Remembering the Columbia Record Club

It is often when institutions, artifacts, or practices become entirely -- or at least effectively -- defunct that we come to realize or reconsider what they had meant.  The busier our lives get, the more useful such distinct moments become as markers memorializing the meaning of the past within the ongoing present.

For me -- and for many of my generation, those who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s -- the news earlier this month that the long-moribund Columbia Record Club had filed for bankruptcy was such a moment.  As the news filtered into social media networks, many of us reminisced together, some recounting how many times they had joined the club.  For my part -- and that's mostly what this post will be about below -- I was reminded of how taking advantage of the club's offer played such an important role early on in building my metal collection.

The Scene of the Past: Metal Albums 40 Years Back

Among the seemingly endless listicles and galleries the VH1 website regularly churns out, one caught my eye a week or so ago -- finding its way into my Facebook stream, if I remember rightly -- a gallery that takes us back into the years before metal becomes a self-conscious movement, and has yet to extricate itself from the closely aligned and still more vague genre of "hard rock":  20 Classic Metal Albums Turning 40 in 2015.

Perhaps it's because I'm myself near to the midpoint of my own 40s that this retrospective -- among so many others -- got me ruminating as I clicked through the albums picked out by the VH1 writers.  I can say that my friends and I quite literally grew up as teens with classic metal in the 1980s, and became excited in  our childhoods by bands in the 1970s we didn't even realize might form part of a broader and deeper musical movement -- formative years for sensibilities and imaginations.  Of course, our generation could have that experience precisely because an earlier generation had been over the previous decade gradually feeling their way -- some more deliberately and consistently, others almost by happenstance or experimentation towards sounds that embodied and incorporated elements that would turn out to be central in later metal music.

Identity and Alterity: Why We Can't Really See Some Bands That Still Exist

My wife and I are always on the lookout for nearby tour dates for classic metal acts -- and we've been pretty fortunate in recent years, actually, since quite a few come to the Tri-State area.  In the last several years, we've been to a whole host of classic acts -- Iron Maiden, Judas Priest (twice), Motorhead, KISS (twice), Megadeth, Raven, Accept, UDO, Thin Lizzy, Motley Crue, and Alice Cooper.  And, back in our younger days -- our teens and twenties, before we got together -- there's a whole host of other bands which we saw independently, with our respective friends.

There's some groups -- the Scorpions for example -- who I saw back in the 1980s (at a Monsters of Rock show), but who my wife has never seen on stage, and as we were thinking about who might still be touring and who we might try to get tickets for in the coming year, she said something rather paradoxical to me.  "It's too bad that we can't really see the Scorpions."  What she meant by that isn't that we couldn't sometime purchase tickets to see them when they wind up back over here in the USA -- that's certainly possible -- but rather that it long ago became impossible to see the band whose music we came to love back in the heyday of classic metal -- the 1980s.

Recomendations: Metal Killers Kollection

In some ways, I grew up at just the right time to appreciate at least two of the waves of development of heavy metal.  I was born in the year of the moonwalk -- the real, not dance-step one -- in 1970, so that placed me in my formative years as a kid in the meadows, kettles, and moraines of southeastern Wisconsin, while perhaps not in the right place, certainly in a good position to get exposed to classic bands like KISS and AC/DC by radioplay and albums in the 1970s -- something I'll write another post about later on -- and then to be present in the early and mid-80s, as a teenager, when successive waves of metal were washing over the midwest from multiple locations -- both coasts, England, Germany, and Japan.

Again, this is an experience I want to explore thematically and in more detail in further posts -- one of the main ways I actually came in contact with (to me) new bands, albums, and songs was through poring through and occasionally purchasing from discount bins of records and tapes in stores like Target, K-Mart, and even Farm-and-Fleet (and when we vacationed in the panhandle of Florida, a Walmart).  One of them -- I got it in the spring of 1986, and listened to it over and over for weeks -- was a 2-tape compilation, the first volume of Metal Killers Kollection.  And it was mindblowing. . . .

10 Great Classic Metal Bassists: What Makes for Greatness?

As with any sort of highly positive qualifier -- "supreme," "top-notch," "greatest" and so on -- the quickest and most cursory of internet searches uncovers dozens of lists (not all of which would necessarily qualify as "great" themselves).  There's Metal Descent's Top Ten Most Recognizable Heavy Metal Bassists, Heavy Metal Time Machine's Top Ten Bass Players,  Gears of Rock's Top Ten Metal Bassists of All Time -- there's even more specialized lists like Metalholic's Top 12 Female Hard Rock/Metal Bassists 2013.

Interestingly, you see quite a few now-iconic metal bassists make their way into less genre-focused lists like Ultimate Guitar's Top 10 Bassists of All Time -- which includes a few proto-metal band's long-axemen (Cream's Jack Bruce, for example).  Steve Harris and Cliff Burton often jockey for position as the top-number metal representatives on these sorts of lists -- and rightly so, I think.  In fact, I've been doing quite a bit of thinking off and on, not so much about these sorts of lists, but of just what qualifies a bassist as being genuinely "great" -- not just good, competent, a contributor to his or her band, their songs, and their sound -- but someone outstanding, of a clearly superlative rank.  Those musings have had me assembling a list of my own -- one restricted, understandably enough, to  bass heroes of the core of metal, the now-classic, dynamic forms it assumed and spilled over into during the 1970s and 1980s.

"Define" Heavy Metal, You Say?

You'll notice that, at first, it looks like I've placed the quotation marks in the wrong places in the title of this entry.  But, no. . .  they're set around just the right term -- define.  You'll see, or rather read, why momentarily.  First though, a bit of back-story.

I would say that one of the words I hear most often from non-philosophers in early-on conversations with philosophers, almost always placed in the interrogative is "define," as in "now, how would you define. . . ?" or "what's your definition of . . . ?" or "can you define. . . .?"  Occasionally, most often I'd say in student papers, I end up seeing the indicative ". . .  is defined as . . .  according to the . . . .   dictionary/encyclopedia/my uncle Jake, etc."

I don't hear "definition" pop up all that often when philosophers are plying their trade, teaching, or talking amongst themselves.  Why is that, you might wonder?  Well, although we hale from a profession and tradition that gets a good early start with Socrates wandering around asking people for definitions of key concepts, like virtue, justice, knowledge, and so on. . .  most of us have come to realize -- one way or another -- just how difficult it can be to provide adequate definitions for any really interesting concept, experience, phenomenon.  "Give me a definition of. . . "  You demand that in many philosophical circles, and they rightly peg you as right off the bus, really or just ironically naive, or as playing at debater's tricks