rearranging. The boxes lined up against the walls down in the basement were all your standard cardboard moving boxes and were as clammy, dark and mysterious as the basement itself. They also never moved from their locations, ever. Convinced that these boxes were also housing dozens of poisonous house snakes, vicioys house raccoons, and flying carnivorous house beetles, we were loath to go anywhere near them -- instead, we just tossed toys and clothes in their general direction rather than dig through them to sort and file away things that actually belonged together.

For reasons long ago forgotten (but almost certainly related to punishment for some trouble we had gotten ourselves into), there was one time where we had some assistance in the basement from our best friend, Paul. His parents and ours (not to mention his sister and ours) had been close friends for years. These were the close friends of your parents that you called "Aunt" and "Uncle" despite the fact that they aren't even remotely related to you. As the parents had hit it off together, so had the kids, and we spent entire weekends and change at each other's houses, generally taking turns driving each set of parents up the wall. This bond between the families also meant that both sets of parents were empowered to regulate on us kids when we were being destructive little monsters, however, and we must have done something to get my mom pretty pissed off since we had all wound up being forced into that terrible toy mausoleum downstairs, punished with performing that Sisyphean cleaning task once again.

As before, we set about to do as much as we could in that basement without actually accomplishing anything, and with Paul around to "help," there was a lot more fun involved in this task than normal, since he and Brett and I seemed to excel in bringing out the absolute worst in each other.

So, how bad was "the absolute worst in each other"? We were like the Three Musketeers of mischief: engaging in vicious stuffed animal fights that often resulted in toppled furniture and broken wall hangings, holding thunderously loud jumping contests on flights of stairs, sentencing our sisters' beloved Holly Hobbie dolls to death by hurtling them down the laundry chutes whenever they irritated us enough, prank phone calls to the local grocery stores in search of all kinds of nonsensical items, and take-no-prisoners squirtgun fights upstairs or outside during our mothers' Tupperware parties were all high on our lists of ways of keeping ourselves amused.

I believe it was also with Paul around that we spent an entire afternoon systematically snipping the heads off of over 300 green-and-gray plastic posed army figures with a pair of needlenosed pliers in order to create opposing divisions of headless Allied and Nazi soldiers, who then fought each other for possession of their severed heads (you'll have to bear with me when I tell you that we considered this the greatest idea since the ice cream cone at the time).

I'd guess that the absolute depth of our monstrous behavior was the day of my Uncle Kevin's wedding (my real uncle, just to be clear), which we'd all attended in Pennsylvania. Our parents, knowing that it would be foolhardy to do otherwise, kept us separated from the rest of the congregation by sticking us in the helpfully-labelled "crying room" at the back of the church. Tickled pink by the purpose of this room, which overlooked the center pews of the church, we decided to put the place to good use and spent the entirety of the wedding ceremony wailing, sniffling, and begging my uncle to reconsider, occasionally pressing our faces up against the plate glass windows for dramatic effect. Looking back on this day, I really hope that this "crying room" was soundproofed, though it hardly mattered as the latter histrinonics alone had even my dear sweet Grandmother ready to have us all drawn and quartered afterward.

Back to the basement...

After a few hours of "toiling" around and moving things from point A to point B, one of us noticed a rather malevolent-looking spider trundling up the concrete wall towards the raftered ceiling. Herr Arachnid had just appeared from behind one of the boxes we were casually throwing toys at, and we all recoiled in horror (especially me, finally seeing some proof of my irrational fears at long last). After staring at the thing for a few seconds in revulsed fascination from a safe distance, we immediately started egging each other on to kill the thing before it made a clean getaway. Why we were so agitated that it might escape is beyond me ... maybe we figured it was going to call in a few dozen of its buddies to come back downstairs and rumble.

Anyway, a plan was immediately set into action: instead of aiming the toys at the open moving boxes, we adjusted our aim and throwing velocity, and started whipping Matchbox cars and stuffed animals at the spider in an effort to squash it from afar. Amazingly, we were actually clearing a good sized area of the floor doing this and were rapidly running out of things to throw. That's until I came across one of our old Peter Pan 45 records from our toddler years and slung it like some skinny, shiny frisbee of doom towards the marauding eight-legged intruder (who surely was either smooshed or already up to the rafters by this time).

I missed wildly, of course: one thing records and CDs do not ever do is fly in a straight line. The record rapidly spun off my desired trajectory and hit the basement wall a few feet from where we had been throwing everything not nailed down. In doing so, however, it shattered into a dozen or so pieces in so spectacular a fashion that we all stopped what we were doing and stared at each other in awe.

Oh, you know what's coming next, don't you?

Barely concealing excited chuckles of glee, I raced up the basement stairs and up towards the living room, where I knew my parents had piles more of these things just sitting behind those sliding wooden-panel doors, gathering dust and yearning to fly.

Returning to the basement with a couple of dozen more singles, I distributed a handful each to Paul and my brother and we immediately set forth whipping the things at the basement walls as hard as we could and laughing like crazed chipmunks as each one impacted and sent shards of black vinyl flying in every direction. The evil, undoubtedly poisonous, child-stalking spider from Hell was completely forgotten by this point -- this was *far* more interesting than worrying where it had gotten off to.

Having completely expended our first clip of 45s, I charged back upstairs to retrieve some more. God knows where our parents were or what they were watching/talking about to keep them distracted from the racket we were creating downstairs. Upon reaching the living room stereo setup again, I pulled back the sliding wooden portals to reveal more of my parents' moldering record collection. This time, in addition to seizing another pile of 45s, I selected a small harvest of full-sized record albums as well. I should note at this point that in my supercharged zeal to break shit, I had kept enough of my wits about me to at least choose albums I knew my parents never played, couple with a few Sesame Street albums Brett had grown out of years beforehand.

Oh my, how the carnage started anew when the full-length vinyl started flying! Unlike the smaller, thinner 45 records, the 33 albums were heavier and far more shatter-resistant. They also flew far more erratically, we discovered...probably something to do with the smaller hole in the middle, who knows. We had to really work on those puppies to get them into satisfactorily itty-bitty pieces, but work at it we did, nearly shrieking with delight when we finally got a couple to disintegrate in suitably dramatic fashion.

Remember those panicky, pensive instances when you were a kid and it suddenly hits you that things had somehow gotten out of hand? In the heat of battle, you couldn't care less, but once that moment passes, you suddenly have this realization that you could theoretically get in Really Big Trouble for the events that have just transpired. It was just after we'd finished off that second round of "ammo" that we finally began to realize what in the Hell we were doing and had one of those moments.

Looking down at the floor of the basement, all we could see were chunks and splinters of vinyl lying around in small piles like fallen leaves. A small pile of now-empty 45 sleeves and LP jackets lay near our feet. We were all standing right smack in the middle of a crime scene. It was quickly and silently agreed upon that we might want to get this evidence into the trash (or otherwise well out of sight) before my mother inevitably decided to come down and check on our "progress." The idea of that happening was enough to get us moving with real purpose: few things kick a kid into high gear faster than the fear of utterly senseless and stupid actions being discovered by parents (particularly when you are in the act of covering them up).

Sadly, the actual "end" of this story doesn't have a slam-bang justice-is-served ending, but I find it kinda funny anyway. About an hour or so later, Mom came down to call us all to the dinner table, professing considerable surprise at what we had accomplished that afternoon. Indeed, the basement was in fairly decent shape in comparison to what it had looked like before we had been ordered down there: it had to be since in order to get at all the shattered records out of sight, we had to actually put things away (or at least toss them towards the moving boxes with renewed care).

A bit later, we ditched as much as the broken record debris as we could into the kitchen garbage basket after dinner, taking special care to bury it well below the top (they'd never think to go digging through that, we reasoned correctly), and let the rest of the pieces lie behind/inside the boxes lining the walls where they had fallen, which served two key purposes: 1) indefinite delay of any potential parental fallout and 2) the leftover evidence theefore became attributable (with a crucial element of plausibility) to our younger sisters, mua ha ha haaaa.

Good times.


NP David Gilmour Have You Found It Up There, Andy? (Paris, 3/16/06)