Monday 27 April 2015

Crate Digging & Straight Living

When I returned from May 24 weekend, as suspected I had been informed upon. Tara's friends that were there had told her about Leah, and now the drama was unfolding. I had to explain the entire situation to her, and it took some convincing, but she eventually took my word for it and we patched things up. Besides, we'd only been dating a week or two so it's not like we had anything set in stone yet.

3 n' Pass was still gigging when we could and we were still writing music when it was feasible. We also still had our radio show on CHRY "the Sunday night experience" and some weeks we might of only seen each other on Sunday, but it was nice that it always brought us back together at the end of the week. Mike Chapman was really getting into DJing now, so he would tend to help himself to the record vault at CHRY. I was guilty as well, as I'd nip the odd record or cd from time to time, which always guaranteed the comment "sleaze" to slide from Mike's mouth, followed by our laughter.  

Speaking of records, I was still into collecting vinyl. I wasn't spending as much time in Toronto now, but when I was, I'd constantly hit up all the used record stores along Queen street west. My collection was growing too, I had to upgrade from an old milk carton to the new blue recycle bins that had only been around a few years now. I don't remember where I got my blue bin, but somebody somewhere was missing one.

I was finding a lot of records I used to own and re buying them, mainly oldschool thrash and hardcore. There was a brief time when I was hanging out at Phil's a lot with Craig, but after awhile I got sick of being a hermit. I wanted to get out and meet girls as well as hang around my other circles of friends. Unfortunately I had brought a lot of vinyl to Phil's in those days, and for some reason I left them all there. I'm not really sure why I did, perhaps it came back to the Grasshopper breakup. I felt like asking Phil for my records would give the impression that we were no longer friends, which wasn't the case.

The plus side was it didn't cost much to replace a lot of the records as I was buying them used. Originally I had paid 10-15 dollars per album, but now I was getting them for 1-5 dollars. Some of them were even variant releases that included lyrics, which my original albums never had, so that was a bonus too. Asides from the hardcore stuff, I was stumbling upon various Beastie Boys 12 inch singles, and I now owned almost everything they had ever released with the exception of the elusive "Rock Hard EP" which was almost impossible to find.

Jerry and I were still going on our Sunday drives when we could, a tradition we'd been upholding since he first got his license. Sometimes we'd goto Square One shopping centre in Mississauga, where we always seemed to discover something new. It was there that I found a Beastie's 12" I'd never seen before, it was entitled "An exciting evening at home with Shadrach Meshach and Abednago" I was broke at the time, but Jerry being the best friend that he is was willing to foot the bill until I could pay him back at a later date. This ended up being my favourite Beastie release I had heard to date. I'm pretty sure this took place before Check Your Head was released, as the single contained remixes from Paul's Boutique. I feel it was worthy of mentioning as it was and still is such an important record in my life.

During this excursion we decided to check out some of the music they had available at the listening centre. We collectively agreed to check out a band we had never heard of before, they were called Shadowfax. I really didn't even know what to categorize this music as, but we were totally digging it. Jerry decided to buy the cassette, and we listened to it for the entire ride home. Shadowfax was a blend of new age, jazz, and electronica, which was a far cry from what we'd normally listen to. Despite that, we really dug it and it was nice to open our minds to something new. I told Jer I'd like to borrow it sometime so I could dub it, but now looking back I don't think I ever actually did. Decades later I'd learn the band's name came from Lord of the Rings, it was actually the name of Gandalf's horse. 


Life was peachy. I had a great group of friends, I was still making music, and I had a new love interest. I had been graduated for exactly two years now and I hadn't worked a single job, which in turn saw my parents constantly breathing down my neck. I guess you can't really blame them. I was just too enamored with enjoying life and living the rockstar lifestyle, the only downfall being it wasn't making me any money. My mom decided to throw me in the car with her and drive around Brampton applying for jobs. 

I tried a few things out, usually through temp agencies, but most of those jobs were serious hard labour while only making half the money I should have been making. I never lasted long at these jobs, usually anywhere from a day to a week. Finally I got a call from Loeb, a brand new grocery store that was opening. I had an interview, and before I knew it I had a full time job working midnight shift in the bakery. Summer had just begun, but your narrator wasn't going to have much involvement with it...



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