7. There's Someone Else Controlling Me

I decided to fast forward a bit since the details of the early years are not nearly enough to fill any significant portion of a blog. I may refer back where necessary and provide a vignette, but let's pick up in 1986 when I was 12.

I remember the PSAs during Saturday morning cartoons that talked about marijuana being a "gateway" drug. I know nothing about that as I never did drugs and didn't start enjoying the occasional beer until way later in life (seriously, not even joking). I can, however, speak to the truth of a different kind of "gateway" to a wider world.  The gateway to metal.

I was in seventh grade during 1986-87 and my brother was a sophomore in high school. He was friends with the group I will call the jeans vest guys. This is not to be confused with the "denim vest guys" who listen to country music. The jeans vest guys were the long-haired guys who cut the sleeves off their jeans jackets and adorned them with patches and artwork of their favorite heavy metal bands. My brother, as mentioned earlier, was already into bands like Iron Maiden and Judas Priest, and of course, Ozzy Osbourne. The next step in the metal chain would be the band that was the gateway drug to even more metal.

Metallica. The album was Ride The Lightning. My brother borrowed the album (on vinyl) off of one of his friends, came home, put it on the turntable and…I was a bit underwhelmed for the first forty seconds. Here was this melodic acoustic guitar solo to start things off. Wow, really? This is…wait…holy shit! I had never heard anything so fast and heavy in my life. The growling vocals singing about impending doom due to warfare. It didn't take long for Eric to buy the album for himself and for me to borrow it and record the first two songs for a mix tape. Of course, this new found sound would not make me any more popular at school.

This brand of heavy metal was commonly referred to ask "kill your mother" music. Motley Crue, Poison, Cinderella, and other hair metal bands were fine. It was the serious underground metal that scared people. So I was listening to Metallica on my Walkman when somebody in my class asked me what I was listening to. Stupidly, I answered, and then it came, "Hey, Jasen's listening to 'kill your mother' music!" I don't remember my reaction to it all, but I probably retreated into my own mind and tried not to pay attention any semblance of popularity I thought I had fade away into oblivion. From then until I graduated the following year, I kept this part of my musical taste under wraps, but I continued to experiment with harder forms of metal, like Anthrax, Megadeth, and eventually the kings, Slayer.

If I could go back in time and talk to myself (provided it doesn't result in the collapse of the universe), I would probably tell myself, "Pay no attention to those other kids because in two years Metallica would release …And Justice For All and they will all jump on this bandwagon. You will be able say that you liked them before they were 'cool'." Of course I can't go back in time (yet) which means I also can't prevent me from wasting a Christmas gift, but that will have to wait.

6. Sundays In The Kitchen

Growing up, Sundays were truly the most fun day of the week. My mom made dinner every week and my aunt, uncle, and grandpa would come over. Mom was always a good cook and her house is still the gathering place for all major dinners except for Thanksgiving. I took over that holiday when I moved into my own house.

After dinner would be coffee and dessert and listening to the oldies show on radio. My parents and aunt and uncle would go out to a local bar on Tuesdays to see the DJ who hosted this show, Bruce Ryan. If it was somebody's birthday, my dad would call in a dedication for the Beatles' "Birthday". When I was young, there was a great thrill to hearing my name said on the radio. (Today, as a podcaster, I hate hearing my own voice.)

One of the favorite songs that came up just about every week was "Little Darling" by The Diamonds. We would sing along to this song, especially the high-pitched vocals and the spoken word part. Beside that song, my all-time favorite has always been "Stand By Me", whether it's the original by Ben E. King, John Lennon, or the fantastic version from Playing For Change, where musicians from all over the world recorded various songs and they were mixed together.

Oldies still hold a prominent spot in my music listening, especially some of the stuff that wasn't always played on the radio. These days, the local oldies station only plays from the mid-60's and later, which means that I have to depend on Google Play and my own CD collection to give me the good time oldies I enjoy so much. I recommend the box set, Loud, Fast, and Out of Control, the Wild Sounds of 50's Rock. It contains many of my favorites, but no ballads. And I still sing the high notes of "Little Darling" when ever comes through the rotation.

5. The Formidable Years

This chapter is a collection of small vignettes since I really can't elaborate on any of this due to lapse in memory (give me a break, it was nearly 40 years ago) or the story doesn't go that deep.

As I mentioned in an earlier post (Kissin' Time, there might be a link here), the parents in my neighborhood growing  up never bought into that whole "Kiss is evil" bullshit. None of our families were particularly religious but my parents went to church every week and sent my brother and me to Catholic schools. Just because we weren't religious, though, didn't mean our parents didn't want to cart us off for two weeks of peaceful evenings.

Our neighbors belonged to a Lutheran church and, for about two weeks, they had a vacation bible school. I think they got a tuition credit for their daughter's schooling based on how many kids she could rope into going. It was only for a few hours in the evening, but those few hours each evening had to be paradise for our parents.

Each evening, we would pile into the neighbor's red Chevy station wagon and head off to bible school (I swear I could hear cheers and champagne corks popping as we drove away that first night).  I'll be honest, I don't remember much from those days. I remember Jesus-based songs and the fact that bible verses were talked about, but other than that, I probably has Kiss songs in my head and just wanted to be at home playing. I think we did this for  and then it was over, especially since I would starting school.

The year was 1979 and Dynasty by Kiss came out. Now, I'm going to make a confession here and I don't want you to hurt yourself, so please sit and hold onto something. I liked Dynasty. As a matter of fact, I still do. Apparently, some fans disliked the album because Kiss went "disco" or they "sold out". News flash, Kiss sold out with their debut album in 1974. The entire object of their existence was to merchandise themselves and make as much money as possible. </rant>

I entered kindergarten and after the usual, cliché crying and crap that kids do when left in school for the first time, I eventually settled in to the routine of what would become the next thirteen years. Mary Beth (the neighbor from down the street) was in my class, and so was who would become my first ever best friend, Travis.

Travis lived further down the street from me, but within walking distance or bicycle distance. We were inseparable once we became friends. It seems that I would actually introduce him to Kiss and then other music down the line. We would be friends (for the most part) until grade school ended, and then we would lose touch. That is until 2009 when we would reconnect on Facebook. He's married with three kids and lives down in Columbus now. He will be heard from again in this saga.

Chapter 4. Mom Rock

In the late 1970’s, my uncle owned and ran a small gift shop called His & Hers Curiosity Shop. Because he had a regular day job, he couldn’t run the shop during the day, so my mom did. And because I was just a tot and not yet in school, I had to go with her, which I didn’t mind. The shop only took up about two-thirds of the available space. The rest was set up like a living space.

The back area was like a living room, with a TV, refrigerator with a variety of flavors of Pic-a-Pop, and an area rug so that I wasn’t sliding all over on the cold linoleum or tile floor (I can’t remember which). I used to play back there during the day while mom worked, or went next door to visit the lady at the donut shop (this was the late 70’s in a southwest suburb of Cleveland, there was no chance I was getting kidnapped). Much of the wall decor in the back revolved around Linda Ronstadt. My uncle LOVED Linda Ronstadt...and her music.

My mom had plenty of her music on the many mix tapes she made for the car and the shop. She carried with her every day a plastic cassette box filled with tapes, both mixes and pre-recorded. She drove a 1974 Oldsmobile Cutlass with an aftermarket tape deck. We would drive to the shop listening to The Eagles, the aforementioned Linda Ronstadt, Steely Dan, Boston, Foreigner, Journey, Bad Company, and many, many more (does this remind you of a K-Tel Records commercial? Kids, ask your parents)

This period of time was my biggest exposure to music. I was already listening to Kiss, which my mom also had on one or more songs on her mix tapes, but I was also introduced to plenty of other music over which I had no control. The Bee Gees were a constant, and mom had them on every tape that she made and also had a few of their cassettes in that box. Every day I went to the store with her, she exposed my young mind to The Bee Gees. Today, I own nothing by them on LP, CD, or mp3…but I also do not change the channel if they appear on the radio…it is my curse.

I was playing in the back when my mom ran next door to the donut shop. I’m guessing the store wasn’t open for business yet, and I was left there, again suburb, 70’s, safe. The shopping center was either old or new, I don’t remember, but it made funny noises and I could hear people on either side of the store through the walls. This scared me, especially since this was my first time being left alone. The TV wasn’t enough to soothe my frazzled, young nerves. I waited in the back, and suddenly, everything hanging on the walls and all of the tchotchkes in the gift shop suddenly appeared threatening to me. When mom finally returned and resumed the tape in the player, I breathed a sigh of relief. I never told her how I felt about being left there alone because I loved being at that store and didn’t want to spend the day at my grandparents’ house. They didn’t listen to music all day long.

Chapter 3. The Gods Have Smiled On Me

Originally written May 3, 2016

The site that once was
Peaches Records & Tapes

One of the first places I ever went to buy records (I’m old, we didn’t have CDs) with my family was a record store called Peaches Records and Tapes. The location closest to my house was in a shopping center with two separate buildings. There was a shopping strip with a couple restaurants (one of those will feature prominently in this memoir later on), a drug store, and a place that I would later learn was a convenience store (It was called Treasure Island, or Isle, I can’t remember now). The other building on the lot had a dance club, some other businesses that I can’t remember, and Peaches.

Peaches was the main business and took up the most room. The building used to be a department store. It had a large rectangular tower with the bright and colorful Peaches Records sign on both of the wide sides. It stood towering over the area like a beacon on the hill or the Tower of Sauron. Below the main sign was a light up signboard that advertised upcoming albums, concerts, and events. Running along the lower facade were outdoor posters of the month’s top albums. The only one I remember clearly was Abacab by Genesis.

It was the biggest record store in the area and upon walking in, the racks and racks of records stretched as far as the eye could see. It wouldn’t be until many years later that I would find out that Peaches was a nationwide chain, but I recall the workers there knowing the customers, if not by name, by musical taste. They were willing to order any hard-to-find item and take the time to look for whatever the customer was looking for. I really wouldn’t appreciate this until many years later when only the electronics stores were selling large volumes of music.

Most of my music was purchased there early on. This was before CDs and digital downloads, when the most durable medium for music was the vinyl album. This was before I discovered the mail-order services that sold eight, eleven, or twenty albums for a penny. This was my musical Mecca, but there was one item that could not be purchased anywhere except for Peaches. Maybe there were cheap, off-brand replicas sold elsewhere, but none of them compared. I am, of course, talking about…the record crate.

A simple wooden crate, about twelve inches across and deep, and two feet long, the Peaches crate was more than just a storage box for albums, it was a rite of passage. My mom would eventually end up with six crates full before she finally allowed my brother and I to pillage and plunder her collection. I had a tiny record collection made up primarily of Kiss albums, but it was growing by the week. I was being exposed to more and more music and I wanted a place that would be strictly for all of the new albums I would be getting (especially when I discovered the aforementioned mail-order services). This crate was my birthright and I wanted to earn mine.

I know, hyperbole much? But at this time, I felt that record crate meant that I truly appreciated music and that simple wooden structure was the symbol of that commitment. When that day finally arrived and my dad assembled it for me and put it in my room, I placed all of my albums into it, except for the children’s albums. Those stayed on the bookshelf since I did not see them as worthy to sit in the same area with Kiss and Cheap Trick (more on that later).

Chapter 2. Kissin' Time

Originally written April 26, 2016

Thinking back, I figured that the Lovin’ Spoonful album was probably a gift that my parents didn’t entirely care for but didn’t want to get rid of, so they added it into the kids’ music collection. I’m pretty sure if mom and dad didn’t much care for the album before they gave it to us, they were probably sick and tired of “Summer in the City” after that. I don’t think I ever listened to anything else off of that album except for that one song, and that was because that song had a sound that I liked. Of course, I would eventually get past that song and onto bigger and better. You might even say, “The hottest band in the world."

Kiss had already been around longer than I had been alive, but by the time I was old enough to have heard of them they would come out with the album that would redirect the rest of my life. Destroyer put Kiss on the map. I could go off on a tangent of how Bob Ezrin produced this album and would follow it up by producing Pink Floyd’s The Wall album, but hell, I was three and a half years old and didn’t really care much for that. All I knew was that the band looked cool in their black and white makeup, the giant boots, and their music appealed to me. Lyrically, I think it’s safe to say that I didn’t understand many of the double entendres that they were using, it was just cool. Just this moment, I realized that “Strutter” was about a stripper, and I’m 42. I just never thought about it (that is a conversation for another day).

Let me pause here and discuss a little something that I still read about to this day. Back in that magical time of the seventies, many young people latched onto Kiss as a band of rebellion from their parents’ music and what society as a whole deemed as acceptable. Many of those parents My parents understood that music was music and that by allowing us to own and listen to Kiss, they weren’t turning it into “forbidden fruit”. This would continue on with Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Ozzy, and Dio. All of these acts were permitted in my parents’ house because they recognized that music is music.

Anyway, we were friends with the kids down the street, the older two were our ages and also Kiss fans. We used to play on the neighbor’s swing set and sing Kiss songs and just have fun. I know it sounds silly now, but when you’re a kid, that was the height of fun. Growing up, there was a vast cast of characters that I will eventually run through as I write this. Some of them have faded away completely and others simply moved into the periphery for a time. They will be introduced in due time and as the story requires.

Eventually, my brother and I would get the solo albums, Kiss puzzles, Kiss dolls, and the remote control Kiss van. Yes, Kiss was all about merchandising (say it like Mel Brooks in Spaceballs, it’s funnier) and Eric and I fell for it completely. We were even allowed to stay up past our bedtime to watch Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park, which was the greatest movie of all time (at age three or four, the taste centers of the brain are severely undeveloped). I would watch this piece of sh…film many years later thanks to a friend and I really can’t remember much of it except that members of the band were in it and there was an amusement park. These days, I’m amazed that that movie isn’t listed as directed by Alan Smithee.

Kiss will come up again. And again. And again. This is because I ended up seeing the band three times, though one could be listed as unofficial since it was before their return to the makeup. For now, though, I’m going to go back to listening to their debut album and remember some of those smaller details of my early life.

Chapter 1. This is Where It All Starts

Originally written April 21, 2016

A few years ago, I attempted write my memoir. As I started to write it, I felt that much of my life was way too boring as a whole. So I decided instead to pick out specific events, certain nuggets of interest and write about those instead. That would be far more interesting than my David Copperfield (the book, not the magician) life, as described by Brad Pitt’s Louis in Interview With the Vampire, “I was born. I grew up. I died.” No, nobody would want to hear the pathetic tales of a grade school kid trying to be accepted and failing at every turn. So, I turned to the events and wrote about those with little if any foreshadowing. How did I come to be declared dead by the student body of a high school that didn’t even know me? What happened before that, and that, and even before that? These are the stories that nobody would want to read, but they are the stories I want to tell.

I had gotten turned onto a blogger, music writer, and photographer named James Stafford, who was writing and posting a new chapter of his memoir, Why It Matters, weekly. There was something there that I needed to read. As a skeptic, I don’t believe that things are meant to be, but I definitely found something to connect me to this life being played out before me. Each chapter (most of them, at least) was titled with a lyric to a relevant song to that chapter for the most part (something I will not be doing). It was life affected by music that he discovered in his earliest years after he rescued his aunt’s record and 45 records from certain doom (DOOOOOOOOOM!). While his story is far more interesting than mine could ever be, I notice some parallels, and I pull some inspiration from his words. I look back at my earliest memories of childhood, to the house where I grew up, and instantly there is music…

“What kind of music do you like?” This is a question that has haunted and harassed me for most of my life. It’s a question that, when asked, sends my mind into a vortex looking for an answer. It’s a question that makes me think that the asker is convinced that it is only conceivable for a person to like one kind of music. Depending on my mood, I may choose to answer with a “yes”, or simply by saying, “all kinds." I don't only like one kind of music, but all kinds, from all genres. I've been told that one cannot like Pink Floyd and punk music because the latter hated the former. I guess then that I am violating some artificial construct of the social order because I will listen to Dark Side of the Moon followed by Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death just to spite the people who say it can't be done. I suppose I could blame my upbringing.


I was born nine months after what I will simply refer to as the greatest album of all time was released (don’t read anything into that, please). I was born into a family that loved their music. Nobody played any instruments, mind you, but I grew up with stories of my grandmother dancing around to Elvis Presley (this was at a time when parents weren’t supposed to like Elvis and even find him immoral and corrupting). I feel like there was some form of music playing in the house at every waking hour, whether it was mom playing the latest music of the day by The Eagles, The Bee Gees, ABBA (gag!), or dad was listening to a new batch of oldies 45s that he picked up at one of the record conventions, including Elvis, The Beatles, Buddy Holly, or the oddball "The Flying Saucer," by Bill Buchanan and Dickie Goodman, which was story of alien invasion told using song lyrics. I would dance around the living room as a little kid in my own, weird way, just soaking up all of the music around me.


The stereo was kept in the living room, the main room of the house, which points to the importance of music to us. My brother and I shared two rooms, a bedroom and a playroom, and in the latter was a record player with a small collection of records, mostly children’s records. I say mostly because one of those records, it would turn out, was a grown-up record, The Hums of the Lovin’ Spoonful. I only remember ever playing one song off of this album, and while it might be way too overplayed to this day, especially on oldies stations, I still love “Summer in the City” and it still transports me back to those earliest days in the gold-carpeted, yellow and white checked walls, and that black, plastic record player. I think it was a GE Wildcat, thanks to Google, and I recall seeing the GE logo on the speakers, but then I also remember the Berenstain Bears being spelled with an “EI” instead of the “AI”, so don’t take my word for it.


Before I knew it, I would end up with my own music and that would start me down a road that I would never veer away from. I would find myself on a quest for more music. It's a journey that lasted...well, frankly, as I write this in my forty-second year of life, I am still on that journey. It all started with a crate that was, to me, more than a crate. It was a symbol of this journey and, while the crate sits idle, the journey continues...