Tag Archives: hmv

Mixtape: Untitled VIII

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This one’s a long one…a three-taper made in late Spring 1998 in the middle of my stint at HMV Records. This was kind of a transitional time for me — purging old personal drama, starting a brand new science fiction novel and writing more songs and poems, working down in the Belfry at night, going on long road trips, learning how to get rid of all that negativity from the first half of the decade. I stopped hiding and started living again, especially now that I could once again afford to do so.

This mixtape got a lot of play in my first car — a 1992 Chevy Cavalier I’d named the Mach V, in which I’d recently had a tape deck installed — and contains a mix from two sources: the current playlist of WFNX which I’d listened to constantly to and from work, and the extreme expansion of promotional copies of cds that I’d begun to acquire at work. Some songs are alt-rock radio standards today (Flagpole Sitta, The Way) while others are loved deep cuts (Playboys, Fall On Tears), Belfry regulars (God Lives Underwater, Superdrag) and soundtrack songs (mostly from Great Expectations, which I listened to on the regular).

Out of most of the multi-tape mixes, I think this one holds up as one of the best. It’s consistent with only one or two filler tracks, and it contains quite a few of my favorite late 90s tracks.

[Only one track missing and not available on Spotify: Foo Fighters’ cover of Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street”, placed between Goldfinger’s “This Lonely Place” and Tonic’s “If You Could Only See”.]

Fly-by: Twenty years on interlude

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Hello from a very rainy Oxford Street in London! I have come full circle and stepped foot into an HMV for the first time since probably 2001, when its US stores started closing up. This particular shop I believe is connected to the original first one, if it isn’t THE first one.

I’m glad to say the selection is still fantastic and the prices are great. Found everything I was looking for (which is often a rarity) and the service was aces.

So yeah — glad to be able to hit an HMV one more time for old times sake. 😁

Platinum Records

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If you haven’t seen my recent post over at Welcome to Bridgetown, I’m currently celebrating the platinum anniversary of my starting a novel (The Phoenix Effect) that would end up morphing into my Bridgetown trilogy.  All this month I will be posting fun things related to the original as well as the trilogy, and I thought I’d do the same over here.

Twenty years ago I was a few months in on my relatively new job as the lone shipper/receiver at HMV Records.  Even though I was one of the oldest hires there (I’m pretty sure I was closer to my manager Tom’s age than the young’uns I worked alongside), I was still feeling my way around.

The biggest change from the years previous was that I had a much closer connection to the music I was listening to.  I was listening to a lot of radio at the time but didn’t have that much money to spend on new releases, but this job let me listen to a lot more stuff (and yes, I may have dubbed a number of cds onto blank cassettes while in the back room, heh!).

But the sounds were changing as well.  The bright bounciness of Britpop was suffering from hangovers and bloating (see: Oasis’ Be Here Now, a solid but WAY overworked album); the American grunge was kind of losing its way (not to mention some of its lead singers to overdoses), and let’s face it: the college rock I knew of then was essentially the commercial rock of now.

That’s not to say the quality (or quantity) of alternative rock was declining…it was merely evolving with the times.  In fact, 1997 featured some fantastic, solid releases from bands both old and new, taking the genre in new and interesting directions.

On a personal level this was a positive and much-needed evolution for me, as I’d been in dire need of a change in my life and outlook.  I’d been broke, angry and depressed for about three years straight, gone through some personal issues that were Not Fun At All, and needed a positive change ASAP.

Not only that, this change in mood is reflected in my writing.  I’d essentially started a new project resurrected from the ashes of one that I had to close down for personal reasons.  And let’s be brutally honest:  back then, I’d had a collegiate view of being a writer.  I was a special snowflake with the Powers of Story [insert sprinkly *whoosh* sfx here] and I wrote Important Life Allegories™.  In reality, however…my writing was crap, I knew it was crap, no one was going to take it seriously, and I was going to need to be a shit ton better than the level I was currently at if was going to get anywhere with it.

So that meant dispensing with the mindset of Writing as Superpower and take it seriously.  Making it a daily process instead of a casual one.  Relearning the basics of story construction.  (This included doing a hell of a lot more reading than before; not just the how-to writing books, but the different genres of fiction and nonfiction I was interested in.  This plan kick-started my habit of visiting book stores on the weekends and, thankfully, a love of reading.)

Music has always been a part of my writing process, and this time it was no different.  This time out I’d be making mixtapes of tracks that would inspire my writing (the four-volume Songs from the Eden Cycle from 1997-8, the sort-of sequels in the early 2000s, and the recent Eden Cycle Sessions mp3 playlists).  Certain albums released during this time would get heavy rotation play on my cd player down in my basement writing nook.  And I’d listen to a hell of a lot of stuff on my fifty-mile commute, which was always a perfect time for me to brainstorm.

I’d made a decision to be a writer quite early in my life, but 1997 was when I decided to take that decision seriously.

Favorite Albums: Failure, Fantastic Planet

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Credit: discogs.com

Credit: discogs.com

Say hello to the rug’s topography / it holds quite a lot of interest with your face down on it…

I distinctly remember hearing Failure for the first time; their debut Comfort had been released just as I started my senior year in college, and our FM station, WERS, had received a promotional copy, which I soon found in the freebie bins outside the studio (aka the “here, this sucks and/or is too commercial-sounding and we won’t play it” bins, given the station at the time).  I’d heard a lot of great things about the band and the album, even despite the incessant and often misguided comparisons to the ubiquitous Nirvana.  I can see where they’d get that, if you think loud guitars + quirky chord changes + odd lyrics = Nirvana or one of its clones, but I always felt that was a cop-out, a weak and lazy way to pigeonhole a newly-popular subgenre.

I played “Submission” and “Pro-Catastrophe” from that first album on my radio show on our AM station, WECB, where I was the music director that semester, and I thought they were well worth checking out and sharing with others.  My enthusiasm didn’t get too far, of course, considering WECB’s low-watt reach was ridiculously sketchy, not to mention by that time, the alternative rock purists were refusing to listening to anything remotely commercial, and that WFNX was playing Nirvana, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam every fifteen minutes or so.  Failure unfortunately could not sneak in edgewise into anyone’s playlist.  I don’t blame the band for that at all; in fact, I have to give them mad props for remaining true to the sounds they wanted to create.  They weren’t as Led-Zep as most grunge bands were, they weren’t as hard as any metal bands out there, but they also weren’t deliberately outsider anti-commercial either.

They released a second album, Magnified, in early 1994, which I unfortunately never picked up at the time, as that was during my broke years in Boston, but I did eventually pick it up a few years later while working at HMV.

That was where I fell in love with the band again.

In August of 1996, about a month before I started working at the record store, the band released the video for the single “Stuck on You”, a brilliant and almost shot-for-shot takeoff of the opening credits to the James Bond flick The Spy Who Loved Me, and I was immediately hooked.  I mean, listen to that crunch–it’s drop-tuned a half-step to give it a powerful low end, and balanced with a high end distorted riff.  The whole thing just punches you in the face from the first few seconds, and doesn’t relent until the last few.  Lead singer and songwriter Ken Andrews delivers great vocals here too, drifting lazily through the verses (which, interestingly enough, are about getting a song stuck in your head) but belting them out during the choruses.

One of the first promotional freebies I got from the record store was a copy of this single, a two-track cd shaped like the head of the spaceman on the album’s cover and featuring the album version and the radio edit of the track.  Suffice it to say this track got a lot of play in the back storage room at the time.  Fantastic Planet was one of my first purchases when I first started working at HMV.  As the lone shipping/receiving clerk for the store, I often hung out up back, pricing and security-tagging and processing them into the stock database, but during all that time I’d have a radio going.  That was one of the first things I did when I started the job, actually–I got a hold of a cheap boombox at WalMart and brought it in specifically for backroom listening.  [It wasn’t just for my own entertainment, either…I did that because I knew the label reps would want us to sample some of their wares during their visits.  That worked quite to our advantage, actually.]

I knew I’d love it even before I heard any other tracks from it–the fact that they named it after the 1973 animated French film of the same name (a movie I’d taped years before off USA Network’s Night Flight and watched repeatedly) was definitely a selling point, but I’d heard a hell of a lot of positive reviews as well.  I even snagged a promotional album flat for it as well and had it posted prominently for pretty much the entire time I was at the store.   And yes, I played the hell out of that album for years to come.

 

The history behind the album is quite interesting, as Ken Andrews and bassist Greg Edwards explain in this recent interview as well as in this promo for the album’s 2010 vinyl reissue both point out that it was recorded during their most tumultuous times as a band.  Come 1995 they’d had issues not just with the label (Slash Records) not quite knowing how to sell the band, and drugs and personal issues were also causing fractures.  And yet, they retained a crystal clear idea of what they wanted the album to sound like, and took delicate care with each and every track before considering it done.  This included the production as a whole–they took care to ensure the running order was perfect as well.  The album also both starts and ends with the same trinkety sound effect loop, but it could be taken two ways: the album is either an unending cycle, or they’re a prologue and epilogue to gauge just how much the cycle has changed from one end to the other.

It’s hard to say exactly what the album may be about, really…while there is a theme of space in the science fiction sense–thus the title–it’s also about emotional space and one’s self within it.  There are songs about drug addiction and psychological breakdowns, but there are also songs about redemption and clarity as well.  Even the opening track, “Saturday Savior”, could be taken more than one way–either a throwaway relationship, or addiction denial.  The album almost has a similar lyrical and musical feel as Pink Floyd’s The Wall, where we don’t quite notice until a few songs in that things are starting to get dark and desperate.  It’s not until “Smoking Umbrellas” that the imagery becomes trippier, the chords of the song drifting in unexpected directions.  The frantic “Pillowhead” follows it up, and the narrator knows full well that he’s deep in addiction now.  By “Dirty Blue Balloons”, he’s at his “Comfortably Numb” phase, wasted beyond help, and at “Pitiful” he’s hit rock bottom.  We’ve hit the halfway point in the album, and we’re not sure where he can go from here.

And that’s when “Leo” arrives–a moment of clarity, where he’s finally able to see himself, and he doesn’t like what he sees and feels.  There’s pain, a misplaced hunger, a sense of paranoia that he can’t quite place.  There’s no real resolution, at least not yet.  The first step is a cleansing, in the form of “The Nurse Who Loved Me”.  A brilliant, beautiful angelic song (which puts A Perfect Circle’s cover to shame) that’s not just about the narrator’s coming clean physically but emotionally as well.  It’s one of the best tracks on the album, deliberately constructed to build tension both in sound and pace, right up until the last second…and ending with a breath of exhaustion and relief.  And by “Another Space Song” and “Stuck On You”, he’s back on the mend.  There’s still addiction–emotional addiction this time–that needs stopping and healing.  He faces it head on on “Heliotropic”, one of the heaviest and angriest tracks on the album.  He’s forcing himself to admit guilt and turn away from the temptations once and for all.  Redemption and relief finally come to him in the epic closer “Daylight”–he’s gone through hell physically and emotionally, most of it his own doing, and he’s made peace with it…now it’s time to make peace with himself.

 

When I first heard this album, I did pick up on the addiction references, but I also chose to see past them for the overall mood of the album, just as I had back in my teens with The Wall–it wasn’t so much about the actual story being told that intrigued me as it was about the way it was told.  I don’t really pay too much attention to the literal meaning of the lyrics; instead I see the peaks and the valleys in this album as if they’re part of a novel or a movie, with its sequencing taking us on a deep spiritual and emotional journey.  It tells a story, and it tells it without flinching.  It’s because of this that it fell into heavy rotation during my writing sessions for the Bridgetown Trilogy, and helped inspire the ending scene in A Division of Souls.  It’s remained one of my top ten favorite albums, and still gets heavy play–I even have it on the mp3 player I use at the gym.