(Flickr Post): Fausto Carmona Pitches At Classic Park

The Lake County Captains haven't quite managed the same winning pace in the second half of their season as they had during the first, but their playoff appearance is still secure, which is a lot more than can be said for the Cleveland Indians these days.

Anyway, with Indians starter Fausto Carmona set to make his first rehab appearance since coming off the Disabled List only a couple of miles from my front door on my day off (which also happened to be yet another wonderfully gorgeous summer's day), this was going to be a must-see game.

Thankfully, Carmona did not disappoint this evening ... those duties were handled instead by Captains reliever Josh Judy during a disastrous seventh inning. The Fautastic One racked up four innings of near-spotless work, allowing only one double and reminding everyone present just how much he is missed at Progressive Field.

Oh yeah, and none other than Dick Goddard sang the "The Star Spangled Banner" at the game. Bonus.

(Flickr Post): A Windy Sunset At Headlands Beach

As yet another perfect summer weekend wound to a close, I felt the desire to capture another sunset on Lake Erie, this time from Mentor Headlands State Park, a few miles down the freeway from where I live, and a far more picturesque location than Willowick's Lakefront Lodge.

An added bonus that really helped make these pictures interesting: a high-pressure system had started moving in over the area earlier in the day, and it was very windy when Sarah and I reached the beach about a half hour before sunset. The scene that awaited us as we walked over the small hill (and suddenly were able to see the whole beach before us) was breathtaking: the normally calm lake was roiling and churning with restless energy: the waves crashing onto the beach as if it were late November instead of mid July while the trees and grass swayed and bent around us in the steady wind.

Enough from me. Enjoy the pix!

(Flickr Post): Sweep!

Initially, I had resisted buying tickets to today's game, wondering what positive gain could come out of watching what was left of the Cleveland Indians getting steamrolled by the hottest team in baseball. Then, from out of nowhere, the Indians improbably won the first 3 games in this 4-game series (and by a decisive margin at that), and I suddenly had to make the trip downtown to see if they could somehow pull off the sweep, even with Jeremy Sowers on the mound.

Guess what? Even though Sowers remains winless on the year (despite five perfect innings of work to start off this particular game), the Tribe somehow came out on top yet again and the sweep (sweep?!) of the Tampa Bay was complete.

Into the All-Star Break we go, our 2008 season a wreck, our ace traded off to a National League team in the midst of a pennant race, and we have just taken four in a row from the biggest surprise team of the year (in a positive sense, at least).

This is the weirdest season ever.

(Flickr Post): Another Perfect Day

Though my first real vacation from work in nearly a decade doesn't start for another three weeks, the promise of a clear, sunny day on Sunday (coupled with Sarah needing to use my car all day on Monday) presented an opportunity to do some local photography that was too good to pass up.

I slept in a bit later than I'd have liked (forgot to set the clock for 10 AM instead of 10 PM), but I was still able to take full advantage of the weather and arrived downtown at the old municipal parking lot on the south side of the Shoreway just after 1 PM and set about wandering the area, eventually heading over to Burke Lakefront Airport, the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame, the U.S.S. Cod, the Great Lakes Science Center, and the William G. Mather, taking pictures of whatever caught my eye.

While relaxing for a few moments at the end of a long brick walkway that juts out into North Coast Harbor from behind the Rock Hall, a much larger vessel appeared from behind the William G. Mather and approached the inlet. It was the Goodtime III, which I had glimpsed occasionally over the years while gallivanting around the Flats, but had never seen this close-up. I also didn't know that its mooring was directly behind the Rock Hall, across that little man made bay from where I was sitting. Since I was going to be walking underneath the Rock Hall and down the brick pier at the end of E 9th Street anyway, I decided to investigate the ship's fares and tour schedule up close, and when I realized that another two-hour cruise would be departing in a half hour, made a snap decision to go along for the ride.

Once out of North Coast Harbor, the Goodtime III hugs the Cleveland shoreline for a mile or so before entering the Cuyahoga River and cruising six winding miles upstream under countless bridges and between dozens of old factories, warehouses and supply dumps. Upon reaching the gigantic Mittal Steel Mill just south of Interstate 490 (whose riverfront is apparently the hangout for every seagull in the Northeast Ohio area), the Goodtime III executes a 180 and retraces its path to the mouth of the Cuyahoga. From there, the ship cruises straight out past the breakwaters and into Lake Erie proper, where it then describes a long, slow, circle, allowing sight seers a half hour of amazing panoramic views of downtown Cleveland (not to mention miles of shoreline to either side) before finally returning to its home port.

Incidentally, I had heard that The Flats were being redeveloped over the years, but I was utterly gobsmacked when we steamed past what was left of the East Bank. Granted, I had not been down in this area at all since the fall of 2000 (and not regularly since maybe 1998 or so), it has been razed almost completely flat and looks as depopulated and forbidding as a weapons testing area. The old Watermark seemed intact, though it looked to be abandoned or in disrepair. The West Bank, on the other hand, looked pretty much the same as I remembered, though the Plain Dealer Pavilion (formerly Scene Pavilion, and before that, Nautica) looked significantly more "tarted-up" than it had been since my last concert experience there a decade earlier. It was difficult to ascertain from my angle looking in if the old clubs and restaurants (Metropolis/Trilogy, The Spaghetti Warehouse) I used to frequent in my mid-twenties were still around behind Tangiers and the Powerhouse: that might have to be an excursion for a future date.

Having expected nothing more than a pleasant ride around the harbor, I was completely awestruck by the number and massive scale of the structures that lined the once-thriving Cuyahoga River. It was also fascinating to see areas of the Flats I had only previously glimpsed while driving around aimlessly in the middle of the night a decade and change before, and taking in the shoreline and skyline from an unobstructed, peaceful vantage point a couple of miles offshore was fantastic.

Full disclosure to those with a propensity for motion sickness: it was only towards the end of the ride when we were heading out onto Lake Erie proper that I started feeling a bit off-balance. My camera battery had just run out, and while replacing it with the backup (and changing out the memory stick for safety's sake), I suddenly realized that it was taking a conscious effort for me to sit up straight. Puzzled, I leaned back into the chair I was sitting in, sitting myself straight up and feeling a strange sensation like some invisible force was pulling my body a few degrees towards the right and I had been subtly leaning to my left to counter it. I stood up and a slight wave of wobbliness pass through my legs.

At no time during the voyage on the Goodtime III did I ever felt outright seasick, but I definitely experienced a mild dizziness that kept at me until I was on walking on land about an hour later. Having been aboard a few high-speed ferries bouncing happily across the Straits Of Mackinac as a kid, I know what true seasickness feels like, and this was certainly nowhere near that level of nausea or imbalance, but it is something a few people might want to keep in mind before climbing aboard.

Thoroughly blown away with the trip and elated at the pictures I had taken so far, I drove back home in a lighter mental state than I had felt in weeks. My day wasn't quite done yet, however: part of my original plan had been to locate a place I had come across a few years before in order to get a picture of Lake Erie from one of the highest elevations in the area just a few miles inland. After a stopover at the condo to let Sarah know I was still alive, I set off into Concord Township: the premier district in all of Lake County for people who want to live in fenced-off monster homes that scream "get the hell off my lawn and leave me the fuck alone."

At first, my destination eluded me: I knew it was on King Memorial Road somewhere south of Little Mountain, but a few rolling miles of southbound travel brought me to the border of Chardon Township with no evidence of the view I had been looking for. Mystified, I turned around and retraced my route backwards, wondering if I might have forgotten an important turn or landmark. As I climbed the last rise before the Little Mountain Road intersection, right at the entrance to the Lake County Historical Society and I suddenly found the view and nearly drove off the road in surprise. Sadly, by that time, the sun was too low in the sky for the image I wanted to obtain, and the glare off the water largely obscured the intended effect of the shot, but at least I know where to go when I return in a few weeks for a better-composed second chance.

I had promised Sarah I wouldn't be more than an hour and change when I left the condo around 1:30, but now the sun was setting and it seemed suddenly obvious that the best way to end the day would be with a lot of sky/sun pictures from the beach as well (there had also been a striking crescent moon over the last few days as well, which factored into my desire for some additional captures). My obvious choice from where I was would have been Mentor Headlands State Park, but I decided to stop home first, see if Sarah wanted to come along, and then go to Willoughby Lakefront Lodge instead. Since Sarah wasn't feeling well, I headed up alone and managed to get some pretty good images of the day's end, along with a few of what I call "texture" shots of sand, rocks, waves, water, and the like. It sounds a bit silly, perhaps, but I felt honestly drugged as I headed back to the car a short while later: it was a beautiful, serene end to another perfect summer's day.

For those who have never done so (and don't have an aversion to being afloat for a couple of hours), I highly recommend an afternoon trip on the Goodtime III: without question the highlight of a leisurely, gorgeous, breezy sunny day that did wonders for the soul. I really needed this ...

(Flickr Post): Stormy Weather At The Prog

With the 2008 Cleveland Indians continuing to morph into a sick and twisted parody of our fondest hopes and dreams, my reasons for attending baseball games at The Prog instead of doing something a tad less depressing/futile with my free time have less to do with Major League Baseball than simply enjoying a nice summer afternoon in downtown Cleveland with my brother.

Of course, it doesn't help matters if that "nice summer afternoon" turns windswept, gray and rainy while your beloved ball club is being throttled by a pitcher who just threw one of the worst starting pitching performances in the history of major league baseball just 1 week before. Typical.

The season from Hell continues ...

(Twenty Years) Part 16: Still In The Game

In 2001, the fortunes of the newly formed Walrus Music briefly mirrored those of the industry at large, though for very different reasons. Overall, our sales were doing fine, but the enforced removal of our most profitable area of business wound up derailing the year. Luckily, we managed to make up all of our lost momentum the following year and have been trucking ahead at varying speeds ever since. The music industry as a whole, however, was now starting to feel the first real pangs from widespread P2P downloading as yearly sales began to tumble from the stratospheric heights they had reached in 2000.

While there was a lot of worrying going on at the distribution level, the overall tone of discussion back then was still more hypothetical/"what if" than bleak or despairing. Since the real bad times had yet to arrive, a lot of people initially refused to believe that the sky was truly falling, instead maintaining that this drop in sales was some kind of brief contraction or correction, and everything would be dandy again as soon as people stopped sharing mp3s and were somehow forced to buy them instead. It would take the realities of the next three years to kill that line of thinking dead once and for all.

Somehow, while the music business declined over the ensuing years, Record Den's sales not only grew, but flourished. Even now, I'm not sure I can fully explain why this was the case, but I can offer up a few ideas that might solve the equation when added together ...

1. Adults

The fact that we are still open certainly doesn't mean that downloading had no impact on our business: of course it did, but we were, I think, able to trade off clientèles before the damage got out of control. Over the years, kids had noticeably vanished from our customer mix while we started seeing more and more new customers over the age of 30 instead, many of them driving in from the other side of Cleveland or points south to patronize our store. To reflect this shift, we started to alter the store's selection slightly away from an indie-rock intensive mix into something far more classic/progressive leaning in nature, while still seeking to retain the loyalties of the few teenagers who still believed in buying music as an actual physical product rather than simply hoovering it down by the gigabyte from a file sharing service.


2. Catalog

Meanwhile, after years of successfully attempting to smother competition by maintaining a massive inventory of music, the big boxes were beginning to scale back on CD floorspace in favor of DVDs, which were still a red-hot commodity. The once-impressive rows of CDs Best Buy used to boast suddenly started looking rather thin as they were now prioritizing guaranteed hit music over "marginal" catalog or independent releases/reissues. Sure, you could walk down an aisle there and see a truly massive U2 section sporting about 150 CDs, but upon closer inspection you'd realize that 130 of those CDs were copies of How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb with a couple copies each of 4 or 5 other titles sprinkled about for appearances sake.

This restructuring of priorities at the big boxes created an opening for us, and we charged straight into it. The Den started attracting people who had grown up with rock music and weren't quite ready to let go just yet. If we were going to keep them coming back, we were going to have to retain far more deep catalog than we ever had before, and we started adjusting our buying accordingly. Luckily, the major labels had started offering substantial discounts on their catalog in order to keep it moving outside of the big boxes, and Greg jumped feet-first into these buying programs, snapping up thousands of older CDs at reduced rates and passing the savings along to stimulate sales. We had always done a pretty good job with keeping some special, hard-to-find titles of local interest handy for whoever asked, but now we were actively cultivating a reputation as the place to get anything you hadn't heard in a quarter century or more.

Once we had the ability to buy direct from two of the biggest music companies in the world, it seemed like this end of the business really started to get rolling for us. I cannot stress enough how being able to buy directly from two of the biggest music distributors has greatly increased our ability to compete with big boxes since the catalog discount programs offered at the distributor level were far better than any one-stop could offer. For a year or so, our sale bins at the front of the store could have been called "The WMG Bins" as product from that distributor overwhelmed all else. When we got Universal opened up a year or so past that, the buying balance shifted again, and we now have what looks like a mini warehouse in the back room jammed solid with CDs from WEA and Universal. These programs, coupled with an explosion in cheaper old import titles, began to transmogrify our store into a kind of classic rock heaven on Earth.


3. Vinyl

Another factor in our longevity has been the completely unexpected re-emergence of vinyl (whether used or new) as a collectible format. Aside from dance and hip-hop 12" singles and the odd Pearl Jam LP, we had been pretty much out of the vinyl market from 1990 through the end of our days in the Great Lakes Mall. We hadn't had any plans to re-enter that market in our new location until a few months after re-opening, when a customer asked us one afternoon if we carried any vinyl records. Greg and I both shook our heads no, and when the customer then asked us why, neither of us could come up with a good answer.

With space to burn (and no better ideas to try out), we started buying and selling used LPs again for the first time in a decade. Initially, almost everything we set out to sell was priced at a dollar, with a few premium pieces going as high as five. Sales were steady, but slow, and as more people got wind of the fact that we'd take their old boxed-up records off their hands, our stock began to outgrow the bins we'd set aside to contain it. For some time, this became a concern, especially as we began stockpiling everyone's grandmother's record collections in boxes piled six feet high in the back room while the vinyl bins overflowed and spilled onto the floor. There were times when it was getting so crowded in the back that we were seriously considering shutting off all vinyl buying in an attempt to keep our stock under control, and that is when we started running into the E-bay people: the guys who earn a living buying crates of stuff at rock-bottom prices from anybody who would sell it to them and then finding people online who would pay them for whatever goodies they might come across.

At first, we were amused (and relieved) when the E-bay people would show up and cart off boxes of moldering records at a time, but it became apparent over time that LPs could become a valuable part of our profit margin, and we started becoming a bit more hands-on in the pricing and buying of used vinyl instead of simply buying everything in at a flat rate and blowing it out the door ASAP. While we still occasionally buy "by the pound" if a customer doesn't feel like going store-to-store looking for a better deal, we now have a pretty decent idea which records are worth paying more for (almost any band or act we've never heard of before) and, more importantly, which ones aren't (pretty much every album released on Columbia between 1973-1987).

These days, used vinyl sits in every open nook and cranny in the store, with the premium titles arranged semi-alphabetically in specially made bins in the back while everything else is boxed up or lined up wherever we can find room. Quite frankly, we need a better way to display our vinyl stock: sales have picked up in intensity to the extent that used LPs now regularly out-sell used CDs on a piece-count and dollar basis,and our used CDs are far easier to browse than our vinyl. Also, the profit we are able to realize from selling used vinyl has been instrumental in keeping us afloat and amending for the relatively thin margin afforded by contemporary CDs, thus we definitely owe it to ourselves to come up with some kind of new solution to displaying the hottest selling items in the store.

Now comes the weirdest part: over the last two years, used vinyl has started to bring back a good chunk of the younger customers we figured had been lost for good to downloading. Somehow, a lot of younger people have glommed onto vinyl being a more immersive, meaningful, and (let's not kid ourselves) hip listening experience than an mp3, and they have embraced the format to a mind-boggling extent, whether used or new. Where we once spent most of our time with visiting sales reps screaming about CD prices and crappy marketing ideas, now we're always pleading with them to get as much classic rock vinyl into the marketplace as quickly as possible, because we sell it faster than we can keep up with it.


For the first time since opening up at our current location, I think we've achieved the kind of store we'd always imagined we could run back in the old days when a slow afternoon could be spent blue-skying a Deak-free existence in the now-museum like expanse of Great Lakes Mall. We are all very proud of what Record Den has become and also hoping we can keep it going at full steam even as the U.S. economy goes to Hell in a hand basket all around us.

While the plan is to keep going as long as we can, the near future remains a bit hazy as I write this: our lease comes up next year, and preliminary negotiations between Greg and our corporate landlords have deadlocked over rent (they want to raise it over time, he wants a constant rate in exchange for a longer lease). For the time being, we're letting the landlords stew for a while as time is presently on our side: the longer we wait, the better idea we'll get of where we're going in a financial sense. Already lagging behind the pace of a flat 2007, we are now facing what could be a brutal summer, what with gas prices at 4 dollars a gallon (and the price of oil continuing to climb, dragging behind it the cost of just about everything else in existence) and the entertainment dollar being stretched tighter than perhaps at any point in the last thirty years. We're working just to keep ourselves respectably close to our target figures, but this has not been a banner year thus far.

What happens this summer (not to mention over the following Christmas) will impact any long range plans Greg comes up with between now and then. It's hard to guess what to expect, but I would be very surprised if Greg opts to stick in a fork in this operation next year, largely because we have an awful lot of inventory to sell, and barring the launch of a full-time internet operation, I can't imagine what the hell we'd do with all of this stuff should our day of reckoning come earlier than expected.

My feeling is that we'll end up renewing our lease on a year-to-year basis and keeping our options open. As long as people remain willing to buy music on a physical format in a retail environment, Greg will want to be open to provide that service. He has said many times in the past that he was playing to be the last man standing at local indie music retail, and you can certainly argue that he got his wish. I hope this doesn't sound like we're gloating, because we both miss the days of friendly competition and being able to visit places like Record Revolution, My Generation, Platterpuss, or Repeat The Beat: discovering cool imports and underground releases we'd never seen or heard before. This was part of the fun of working in this business, and most of it is now long gone. Sure, we're very happy to still have our doors open, but it's kind of a drag on a personal level when the nearest store that even remotely resembles our own is nearly 50 miles away.

While the business side is pretty much up to Greg, there is also a possible decision to be made on my end as well. While being a Den lifer thus far has brought a measure of reassuring stability to my life, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I have stretches of dealing with John Q. Public that make me wonder how much longer I want to keep on doing this, (especially if we do wind up getting a multi-year lease offer to stick). After years of always taking the money instead of some time off, a vacation at last looks like a reality for me, and that might be enough to "reset" and refresh myself for a bit and simply get away from the grind. If it sounds waspish and antisocial to say that I need a break from being around people, then so be it. The status of Sarah's education and job will also weigh in on my decision, particularly if she feels that better opportunities are lying in wait outside of Ohio.

Certainly, there will be much dwelling, discussion and consideration as the end of this year draws close, but the one implacable constant lying at the bottom of all of this is the simple fact that I still love my job and the idea of dropping it on my own accord in lieu of an occupation that I don't love is a rather daunting prospect, to say the least.

(Flickr Post): Cleveland Indians Win!

At last! We attend a Sunday game that results in a win for the Indians!

At last! I get close-up pix of one of the all-time pitching greats warming up in the visitors bullpen before the game!

At last! Mustard wins the Hot Dog Derby ... while I am waiting in line at one of the concession stands, which means I have no photographic record of my hero's greatest achievement. Gaaahh.

I, Shutterbug

A love of photography seems to run straight down my dad's side of the family. When I was a toddler, my dad was always taking home movies of drag racing, or family gatherings, or just pudgy little me ambling about the apartment on Super-8. When he was off on business trips, he often covered his international travels with his trusty stereo camera, which produced overlapping shots that had to be framed on white cardboard and then viewed through a kind of battery-powered binocular View Master device to achieve the desired 3-D effect (using that thing was kind of like taking the visual test when you renew your driver's license).

Over the last few years, Dad has been out and about with his new super-modded digital camera (with rocking lens attachments), taking increasingly sophisticated pictures to the extent that for a while you were likely get more hits off of his archived amateur photography than my archived professional writing if you ran a Google search on our common name.

Meanwhile, for as long as I've known him, my uncle Kevin has made his living doing personal or corporate photo shoots, either freelancing back when I was a kid or from his own studio which he's worked out of for the last twenty-five years. In 1985, I spent a summer working alongside him, both at his professional studio and in the cramped, dank darkroom he created in my grandmother's basement. At the time, I found some aspects of photography of interest, but overall I never caught the bug. One reason is I hadn't taken into account the sheer amount of grunt work that went into setting up a professional shoot, which seemed to leech a lot of the glamour out of the job. The technology of the era probably didn't endear me to the job, either: working with darkroom chemicals is stinky and time-consuming and easy for someone as graceless as me to completely screw up. There was also my near-crippling obessesion with music that was a constant distraction for me: I spent far more time diving into the mystique of New Order than, say, studying for school or daydreaming of a career behind the lens. Put it this way: the high points of my brief apprenticeship with my uncle was a trip to a local radio station and the acquisition of my own Sony Walkman with the earnings I had accrued. I think you can see where my priorities were.

I'd messed around off and on with Sarah's old digital camera when she owned one, but it was the acquisition of a far more advanced model of my own back in March that has awakened the genetic-level shutterbug that must have been dormant in me since birth. I've been constantly reaching for the camera (or wishing I had it handy) over the last couple of months, and the volume of images on my hard drive has reached the point where I recently opened a Flickr account to host some of the better shots I've been getting since starting up my new hobby. In the future, I'll be linking from this blog to new photography sets of days out and about, baseball games, local scenery, or even subject themes as they are assembled. Hope you like 'em.

(Twenty Years) Part 15: Raid

The once-booming market in live bootleg CDs had been in flux for some time in early 2001. In the years following the enforcement of GATT, finding workable sources for these illicit titles was like playing a game of Whack-A-Mole (for us as well as the authorities). Also, as good titles became harder to locate, the packaging standards had started to head down the tubes, both in terms of the once-ornate booklets and cover art as well as the source music, which was occasionally being sourced not from original show tapes but from compressed digital files grabbed right off of the internet.

Granted, these were bootleggers we were dealing with and not, say, Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab, so there wasn't an awful lot you could say when you got a dozen copies of a Metallica concert burned onto a generic CD-R with paper artwork straight out of a cheap PC printer and the songs all separated by a second or two of silence (since the manufacturers not only used mp3 files, but couldn't even be bothered to burn the stupid shows using Disc-At-Once). It's not like these things were sold on any kind of returnable or guaranteed basis, either: once you bought 'em, they were yours forever. For the first time since we'd started buying them in the late 80s, the problems of carrying bootlegs were starting to outweigh the benefits.

Around the end of 2000, we had found a new and local source for boots, and we'd get our orders from this guy quite literally in pieces: that is, CDs in one box, artwork and jewel cases in another. It wasn't a ton of fun standing there behind the counter and putting these things together for hours on end, but I guess it beat shrink-wrapping stacks of Italian vinyl albums in the silent back room of J.J. Newberry's. It was, of course, right while I was elbow-deep in illicit CD components that a handful of Mentor's finest came barging into the store, demanding to talk to the owner right now, while two belligerent RIAA agents threatened us with immediate shutdown if we didn't comply with their demands. Wheeee.

Over the next three hours, we had to stand by and watched as hundreds of CDs were seized and removed from the premises by the RIAA goons, with the men in blue providing the muscle. The detective in charge of the operation handled the bust as fairly as we could have hoped for, considering we had been caught completely red-handed. The RIAA guys, on the other hand, were a couple of arrogant little woodpeckers who demonstrated an amazing ignorance of what was a bootleg CD and what was not: there were a flashes of contentiousness as we would testily point out to them that such-and-such particular import live release was not, in fact, a bootleg.

In the days and weeks afterward, some friends of ours speculated that Deak must have had something to do with this bust as the timing was just too perfect to ignore. Sure, conspiracy theorists have spun vast, intricate webs of causality out of far less remarkable coincidences, but I'm fairly certain that one had nothing to do with the other in this instance. But talk about a shitty opening week ... in one day, seven grand in inventory that had just been purchased from the previous owner was wiped from the books and is probably still sitting in an evidence storage room somewhere. Ouch. We were also forced to play nice with the RIAA and help them shut down our local boot distributor as a trade-off for avoiding prosecution. When all was said and done a few weeks later, we were given an admonition from the Mentor PD never to traffic in these recordings again and that was that.

While losing a ton of money was not what I had in mind, I'd been secretly wondering for years when we'd finally leave bootlegs behind, end our constant worrying about excess visibility and stop having to play dumb whenever we were asked directly what these discs were and where they were coming from. Financially, this was a nasty blow for an operation just getting started: we're fairly certain that the total loss of that area of business cost us the year as 2001 was the first of only 2 down years we've experienced since we opened in our current location (the other, being last year, was more flat than down). That said, it was a secret relief for me to close out that particular chapter of our existence.

The First Day Of Summer

While it may not not officially have arrived yet going by the calendar, evenings like this one (79 degrees at 11:15 PM) are unmistakably summer nights in the classic sense: the muggy, warm evenings when you can sit out on the front porch in shorts and a t-shirt with a cold drink handy and a ball game on the radio.

Mmmm, I've been waiting for one of these since the end of October.

Ten Cent Beer Night

With this year's baseball season refusing to head outright into the tank (instead, it feels like the next 100 games will be a death march of mediocrity cruelly punctuated with maddening flashes of hope and inspiration), let's take a break from the current malaise and look back at a time when the Cleveland Indians were expected to suck, and ownership was frantically trying to keep people coming to the park anyway.

A friend pointed me at this article that ran on ESPN to mark the 34th anniversary of one of the more notorious moments in Cleveland's history: Ten Cent Beer Night.

Definitely a recommended read for baseball fans and native Clevelanders (though not necessarily in that order).

(Tribe 2008): The Crisis (with apologies to the descendants of Thomas Paine)

These are the times that try men's souls. The summer bleacher bum and the sunshine Cleveland Indians fan will, in this crisis, shrink from the support of their team; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

Possessing the worst-hitting squad in the modern history of this team, like Hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as "a winning record" should not be highly rated.

The Kansas City Royals, Chicago White Sox, Detroit Tigers, and Minnesota Twins amongst other major teams across the league that can actually hit baseballs out of the freaking infield to enforce their tyranny, have basically declared that they have a right (not only to WIN) but "to stick our mangy heads further down in a swirling vortex of utter and total suck" that is the AL-Central and if being drowned in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon Earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to the god damnable Boston Red Sox.

Whether the contendability of this team was declared too soon, or delayed too long, I will not now enter into as an argument; my own simple opinion is, that had we have been able to win one more ALCS contest game eight months ago, it would have been much better.

We did not make a proper use of last winter, neither could we, while we were in our perpetually cash-strapped state. However, the fault, if it were one, was all our own; we have none to blame but ourselves (or perhaps the cold, merciless, spotty, cackling, ball busting, luggage-skinned hag that keeps this region's grandest optimistic hopes in an airless, cast-iron safe at the bottom of the Marianas Trench).

I thank providence, that I fear not. I see no real cause for fear. I know our situation well, and can see the way out of it (or if nothing else a lot more free time once this team completes its fall from contention, if that is to be the Way of Things).

Once more the Indians are hitting and scoring; our newfound momentum is materializing fast, and we shall be able to open the next month of the campaign with our dependable twenty-five men, well prepared and clothed.

This is our situation, and who will may know it. By perseverance and fortitude we have the prospect of a glorious summer; by cowardice and submission, the sad choice of a variety of evils — a triumphant Chicago — a depopulated Progressive Field — Tom Hamilton leaping in despair from the WTAM broadcast booth — summer without hope — our glorious ballpark turned into barracks and bawdy-houses for White Sox, and a 2009 pennant race to provide for, whose father we shall doubt of. Look on this picture and weep over it! and if there yet remains one thoughtless wretch who believes it not, let him suffer it unlamented.

May 31, 2008

Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull

Ungainly title aside, the fourth film in the Indiana Jones series (and the first one since 1989), brings the legendary character into the 21st century largely unchanged from when we last met him, which starts things off on a pretty hopeful note. However, the increasingly tiresome machinery that drives your typical "summer blockbuster" can't help but make this reintroduction to an old friend an ultimately soulless and suspense-free adventure: in effect, no different than riding the old Iron Dragon coaster at Cedar Point.

This isn't to say that I despised this movie (nor do I hate that particular roller coaster for that matter), but my expectations for Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull were apparently set far too high and the resulting ride, while not unpleasant, was still just a ride, and not a particularly memorable one at that. As far as its place in the franchise is concerned, Crystal Skull isn't the worst of the bunch (that distinction is still held by the ungodly excruciating Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom), but it was nowhere near as satisfying as Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, never mind the original action classic Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

Frustratingly, Crystal Skull starts off looking like it just might be up to the standards set by two-thirds of the original trilogy. The opening 45 minutes of the movie is easily the best stretch, beginning in the typical James Bond fashion that the series holds dear. We meet up with Indiana Jones being held prisoner by a gaggle of Russian soldiers led by Cate Blanchett (doing her best Nastasha Badenov impersonation). The Russians are in search of a special box hidden away in a vast Army supply warehouse (you can see the inevitable sight gag coming here from a mile away), and Jones reluctantly assists them before making a break for it and kicking off the first of many stunts and special effects set pieces to come.

Once Jones is safely back at his day job, we are gradually brought up to speed on what's been happening in his life over the previous twenty years (which apparently have passed in real time). As a decorated WWII hero and "part-time" teacher, Jones may be flintier with the passage of years but is still tough enough to believably hold his own in fistfights with men a third of his age, and it's a pleasure to see him on the silver screen again. Now paired up with teenager "Mutt" Williams (a rebellious, leather-clad hellion straight out of The Wild Bunch), Jones heads into the jungles of South America for unexpected reunions with an old flame and an older colleague, while tracking down the artifact that is the namesake of the movie.

It is at this juncture that Crystal Skull starts to veer sharply away from the other three films silly to the extent that it becomes the cartooniest of the Indiana Jones films by some distance (especially when you get to the nonsensical jungle jeep chase sequence and the attack of the CG ants), which would be of no major issue if it weren't for the plot, which ultimately transports the film to a place uncomfortably close to The X-Files (and tell me you didn't think of that one while eyeballing the CG-heavy climax of this film) or Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. Luckily, the tone remains light throughout, avoiding the morbid excesses of Temple Of Doom, with the only "darkness" appearing early on during an eerie sequence set in a fake suburban development built in the middle of nowhere for a very specific purpose.

In the end, my feelings regarding this film aren't that dissimilar from, say, Spider-Man 3 (or any of the three Star Wars prequels, for that matter) in that commercial concerns were apparently far more important than making a movie that was worth a two decade wait. Is this really the best Spielberg and Lucas could come up with (considering they've been knocking this idea around for nineteen years while waiting for "the right script" to appear)? I went back and viewed the original trilogy to have something to compare Crystal Skull to and eventually came to the conclusion that, despite the relentless action sequences that keep you in your seat over the two-hour plus running time, this is a movie almost completely lacking the charm and writing that made the first and third entries in this series so enjoyable (I am also getting increasingly exasperated with obvious CG gimmickry, but that is an entire separate post in itself).

Ah well, here's hoping Wall*E and The Dark Knight (the only other two movies I am really excited about seeing this summer) prove to be more worthy of the hype than this one. Much as it pains me to say, make sure you catch Crystal Skull as a matinée or simply hold your fire and wait for a DVD rental: it just ain't worth ten bucks a seat.

Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull rating 3/5

(Twenty Years) Part 14: Emancipation

It was a year and change after I became the assistant manager of the store that the day we had been waiting for all these years finally arrived: Deak had decided at last to walk away from Record Den and was negotiating the sale of the store to Greg. Typically, we found out later through other sources that selling to Greg hadn't been Deak's first choice (shocker!), but apparently no one else had been interested in buying out the location, leaving him with no choice but to work with Greg's terms. I don't even want to think about what would have happened if he had sold a store out from underneath us again, but it certainly wouldn't have been pretty.

As you might have guessed by now, Greg's nearly three decades of loyal service to the Record Den chain were richly rewarded at the end as Deak relentlessly attempted to squeeze as much dosh as possible from anything not nailed down. The negotiations, such as they were, followed a similar pattern throughout: Deak ratcheted the price of every display fixture and desk organizer on the premises as high as he dared, and then Greg would endeavor to argue him down to a suitable meeting point. There were even a few times during this process when Greg would outright refuse an offer, either trying to play hardball or from outright disinterest (this was the case when Deak was asking silly money for the internet rights to the "Record Den" name, which we wound up declining).

Interestingly, we noticed during the negotiations that Deak still seemed to place a high value on the "Record Den" name on the wholesale front, yet he had to know as well as we did that our name was Mud as far as the industry at large was concerned. In reality, the only true value the words "Record Den" had to anyone was with our customers, none of whom had any idea of the credit shenanigans our company had pulled with the majors over the previous decade. That said, it's pretty surprising that Greg was able to get us an open account with WMG (Warner Music Group), and nothing short of miraculous that he eventually finagled a way to buy direct from Universal (the biggest of the Big Four, and the Godzilla of music distribution).

While I'm sure that Greg's longstanding reputation with many sales reps and promotional execs is a lot of what greased the wheels with WMG and Universal (particularly the former), it's also fair to assume that our new company name helped put their respective credit departments at ease. The creation of "Walrus Music" as a corporation was a deliberate move to separate this new venture from the old "Record Den" in the eyes of our would-be creditors. The name was the end result of Greg and I volleying Beatle-themed ideas back and forth for a day or so in search of a cool sounding company name. I would like to note here, for the record, that I think "Walrus Music" was a bit too obvious a choice: I was trying to come up with far more obscure points of Fab reference in my ideas. That said, I have to admit that Greg probably had a point when he noted that my favorite idea might not be the most inviting-sounding business name ever ("Hello, this is Slagger's! Can I help you?"), and since he was putting up the dough to start the corporation, "Walrus Music" won the battle.

With no announcement (save for the few friends and store regulars who had been aware of the situation) or fanfare whatsoever, Record Den officially became Greg's business at the end of March, 2001 with the newly-incorporated Walrus Music taking over all operations. While we looked exactly the same on the outside, it felt wonderful walking into the store that day, knowing that we would never have to deal with Deak on a professional basis again and relishing our new found independence. Finally the masters of our own destiny, we started working out new ideas on changing things around to our liking, and wouldn't you know, the first major change to the store occurred within days of Greg's taking control ... about two, to be precise.

(Tribe 2008): Waking Up Blind With The House On Fire

It was nearly a month ago now that the sports writers' predictions were coming in fast and furious, with The Detroit Tigers heavily favored to take the 2008 American League Central title and only The Cleveland Indians looming as a potential challenge to Motor City dominance. With coronation all but assured, all these two teams had to do was, you know, actually play the 162 scheduled games that stood between Spring Training and the Happy Hunting Grounds of October.

One of the funny things about baseball is that with so many games to play, anything can and does happen, and many times "anything" includes The Totally Unexpected: a few weeks later, with sixteen games now in the books, the Tigers and the Indians are indeed fiercely locked in battle ... for the basement of the AL Central.

While the Tribe's victory against the White Sox on Opening Day seemed to kick off the 2008 season on a positive note, the events of the 14 games that followed torpedoed the initial enthusiasm of Cleveland fans as nearly every aspect of their team's game began to break down over the next week. It was only after last night's payback rout of the Tigers (current owners of the worst win-loss record in all of baseball) that the Indians are starting to resemble the ball club everyone expected them to be this year.

In a creepy recreation of their post All-Star Break swoon of last summer, the offensive engine of the Indians has been sputtering and coughing, seemingly unable to string together hits (or even come up with hits themselves). While Ryan Garko and Victor Martinez have seemingly been supplying nearly all of the Tribe's hitting (with notable assists from platoon outfielder David Delucci and backup second baseman Jamie Carroll), legitimate concerns persist over the entire bottom third of the starting lineup (especially right fielder Franklin Gutierrez) and the status of slugger Travis Hafner and whether he will (or can) regain the form that made him the terror of the American League as recently as the 2006 campaign. Defensively, infield defense remains a nagging concern as well, with groan worthy miscues from Casey Blake and Jhonny Peralta provoking some fan ire.

If there has been any semblance of stability in one area of the team, it has been the pitching, but even that department has hands wringing all over Northeastern Ohio. The Tribe has seen excellent starts from Jake Westbrook and Cliff Lee (both of whom had sub par, if not flat-out terrible years in 2007) that greatly helped alleviate an uneven, though promising, start for backup ace Fausto Carmona, a disconcerting pair of uncharacteristically wild performances from Paul Byrd and, most shockingly, the near-total collapse of 2007 Cy Young Award winner C.C. Sabathia.

The Cleveland bullpen has also been in a troubling state of flux, with set-up ace Rafael Betancourt now the closing pitcher in the wake of Joe Borowski's move to the Disabled List following two disastrous ninth inning outings against the Oakland Athletics and the Boston Red Sox. Illustrating the on-and-off nature of bullpens, two of last year's trusted stalwarts Rafael Perez and Jensen Lewis have been as hit and miss this year as they were lights-out last year. Meanwhile, the jury remains out on the newly acquired Masahide Kobayashi, while veteran reliever Jorge Julio has shown flashes of promise but has been erratic overall.

With a series at home next weekend against the 2007 ALDS rival the New York Yankees (which will hopefully go far better than the Tribe's first 2008 encounter with 2007 ALCS rival Boston) as the centerpiece battle of the next phase of the season, the Indians now have to find a way to keep their newly reacquired focus and chase down the current AL Central leading White Sox with the stabilizing Detroit Tigers snapping at their heels.

We've got a long way to go, and over five months to get there.

(Twenty Years) Part 13: I Can't Quit You Baby

While I was never a stereotypical 90s "slacker" type in appearance, there is no question that my work ethic occasionally warranted an outside adjustment. At odd times, this was simply a matter of growing comfortable and complacent with the job, and there were a couple of other occasions where I was going through some kind of life turmoil that greatly interfered with my ability and/or willingness to do anything aside from show up and occupy space behind the counter. There were never shouting matches over this (this wasn't Greg's style), but the point would be made and, if necessary, enforced by my hours being reduced to part-time (spring 1994), or being placed on involuntary sabbatical in order to get my head together and figure out what the hell I was going to do with myself (spring/summer 1990).

By the middle of 1999, though, there were new forces in play that began to affect my work performance. For the first time since I was hired, I was finally starting to tire of forever being "third key." This change in attitude was precipitated by two factors: 1) I was pinned under the proverbial glass ceiling being the third man on a three-man crew, and 2) I had met Sarah during that spring and was presented with a choice to relocate, start anew, and perhaps move up from my present position whilst doing so.

When Beth (the store's longtime assistant manager since 1989) left Record Den at the dawn of 1997 for a job downtown with the Cleveland Indians organization, I was passed over for promotion by a co-worker who had been hired 6 years after me. Thankfully, there has never been any rancor between me and Brian (who had moved ahead of me) over this, for I knew full well that I had deserved the snub considering my recent performance, and the simple truth of the matter was that Brian was the better pick of the two of us due to his retail management experience from previous jobs.

Another factor that kept any possible hurt feelings at bay is that I had been offered management jobs in the company before (I had turned down, after much internal debate, an offer to run the Great Northern Mall store during the fall of 1995), and I figured it was only a matter of time before another opportunity presented itself. What I didn't count on, of course, was the complete disintegration of the entire chain over the next two years, which effectively left me stuck at #3 for the foreseeable future. D'ohh.

Towards the end of 1998, a new opportunity did come along, but not from Record Den: Scene magazine, a local entertainment newsweekly that I had been freelancing for over the previous two and half years, was being bought out by the Phoenix-based New Times media group (now called the Village Voice Media, as I discovered while researching this post). The situation at Scene was almost perfectly analogous to what had happened the year before at the store when Record Town had come calling: anyone who wanted to stay at Scene was offered employment under the new ownership, but it was going to be a very different kind of publication than what had existed before and, unsurprisingly, most of the editorial staff abandoned ship as the transition drew near.

From the tone of his voice, it sure didn't sound like incoming music editor at Scene was very pleased with the situation he was rapidly finding himself in as everyone walked off the plank instead of swearing eternal fealty to New Times. In a subsequent fit of pique, or perhaps in a "Year Zero"-styled move to wipe out the past and start from a new blank slate, New Times consigned the old Scene culture to oblivion as every single pre-transition article and review (thousands of record, movie and concert reviews, interviews and news stories covering the Cleveland music scene going back nearly 3 decades) vanished from the web archives forever. Jerks. I sure hope someone somewhere is keeping every issue of the old Scene magazine in safe, dry place, otherwise this represents an incalculable loss.

Anyway, back to that opportunity: as we watched a high school football game and chatted about the New Times situation one Friday night that October, Steve (my editor at Scene) told me of a brand new entertainment weekly called Spot that he was seeking to get off the ground. If memory serves, Steve had managed to snare three or four of the senior music writers (of which I was one) from Scene, along with a couple of other contacts/friends from the outside to make up his new staff.

The idea was that Spot would quickly move to flank Scene, which we knew was almost certainly going to veer away from the all-music format it had owned since its inception and skew towards the socio-political turf long patrolled by the Cleveland Free Times. Spot would also attempt to reclaim Scene's old territory with a more irreverent, eye-catching approach to news coverage than the well-worn, familiar Scene style (for reference points, Steve had in mind such vibrant British music monthlies as Q and Mojo). The most enticing prospect was that if everything worked out, we would would have the entire "local entertainment" playing field all to ourselves. After laying all of this out, Steve then asked me if I could commit full-time to the new venture.

At the risk of cheapening the moment with an unintentional pun, this was one of the toughest decisions I ever had to make on the spot. I had started freelancing for Scene on a pure lark in the spring of 1996 after years of wanting to make some kind of inroads into professional writing. The whole gig had come about from me asking a regular Scene contributor named Lee (who had been coming into the store for years) exactly how one applied for a writing position down there. Lee basically told me to knock off a few "demo" album reviews and send them down to Steve's office for approval. To my great surprise, I was brought on board immediately and started submitting copy within days, eventually "graduating" to concert reviews, interviews, and feature articles. While the pay was minimal and on a per-article basis, I was finally taking steps towards my old dream career, and what I was being offered by Steve that fall evening was basically the full-time writing job I'd been wanting for years.

However, there were two problems that made me chew this over for a minute or so before I could respond. Firstly, I knew that the survival rate of new startup magazines beyond six months wasn't very good, and regardless of their new approach, we'd be going up against two long-entrenched local 800 pound gorillas. Granted, Spot wouldn't be fighting the twin titans head on as our content would be quite different from theirs, but we would have to call in favors and take a lot of time setting up credentials, advertising accounts, and taking a long, slow route to possible success.

Then there was a question of loyalties, plain and simple. While I felt like I owed Steve for giving me a shot and then respecting me enough to offer a full-time position at his next venture, I had known Greg a decade longer and felt equally, if not more indebted to him for keeping me employed over the previous eleven years. As much as I loathed having Deak skulking around the back room all day, the thought of leaving Record Den when we were just getting started over again tore at my insides. After a few months of steadily increasing momentum, sales were starting to take off and we were all excited by what might be possible as our first Christmas season in our new location approached. To make a move to Spot, I would have to jump ship from the Den at the worst possible time to do so, and that alone was unthinkable. Even if the timing hadn't been as terrible as it was, I knew full well that there was no room for a fourth full-timer at the store, and if Spot were to fail, I would be pretty well screwed for a job, at least in the short-term.

After a minute or so of thinking everything over, I declined Steve's offer. I would be more than happy to keep on writing and coming up with content ideas, I told him, but I couldn't leave the store at this time after all we'd gone through to land it and then set it up. I think Steve understood, though I still felt terrible for turning him down. After I dropped him off at his apartment later that night and drove home down Route 2, I wondered if I might have just made the biggest mistake of my life, because it sure felt like it.

As it turned out, I couldn't have been more wrong: about four months later, after a half-dozen or so issues had been distributed around the Cleveland area to a promising initial response, it appears that, depending on how you interpret this brief wrap-up piece, either Steve had a catastrophic falling out with the publisher or (as I had heard) Spot's sole financier developed a lethal case of cold feet and pulled the plug on the whole enterprise. It didn't matter, really: Spot never published again. The dream was over.

Steve was a pretty low-key guy emotionally, but you couldn't miss the anger and betrayal in his voice as I talked to him a day or so after the shit hit the fan. I wasn't sure what to feel: on one hand, the end of Spot ultimately marked the end of my professional writing career. On the other, I had somehow made the wisest decision of my life to that point and thus had a full-time job to fall back on, while Steve (after a stint that following Christmas working for us as part-time help) eventually landed at Lincoln Electric for a while, then ran a CD Warehouse outlet in Mayfield, and now, it appears, lives in New York City.

Within weeks of Spot ceasing to exist, Sarah and I had become an online item, and as that situation developed further, the feeling that I wasn't going anywhere at Record Den had started to gnaw at me to the point where I was seriously considering moving to Columbia, Missouri (where she lived) to see what life had to offer a thousand miles from home. With hardly anything to keep me here if I left the store, the plan was that I'd work through Christmas, save up what I could, and move sometime in early 2000. This idea was sweetened considerably when Sarah informed me that the big record store in Columbia was now hiring for a full-time position. Yahtzee! I sent off a letter and resume to the store owner, shortly thereafter informing Greg of my plans.

January 2000 came around at last, and Western civilization had failed to collapse in on itself despite all the media hysteria that the Y2K bug would send us all back to the stone age at the stroke of midnight on New Years Day. I was just starting to make final preparations for the move when the news came down that the job I thought I had a fairly good shot at was not going to happen (and I'm very glad this news was passed on to me before the move, because Goat knows what the hell kind of chaos that little snafu might have wrought after I had already arrived in Columbia). With that opportunity gone, my spirit was broken and all the little doubts about this idea that had been flittering about in the back of my mind (that I had been studiously ignoring for weeks) suddenly became a very big deal. Perhaps a bit panicked by the sudden change in the situation, I began to reconsider the idea of moving, and wondered if I might be better off staying in Ohio instead.

As luck would have it, I didn't have to think about this very long: a week or so later, Brian had accepted an offer to work full time for our ex-assistant manager Beth at a warehouse she had opened in Willoughby. While he wouldn't be leaving Record Den permanently (he offered to work Sundays in order to keep up with the biz and give Greg and I a common day off), Brian would no longer be available to be a full-time assistant manager, and the job was suddenly mine if I wanted it.

Not being a complete moron, I accepted the promotion.

(Picture of me flipping the bird while reading Q magazine by Dave M.)

1991: The Industrial Revolution

Sometime in November of 1989, I snatched a promotional copy of Ministry's The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste from Record Den and brought it over to Brian's father's house for some warped entertainment. Playing it quietly on the stereo downstairs that night was underwhelming to say the least, and a few weeks later, the CD ended up sold to Record Exchange or something like that. No skin off of my back.
About two years later, reading through a copy of Scene, I happened across a review of the Ministry video shot live on the Mind tour. The write-up sounded like a hoot, so I grabbed a copy from work and went home to watch it and catch what all the buzz what about. My parents were out of town that weekend night, so I let the stereo rip this time and watched something out of A Clockwork Orange with a score by an insane batch of motorheads on speed.

1988: The Gold It's In The ...

Getting a job in a record store seemed only like a fun lark in the largely lonely fall of 1987 post-Floyd. After Fazio's, a succession of far-beyond-dreary jobs in various factories, and a half-dozen hideously boring Saturday nights folding copies of the Sunday News-Herald (with Pink Floyd mix tapes blaring away in my ears, of course), the prospect of cleaning used chemical toilets outhouses sounded like more fun than what I was presently doing.
It was with this attitude that I began seeking employment in October of that year. Camelot Music was actually my first choice, for what reason I honestly cannot say at this time. Perhaps because they were playing A Momentary Lapse Of Reason on the day I walked through. Maybe because a kid I vaguely knew from high school was behind the counter that day. Who knew?
National Record Mart was next on the list, followed by Record Den. Record Rendezvous and Record Carnival would have been on that shortlist as well, but they had long since folded up at that point in time. Considering how many 45 records had slipped from those stores into the folds of countless Scene magazines in the past, it was probably a better thing, anyway.
How's this for irony? Record Den proved to be the winner, if only by because of the fact that Camelot never called back, and the manager of Record Den, Greg Beaumont at least cracked open the windows of possibility by always telling me to return in a week or so to discuss the matter further. By the time I had finally been granted a serious "interview," the idea of getting a job at a record store was an obsession.

1987: The Summer Of Pink

I had finally been hired late in the spring of 1987 working as a bag boy at the Fazio's supermarket down on the corner. While I detested paying weekly union dues (this being a temporary job, I couldn't have given less of a rat shit about the UFCW Local 880's struggle against the big-capitalist oppressors) out of my paycheck, there was still more than enough money left over every week to actually go out and do things without having to beg money off of my family or friends.
At the time, I was in no great hurry to expand my Pink Floyd collection. Since before Chritsmas, I already loved The Wall. After many playings, I had finally grown to love The Dark Side Of The Moon on it's own merits. Even Wish You Were Here, while being the greatest album of my lifetime, was still not impetus enough to head out and dig up the rest of Pink Floyd's catalog.
There was a comfort / fear thing at work here. I rationalized it this way -- I was very happy and comfortable with my three Floyd albums. The thought of picking up one that sucked bothered me, because I feared I would think less of the one's I loved. How many albums of the caliber of Wish You Were Here could Pink Floyd have possibly made? Was it possible that everything was good as these three albums? (A whacked-out Spicoli-in-denim friend of mine answered that last question with a beatific grin and the mysterious word "Ummagumma!") Is it possible that they never fell flat on their faces and turned in a bomb? Well, I knew what at least three cuts on The Final Cut sounded like from my MTV salad days in the summer of 1983. At that time, the mere appearance of those weighty, vaguley bovine videos elicted a groan and some spirited flipping-around elsewhere for a few minutes before coming back to see if anything new by Asia, Thomas Dolby, Berlin or The Police was in sight. Obviously, not everything is great. Ergo, be happy with what you have, junior. Get ready for finals. For the time being, that was that.
With a week and a half to go before school let out, Dennis was pulling into the Mentor High School parking lot as Jeff and Flash were yapping it up with one of the Belkins on the radio about some Big Event coming to town that WMMS, of course, was going to announce first.
"So what's the big news?" Jeff asked.
"Pink Floyd!" was Belkin's emphatic, excited reply.
What'd he say? Pink Floyd? Touring? Holy shit! My jaw probably fell straight into my lap at that point, I forgot to notice. Cleveland Stadium? September? Holy shit!
The announcement electrified Mentor High like nothing since Bruce '86 or Prince '84 (they hadn't announced the U2 date yet, after all). Nobody could believe that Pink Floyd were actually together again and putting on a show in the fall, when a bunch of us would be in or about to start college. Nobody seemed to know that a Pink Floyd album was on the way as well, but nobody really seemed to care much, either. Everyone wanted to go...me and my friends included. Brian got a numbered hospital bracelet from Sears later that day, seemingly guaranteeing him a place in line -- this was a newfangled solution to the previous year's Springsteen ticket debacle when everyone camped out all night in the loading docks and raced to the doors simultaneously the next morning, creating a Who-like crush at the front.
Saturday morning at 6:00 A.M. was when Brian Harnak and I met up in my driveway and Brian drove us down to Sears to stand in line for tickets. WMMS was playing Kenny G's "Songbird" on the way down (something I'm sure they'd love for me to forget, but that sunny early morning drive is etched in my mind like it was yesterday). I must admit that we both enjoyed the Kenny G track immensely, by the way. Christ, we thought it was pretty cool jazz. We were young.
Since this would be my very first concert, I had no idea what to expect when we got down to the Sears parking lot. The two hundred or so cars lined up in the parking lot was a hell of a shock. As we stood in a line before the ticket bracelet number was announced, we listened to my little jerry-rigged ghetto blaster (a Walkman with a miniature equalizer and two speakers) which was blasting out (what else?) Wish You Were Here, but the new ticket procedures interrupted our enjoyment a little while later. You see, once the starting number was called, everyone not in possession a bracelet had to stand clear of the line. Way clear, in fact. So, with some grumbling, I elected to sit out on top of Brian's car for a while, sunning myself and air-jamming until Brian returned with the tix.
Brian's face betrayed the mixture of good and bad news. The good news was the got the tickets. Six of 'em to be exact -- more than enough for all of us to go. The bad news, however, was that these prized seats were in batches of three and exactly opposite each other, otherwise they would have been a lot worse than they were. It was going to be three of us in the left hand side of the upper deck, and the other three of us on the right hand side.
Not bad, but as it would turn out nearly four months later, not great either.
A week later, the long-dreamed-of end of my three-year term (with no parole) at Mentor High School just happened to fall on the same day as Brian's 18th birthday -- June 4, 1987. His good friend Tina Shambach and I made a trip up to Great Lakes Mall to find him something cool from (gasp!) Camelot Records late that evening, both of us absolutely clueless as to what to buy. As it turned out, Tina had the right idea, and I cut a brain fart. I picked out a cassette tape of The Grateful Dead's Skeletons In The Closet (I have no idea what the fuck I was thinking about that night), while Tina picked out a CD of Pink Floyd's Animals. I liked the cover (what the hell is that pig doing up there?), and I got a kick from the fact that there were only five songs listed on the album. Lightning may indeed strike twice on the same band with the same number of songs on a different album, so I thought what the fuck? and grabbed a cassette for myself as well.
A half-hour later, we were back at Brian's house where he and Mike Gilbert were busy, ah, "orchestrating" the heat-lightning storm in the skies of Mentor that night. Those two always had a weakness for that bit in Return Of The Jedi when Ian McDiarmid was frying Mark Hammill with tentacle-like bursts of purple lightning. Bless 'em. Anyway, Tina and I gave Brian his recently-purchased birthday gifts (which he recieved with chuckling enthusiasm when he glimpsed the pig floating serenely between the smokestacks of Battersea power station) and we went for a short drive during which I played a piece of my tape in his car stereo as a preview.
"Pigs On The Wing" was, well, interesting and very very brief. "Dogs" came up next and we were far more appreciative of the sprawling feel of that song. I must admit that when the band lapsed into the standard-Floyd flat four beat after the line "you'll be the one to put the knife in" we all doubled over in laughter. Despite the more acoustic texture of the album, there were still glimpses of regular old Pink Floyd after all.

1987: That Space Cadet Glow

Aside from the psychotically-high volumed playbacks of "The Happiest Days Of Our Lives" that I had continually endured at home when Dad was showing off his new stereo to his friends, chanting along like any good fifth grader did with "Another Brick In The Wall, Part 2" on the school bus, some insanely boring WWII-era newsreel videos with shots of some guy's mug in the shadows, and an abortive attempt to record The Dark Side Of The Moon from my uncle during my stay in Pennsylvania in 1985, I was largely (some might say "blissfully") unaware of Pink Floyd as an artistic entity until the tail end of 1986. Two decades later, I still can't believe that I got by so long without ever having copped a feel of this brilliance until the middle of fucking eleventh grade, but I had other stuff on my plate that had occupied my attention.

It was on a cold, snowdusted December night that I was over at Brian Harnak's place with Rob and Mike. We were really just hanging around and doing a lot of abject teen nothingness (probably deciding whether or not to play Axis & Allies again) when Brian suddenly handed me his Walkman and told me to listen to the music he had cued up.

Though I had heard it before on a far better sound system, the music and sound effects I heard were transfixing for whatever reason that evening. The music was "On The Run" from The Dark Side Of The Moon - three minutes and change of panned sound effects and throbbing, ancient VCS-3 synthiers. To these Britsh synth-pop attuned ears, this sound collage was somehow like manna from heaven through those little earphones. What I had experienced in the Buhl planetarium the previous summer was merely a fun night out with my uncle and aunt...in Brian's kitchen while in the company of my best friends, this music somehow became mindblowing.
Following the shocking, cacaphonous intro to "Time" (which scared the living shit out of me that night), I knew I had to have a copy of this record. Of course, having no job yet (and no record player) made this a rather insurmountable problem at the time. It was back to the old ninth grade solution of - "can I borrow this overnight and tape it?" Brian agreed, and within three hours, The Dark Side Of The Moon was in my rather considerable collection of dubbed albums. Side two of the tape was a bit of a problem, though a hastily-assembled collection of older mellow "psychedelic songs" (that is, if you consider A Flock Of Seagulls' "The Border" and Jan Hammer's "Evan" to be "psychedelic," as we insanely did) filled the 45 minutes of free space just dandy.
Luckily, The Wall presented a different (and far easier-remedied) solution. With a seven year-old vinyl copy moldering away in my parent's record racks, it was a cinch to dub a decent sounding copy from the downstairs stereo. Even more so than Dark Side, The Wall was great Walkman theater for that winter. The propulsive, occasionally snappy rythyms and huge, wide-open production were just dandy for walking through the school hallways. And of course there was that old lyric "We Don't Need No Education!," which every good school student and ultra-right wing populist hack knew how to misinterpret. Oh, I'm quite sure that I was one of the unwashed faceless multitude of idiot swine know-nothings that dear old Roger Waters railed against back in the '70's...but fuck him, this was high school.
Incredibly as it seems from this standpoint in time, the Pink Floyd experience was pretty much restricted to those two epochal albums for about five months after I'd first taped them. I knew vaguely of other albums by the band, but I knew nothing of the titles or quality of their deep catalog. Aside from Roger Waters, I didn't even know who was in the band or who did what. As far as I was concerned (and according to The Wall's sleevenotes), Waters wrote, sang, and did everything -- in short, he was Pink Floyd (I'm sure he'd love to hear that now). For a long while, Dark Side and The Wall were pretty much in my "sporadic rotation" tape pile most of my senior year -- for night time listening and the odd loud blast in the daytime. That's about it. They were just two cool old albums from (eek!) my parent's age that I happened to like.
During those following five months, I had begun riding to school in the morning with a few different people than before. The car I rode in was driven by a casual acquaintance of mine named Dennis Wylie -- far more desirable than more rides with Ted Kozenko and his merry burnout band, who had turned going to high school into a 45 minute, second-hand smoke-laced nightmare every damned morning. What's more is that Dennis had a primo stereo setup in his car -- top-of-the-line tape deck with the radical mustard-yellow face and liquid crystal display plus a twelve-band graphic equalizer mounted on top. While I didn't care much for the musical fare on most mornings -- the omnipresent Led Zeppelin got more than a little grating after a while (I only really knew two songs by them : "Stairway To Heaven" and "The Song Remains The Same") -- old school Rush was interesting for a kick, and the odd Van Halen album passed the time nicely.
On one beautifully clear early spring morning sometime around the end of April or the beginning of May as Dennis was crusing along the Hopkins Road curves on the way to school, he switched tapes from another Led Zeppelin fists-in-the-air anthem to a song that literally poleaxed me in a way that Dark Side never had at that point. It was another Pink Floyd track called "Welcome To The Machine," and it was unlike anything that I had ever heard before. The experience of those wailing, pitch-bent synthesizers and remorselessly throbbing bass lines at the approximate decibel level of a small jet plane taking off just floored me.
As "Have A Cigar" blasted off afterward, I immediately leaned forward and asked Dennis just what in the hell that last song was. Wordlessly, he passed me the cassette case with it's enigmatic robots shaking hands -- even more evocative than the prism and the wall put together. Wish You Were Here. 1975.
I was quick to the next point - "Hey, Dennis -- can I borrow this overnight and tape it?"
"Yeah, but I want it back tomorrow morning. And if you fuck it up, I'll fuck you up!"
Barely hearing the last part of Dennis' words (which I'd heard many times before), I was already busily examining what little information there was to glean from the tape. I wouldn't learn for months that Wish You Were Here was a shamefully empty packaging deal on cassette. Christ, those robots shaking hands wasn't even the real goddamned cover! No liner notes, no lyrics, no photos of any kind. Just that cover and the even more enigmatic song listings (only five songs on this tape? How the hell long are these tunes?). The whole album seemed like a mystery that had me intrigued hours before I even heard the bloody thing.
After school, I popped side two of my old Dark Side tape into my parent's stereo and dubbed over the mellow classics side while I watched some MTV in the family room. When I heard the tape drive click to a stop, I took the new acquisition upstairs and cued up The Dark Side Of The Moon on side A, thinking that I may as well presage this new recording with a replay of its apparent predecessor. To reiterate an earlier point -- until that evening, I had only heard "Welcome To The Machine" and most of "Have A Cigar." When I slipped on my headphones on and played Dark Side, I thought quite naively to myself : damned fine record. Probably would be perfect if only that "Machine" song was on here somewhere...
Remember the very first time you heard your favorite album of all time?
Flipping over the tape, I cued up Wish You Were Here in its entirety for the first time. Stupid as it may sound, my life has never been the same since. I believe my close friends will attest to this under oath.
After the intro silence, the eerie opening of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" drifted out of the tape hiss like the Northern Lights appearing in the dark skies over upper Michigan. Within two minutes, I was hypnotized like I had never been to any record before. The synth work was absolutely stunning! I had never heard such rich, shimmering, full-bodied tones out of a record in my life before. I was hearing waves and washes of sound so beautiful that I was breaking out in goose-flesh listening to it. Then came those soft guitar notes, spotlessly picked and perfectly at home in the mix while the synths appeared to rise like the tides, surging through possible resolve before fading into near-blackness.
Before the famous four-note mourning guitar phrase, I was nearly in a panic -- that couldn't have been all!
My panic was in haste -- from those ringing notes, the body of "Shine On" crashed into being between my ears, trading off languid guitars and keyboard leads with exquisite grace. I literally could not believe what I was hearing that night, and every shift in mood and tempo in "Shine On" had my complete and undivided attention. When the voice began to sing nine minutes in, I was almost disappointed in that the most wondrous music I had ever heard had to have singing to it. But the vocals were fascinating (though I had no idea at the time who Syd Barrett was), and the saxophone solo at the end was a welcome surprise underneath that waterfall-like guitar work and the suddenly peppy tempo.
When the song finally faded perfectly into the now-familiar forbidding drone of "Welcome To The Machine," I was literally breathless. Why had I never heard of this album before? How could this have escaped the attention of Brian, or Mike or anyone else that I knew aside from Dennis Wylie? Why didn't the radio ever touch this album? I almost breezed through "Have A Cigar" and "Wish You Were Here" just reflecting on "Shine On" and "Welcome To The Machine." Amazingly, "Shine On" started up again in radically different form in gusts of late-autumn winds and by the time the final notes of this "Shine On" reprise finally drifted off into the ether, I honestly knew at that very moment that my musical horizons had been unalterably changed. Pop singles and rock ballads suddenly seemed trite and silly compared to something of this magnitude.
Needless to say, I rewound the tape and played it again. And again. By the third airing, I was already trying to imagine the best way for Brian to hear this album for the first time.
That TDK tape containing Wish You Were Here and The Dark Side Of The Moon became my most-played cassette virtually overnight. There was little question of throwing anything else in to hear -- nothing else I owned could top the effect that sonic one-two punch had on me that night. Every evening would be the same...listen to The Dark Side Of The Moon while I was still trying to drift off, then I'd flip the tape and experience Wish You Were Here one more time. The images and moods suggested (and realized) on that album still work an indecribable magic on me to this day. Wish You Were Here was, and still is, the most magnificent album I have ever heard.