Take Off, to the Great White North!

     So, my Mom and Sister got together and gave me the awesome Rush Farewell to Kings 40th Anniversary Box set for Christmas. In some ways, it’s almost become a tradition that I receive something related to the Canadian trio on Christmas, as there has been something new almost every year for the last decade, but my history with the band and Canadian music goes back quite a bit further than that. I’ve been a fan and a listener of music for as far as my memory stretches; can’t play an instrument at all, but I can pick up the lyrics of just about anything that gets thrown at me and my mind is literally filled to the brim with useless music trivia, well that and science-fiction but I digress. The latest addition to my Rush collection got me thinking about how much of that musical history has been influenced by bands and artists from out northern neighbors.
    Like a lot of the things I consider important and pivotal in my life, I began to become truly cognizant of the things I was listening to in the early 1980s during my teen years. Before that, I’d like this or that, but the details didn’t really concern me. I distinctly remember one night though, listening to the radio before taking a shower one night when I was probably 14 or 15 years old. It was a little black Realistic AM/FM transistor radio from Radio Shack I believe and it was my almost constant companion. And so there it played on the shelf in our tiny bathroom that evening, tuned to a new station in the Birmingham market, 95 Rock. I sat there on the old porcelain throne for a few moments preparing to hop in the shower when I heard this weird high pitched wail emanating from the tiny speaker out of nowhere. At first, I couldn’t decide if it was some kind of static interference or synthesizers as it shifted and rose and fell, then I heard guitars and drums and bass and odd timing changes before it built to and inevitable crescendo, paused and I heard “and the meek shall inherit the earth”. I found out later it was Rush’s 2112 Overture and I was hooked! It wasn’t long after that that I found out the radio station did something called the Saturday night six-pack every weekend in which they played six albums uncut from 1 am in the morning until they were done. That along with an upgrade to a Sanyo radio/cassette player with headphone jack propelled me further, as I have fond memories of lying on the couch in the wee hours with my Dad’s headphones on listening to things like Permanent Waves and A Farewell to Kings in the ensuing weeks. To this day, when I listen to certain track off those albums, I’m transported back to those magical nights of auditory bliss.
    It was during the latter part of this time period that a new and subversive entity took hold of my brain, MTV. Mere words cannot convey the effect Music Television had on my young psyche. It put faces and ideas to the songs I’d already been listening to anyway and of course, there was Rush with Tom Sawyer and Limelight in heavy rotation. There were other bands too though, and though it didn’t really register at the time, they were also from the Great White North. These too would impact the musical landscape of my youth.
    There was one band in particular called Loverboy that spoke to me deeply. Their song ‘Turn Me Loose’ became almost an anthem to an internal rebellious nature I tried to keep well hidden. “I was born to run, I was born to dream, the craziest boy you ever seen”, how could those words not speak directly to my soul? Loverboy wound up being the second concert I ever attended and they brought along another Canadian band as their opening act, Zebra. As the months went by, and certainly by no intent to seek out and listen to Canadian bands, I nonetheless became a fan of another power trio in the Rush mold called Triumph. Then there was April Wine and Saga as well. Bryan Adams and Glass Tiger come to mind and now looking back with the clarity and knowledge of age, older artists and songs I’ve enjoyed like ‘American Woman’ by the Guess Who and ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ by Gordon Lightfoot all came to my Alabama ears from Canada too. And how’s this for an obscure Canadian pop gem, ‘My Girl (Gone, Gone, Gone)’ by Chillwack? A favorite thanks to Casey Kasem and the American Top 40.
    Canadian music has even made me laugh out loud on occasion. That would be in the instance of Bob and Doug MacKenzie’s ‘hit single’ ‘Take Off to the Great White North’ which is where this post gets its name. Bob and Doug were fictional Canadian brothers on the old SCTV sketch comedy television show and when they decided to make a record, complete with a hit single, they hired none other than Geddy Lee, the lead singer and bassist of Rush, to provide vocals. It, and the whole album is hilarious and worth looking up on YouTube or iTunes. Check it out if you can, it’s a beauty way to go!
    Thanks again for reading and please comment with your own music memories, Canadian or otherwise. See you soon!

Ghosts of Christmas Past and Post-Apocalyptic before it was cool.

 

    Christmas is almost here and again, even though I’m 50+ years old now, I think of the toys I had growing up. There were a ton of them! I honestly don’t know how my parents pulled it off, because we were far from well off back then. And then, when my sister Michelle came along when I was five, they managed to provide for the both of us. I know there were compromises; when Legos were starting to get popular, we got Brix Blox from Sears. When everyone else got the Mattel football game, I got the Sears version. It didn’t really matter though. We got a lot and we were happy back then.
    Above are just a few of the multitude of favorites I had; Mego Planet of the Apes, Big Jim’s Rescue Wagon and the Verti-Bird helicopter.  I guess my love for science fiction stretches back as far as my memory will go and I was just blown away seeing the Apes movies and the short-lived CBS TV show, so when I saw the toys, pun intended, I went ape-s**t crazy! Michelle even got in on the game, getting Zira, or Lady Ape as we called her back then. I had most of the figures and accessories like the battering ram and the slave wagon. I have a vague memory of the tree-house playlet, but I don’t know if it was mine or my friend Al Stipes’s from school.
    Big Jim may have been a compromise as well. Most everyone else was into G.I. Joe and I even had a few as well, but after my sister popped the head off my talking commander a few days after I got him, Jim seemed to take the lead. I had a couple of figures and the Rescue Wagon, the Camper and even Jim’s just playset at one time. Big Jim’s world was almost as large as Joe’s and to counter kung-fu grip, Jim had bulging biceps when you bent his arms.
    Verti-Bird was on a tether and operated be remote control. You could only fly it in circles, but there was some skill involved in learning to make it hover and pick up the included cargo bundle with the hook attachment. I actually remember having a lot of fun with that thing!
    There were so many other toys growing up too; the Even Knievel stunt cycle, the Micronauts, …heck I even had a General George Custer action figure at one point! And of course there were things like Lincoln Logs, Hot Wheels, an electric train and nerf footballs and any number of cap and toy guns.
    I enjoyed, and played with all the toys, but being the precocious imaginative kid that I was, I tended to always fall back to the action figures and the worlds I created in my head, much to the chagrin of my Dad at times I think. He even made a comment to me once when I had an action figure of some sort with me around some of his coworkers when Mom took him dinner on overtime at work and told me never to bring one of “those dolls” around again. Ah well…
    Anyway, being the kind of quirky kid that I was, and not realizing it at the time, when Christmas time was over and all the different characters were collected around the toy chest, my Apes and Big Jim’s and Micronauts and Evel and all the others never battled or anything like that. No, we formed a caravan of accessories and vehicles and we were always on a journey to find some safe refuge after a calamity of some kind, a war or natural disaster perhaps. So basically we, the toys and I were trapped in a post-apocalyptic world and forced to work together to try and survive. Where all this came from, I have no idea because I had to have been somewhere between the ages of 7 and 12 when all this was going on. Maybe enough of my brain had registered what was going on in those Planet of the Apes movies to make that leap. There were other movies too, and I apparently had very little TV filtering administered to me. Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek fame, was desperately trying to overcome the cancellation of that show, (which will become a blog entry unto itself one day), and so there were these made for TV movies, failed pilots really like Genesis II and Planet Earth that my young science-fiction primed mind ate up like candy. Regardless of the stimulus though, my toys were the receptacle for all this. Apes and humans worked together. Baron Karza and Force Commander towed the line towards the hope of a new tomorrow and Evel Knievel, who was about 6 inches tall, did all he could to aid Big Jim, who was a much bigger 10-11 inch figure in the quest for sanctuary.
    And so tonight, on this Christmas Eve so many decades later, I look back and smile at my younger self and my naive, yet hopeful notions. Kinda wish I had them all here now and I could get my big butt down in the floor, line up the vehicles and boxes and start a quest for a place where it doesn’t matter if you’re called a doll or an action figure, whether you’re marketed as a hero or a villain or any of that; just a place where everyone, every toy is safe and at peace.

Merry Christmas all!

    Welcome to what I hope is going to be an ongoing project for me. This will be my platform for sharing my thoughts and yes, musings, on a variety of subjects of interest to me and hopefully of some interest to those of you that take the time to stop by and take a look. I’ll talk about the bands and music I like, the movies and television shows I enjoy and the ones that I hold dear in my memory. I’ll wax as eloquently as I’m able about books and comics I’ve read or plan to read. Sometimes I'll vent, as The Walking Dead has made me want to do for this entire season, and other times I'll gush, as The Orville made me want to do as well this year. Often, these posts will focus on the past because, as much as my comic book hero John Byrne hates this statement, the older stuff was often better, at least in my opinion. I’ll probably do a bit of shameless self-promotion posting photos of my artwork, my culinary experiments and my forays into the written word on occasion. And of course there will be photos of my travels around the state discovering new, to me, places and of Guinness and Smokey when they do something adorable.
    Most of all, I want this to be a positive experience for myself and for my readers. Ideally, I’ll share some insight or some tidbit of information new to the audience or as I’m writing, I’ll think about some of these things in a way I’ve not done before. So, thank you in advance for stopping by and spending some time. Feel free to leave comments and feedback. Here we go!