Cheap Kiss Records

Note: I recently wrote this article as part of a neighborhood magazine and thought I'd include it as a blog entry on my website.  These guys are class acts working for a great record store.

If you spot a Toyota Venza with the license plate “I BY VYNL” whizzing around the west suburbs of Chicago, consider introducing yourself to Chris (Grey) Ellensohn, who – along with business partner Pete Kuehl – owns Cheap Kiss Records, a store that’s dedicated to buying and selling vinyl and cultivating a love for music for the next generation.  Ellensohn and Kuehl want the world to know: records are still a thing. 

Yes, records, as in those black twelve-inch platters whose grooves contain the stuff of magic.  You may not be one yourself, but chances are you know someone who’s into albums or who laments the collection he traded away for a couple of cases of beer back in the late 80s.  Vinyl is making a serious comeback these days, and now accounts for about twenty percent of revenue for physical recorded music formats, and Cheap Kiss is part of the reason.

Chris, who by day works at Northwestern Mutual, started the business with Kuehl ten years ago after winning an eBay auction to purchase Platterpus Records out of Louisville, KY.  They changed names to Cheap Kiss Records in 2012 and now have two stores: one at Cornerstone Books in Villa Park and another in Glenview at the Rock House, along with a regular inventory at a Schaumburg warehouse where they conduct on-line business and frequent warehouse sales.

What does a normal day look like in the glamorous world of buying and selling vinyl?  Today, Chris is going to meet with an elderly man who purports to own somewhere around 5000 LPs, all in mint condition.  Will it pan out?  You never know.  Chris’s favorite moment is knocking on a would-be seller’s door, because at that point all things are possible.  Sorting through a few boxes of musty LPs might just lead to something amazing, like the time Chris found a copy of an album by the local metal band Amethyst, the most expensive record either Chris or Pete has ever sold.

When approaching a would-be seller, Ellensohn is quick to empathize.  “We understand that albums can be emotional.”  Sometimes a seller can’t pull the trigger, and that’s okay.  “They know that when the time comes, I’ll be here.”

Chris claims he can spot a vinyl collector in just a few seconds.  What are the qualifications?  “Typically a male, age forty to sixty, sporting a concert t-shirt and no females within fifteen feet.”  All joking aside, there’s a certain air that vinyl collectors share, and it’s one that Ellensohn knows well he says because he’s “one of them.”   

“You meet all sort of cool people, actually,” and he meets them in all sort of places.  Chris isn’t a shy guy, and he’s happily approached people at gas stations or concerts to inquire about their interest in vinyl.  At a pop-up sale at the Arcada Theatre last month, Pete and Chris met a woman in her sixties who regaled them with stories about her concert-going days, when she witnessed The Beatles at Comiskey Park and a double bill featuring The Who and The Kinks. 

Chris and Pete don’t have a goal of amassing copious amounts of records – their aim is more virtuous than that.  They view buying and selling vinyl as a way of repurposing LPs and keeping them out of landfills and on people’s turntables.  “We want records to be listened to,” says Chris.  “Vinyl is meant to be played.  It does no good sitting in an attic somewhere.” 

And what about vinyl as a medium in a world in which streaming services can provide almost any song at the touch of a button?  Chris is reminded of something a young woman once told him: “You should have to work for something this good.”  Just as sharing a playlist isn’t nearly as meaningful as creating the mixtapes you once compiled for old flames, vinyl helps the listener connect to the music in ways that streaming can’t.

On April 21st Cheap Kiss Records will host Record Store Day at their Cornerstone Books location.

Elton John's Long-Ass Tour

It’s a pretty ballsy move for a 70-year-old to announce a three-year tour. Will Elton John hang in there long enough to reach the finish line of his farewell tour in 2021? And for a guy who’s calling it a day because he needs “to dedicate more time to raising” his children, isn’t he sort of blowing off the next three years in that department? I’ll refrain from judging further and bank on him to at least make it to 2019, as I laid down significant cash to see him next February, by far the biggest lead-time I've ever allowed for a concert. I haven’t really been a fan of his music since the mid-80s, and I’m attending the concert mostly because Elton John was an essential component to my musical upbringing, by far the most influential artist in my formative years. (Also, he’s performing twenty minutes from my house.) The soundtrack of my youth includes much of his early output, and I fondly recall purchasing his first greatest hits collection at the local K-Mart during a snowstorm in the winter of 1980, soon followed by a piano book that inspired my piano playing for the next several years.

But generally, Elton lost me after 1984’s Breaking Hearts, the follow-up to his surprise comeback a year earlier and the last album that featured his falsetto voice, nailing it on songs like “Burning Buildings” and the title track, and balancing the ballads nicely with gritty songs like “Restless” and “Who Wears These Shoes?” After this release, he sailed off a cliff into adult contemporary schlock, still able to churn out a beautiful melody and occasionally compose a gem – the song “Believe” from Made in England is a standout – but generally wading in the calm, safe waters of Disney and VH1. I stayed away and didn’t purchase another album of his until just recently, when I added Ice on Fire and Leather Jackets just to round out my vinyl collection, but I say it with authority: both of those albums blow.

I saw Elton on that tour of 1984. The French hornist from my high school band drove me and my buddies Kurt and Mike to East Troy, Wisconsin, where Elton performed at Alpine Valley Music Theatre, opening with “Tiny Dancer” and “Levon” before flash-forwarding to his current releases. A beautiful woman in an evening dress stood in front of us, and during the song “Blue Eyes” she gushed with excitement, strolled all the way to the front of the aisle and tossed a bouquet of roses onto the stage. Later, when Elton picked up the bouquet, she started weeping. He didn’t have quite the same effect on me, but I liked the show, though the benefit of hindsight and live recordings from that time show that it wasn’t Elton at his best. He was aided tremendously by the return of his classic band of Nigel Olsson, Davey Johnstone and Dee Murray, but the addition of a synth player Fred Mandell, who layered cheesy string to just about every other song, was a detriment, and Elton yielded a bad attitude, announcing at one point that they would play songs from Too Low For Zero, and that they might as well “get them over with.”  Nonetheless, it was Elton at the end of his purest voice, and I’m glad to have seen him before he had to change keys and employ numerous backup singers to handle the high notes of his 70s recordings. 

Since then, I’ve been tempted to see him numerous times, but something kept telling me to let him go and not witness his decline. I was ready to pull the trigger three years ago here in Chicago, but car trouble kept me from following through. Alas, he opened up with “Funeral for a Friend,” and my brother who attended the show said that song alone was worth the price of admission.

So now I’m in.  Or…I’m in a year from now.  Here’s hoping the piano player can hang in there for at least another.  And here’s hoping that this almost-fifty piano player can too. You never know.

What Genesis Should Have Become

In 1997, while my wife and I tried to figure out how to take care of a pair of week-old infants, a little album by a big band was released: Calling All Stations by Genesis. Phil Collins had announced a year earlier that he was leaving the band, and upon hearing the news I was as excited as I was surprised. I was, and still am, an unabashed fan of the Collins-era Genesis – you’ll get no “there is no Genesis without Peter Gabriel” rant from me – but I also felt like Collins’s absence provided an opportunity for keyboardist Tony Banks to really shine again the way he had from the mid-70s to the early 80s. Banks was the glue that held the whole band together anyhow in my opinion, so it mattered little if a different singer joined the group, and I felt that Genesis had taken the pure pop element of its journey about as far as it could go. It was time to redirect, not only musically, but as a live act. Time to go back to mid-sized theaters and reinvent a set list that had become somewhat stale.

I had reason to be optimistic, as just five years earlier Banks had released a solo album that – predictably – went nowhere, but was so damn good that I couldn’t wait for him to release similar material under the Genesis moniker. His 1992 release, Still, is a gem, and I was practically giddy when I found a used vinyl copy for six dollars last summer.  

(note: many websites state that Still was released in 1991, and the album itself is copyrighted that year, but I stand by Amazon’s April 14, 1992 release date as I distinctly remember listening to the album while working at Musicland in Brookfield, Wisconsin that spring. Then again, my memory has been known to fail me.)

Still may not be a perfect album – it has an unfortunate sax solo in the opening track – but for a project that recruited five different singers it’s unexpectedly consistent, all the while accommodating Banks’s flare for unpredictable harmonic changes within songs that are largely “pop” in essence. Take tracks like “Red Day on Blue Street” or “I Wanna Change the Score," both co-written by Nik Kershaw of “Wouldn’t It Be Good” fame. Both songs have a pop feel to them, but their chord changes are worlds away from simple I, IV, V progressions. Making the complex accessible is a gift that Banks had been cultivating for twenty years – ever try learning the song “Me and Sarah Jane”? How he came up with those changes boggles the mind – and Still is a great addition to that trend, as he combines pop elements, darker themes (“Angel Face”) complex ballads (“Still It Takes Me By Surprise”) and a touch of prog rock (“Another Murder of a Day”) into one surprisingly strong album.

Four years later, Banks and fellow Genesis alum Mike Rutherford were in need of a new singer, and since Kershaw had made such a great contribution both vocally and compositionally to Still, I wonder now if he was ever considered. It would have been an interesting call. Instead, they recruited Ray Wilson, who did a fine job with the material on Calling All Stations, but the material was unfortunately week. By the time Wilson joined the band, Rutherford and Banks had already co-written an entire album’s worth of music, and the songs are light-years away from what Banks had recorded just a half a decade earlier. It’s a dark, plodding, lifeless mess with embarrassing lyrics and nary a hook to be found. It’s also a whopping sixty-seven minutes long! Why Banks and Rutherford thought that after hiring a new singer their fans would enjoy being overwhelmed with over an hour’s worth of music is a question for the ages.

To make matters worse, Genesis planned a massive tour of large venues as if nothing had changed in the intervening years since the last tour. Banks later said in the book, Genesis: Chapter and Verse, “We started downsizing the venues. We were getting sales in places like Columbus, Ohio…of twenty tickets. We had to cancel the US leg of the tour.”

And the tour they did perform in Europe included the foolhardy decision to perform tracks that were inextricably linked to the band's former singer: songs like “Land of Confusion,” “Hold on my Heart,” “Mama” and “Follow You, Follow Me.” This was a missed opportunity, as a better call would have been to perform songs that hadn’t been performed before or hadn’t been in years. I believe that Wilson would have sounded great on tracks like “Blood on the Rooftops,” “Deep in the Motherlode” and “Man of Our Times.” Instead he had to sing “Invisible Touch.” What were they thinking?

Rutherford has admitted that the new lineup needed time to cultivate. In 2007 he said to Innerviews, "I'm aware of how we could have improved the next album. I would have brought in someone else to co-write with us. I think Calling All Stations was lacking in some areas, so I think the second album would have been much better."

That may be so, but the reality is that Genesis already had the tools needed to make a good album. They had Banks. And Banks should have been the driving force with the possible aid of a singer with a pop sensibility like Nik Kershaw. Unfortunately, the new lineup never got a chance for a sophomore effort. By the late 90s Rutherford and Banks weren’t so keen on releasing an album every other year and touring in between. They were well into their forties with families and it was time to pull the plug.

But Still is “still” in my regular rotation, and one can only wonder what might have been had Banks and Rutherford gone a different direction back in 1997.

Are Spine-tingling Musical Discoveries Over?

Robert Plant recently said of the constant request to reunite Led Zeppelin, “magazines and internet platforms should be supporting new music” rather than clamoring for reunions. A fair argument for a man who fronted the band over thirty-seven years ago (with a few one-off reunions since). His retort inspired me to investigate his recent output, and I’m listening to his latest album, “Carry Fire,” as I write this. And it’s fine. It might even be good. Plant has proven to be among the most versatile vocalists in rock history, but there’s nothing about his new music that’s shaking me down to my soul, imploring me to listen. 

It’s not Plant’s fault. Creating something that screams “this is something you HAVE to hear” is getting harder and harder to achieve, and I’m beginning to think that music has largely played itself out. Everything that you’re able to accomplish using 12 tones has been achieved (check out The Guardian's article, Has Pop Finally Run Out of Tunes.). Classical music hit a wall in the 20th Century, giving way to Dixieland and jazz, giving way to blues and folk, giving way to simple rock followed by prog rock, breaking back down to punk, post-punk, new wave, giving way to rap and hip hop, electronic, etc. This isn’t to say that there isn’t good music being written and performed today – in fact, I’d argue that there may be more good music today than at anytime on the planet, simply because there’s SO MUCH to choose from – but I doubt that many current acts are breaking any new ground. I’m currently rehearsing songs for my tenth album, and while I truly like the compositions and think it’s going to end up sounding great, I’d be a moron to think that any of it is particularly inventive and not leaning heavily on influences of other artists.

“Ah-hah” moments – those spine-tingling revelations that grab you by the collar and assault you emotionally – happen few and far between for me these days, but they DO happen once in a while, most times in the car where most of my new music listening occurs. In 1980 Rush sang about radio’s “magic at your fingers,” and for me, this has certainly been the case, as I can recall several "Ah hah” moments in transit:

2016:  Heading north on York Road in Elmhurst, returning home from volunteering at a food bank, I tuned into WDCB playing “Porcupine Dreams” by the Danny Green Trio. It blew me away. I’ve written since about Green’s stellar album, Altered Narratives, but it bears repeating: listen to this recording!

2011:  In the parking lot at the mini-golf on Lake Street in Addison, I waited for my son to leave a birthday party when “Rolling in the Deep” by Adelle came on WXRT. Say what you want about Adelle, but the gal has chops. This song grabbed me by the gut and didn’t let go.

2009:  Driving to drop off the kids at Hebrew school on a Wednesday afternoon, WXRT played “Oscar Wilde” by a local band called Company of Thieves. Holy crap. Intelligent, sultry, angry, rocking, enticing - everything that I want in a song was there, and all in under five minutes.

1999: On my way to kill some time with my girls on a cold winter’s day, I took some extra time in the Lehigh Valley Mall parking lot as the disc jockey of Muhlenberg College’s WMUH played a song by a woman singing the lyric “I can’t breathe” over an infectious drum loop and haunting Rhodes keyboard. Unfortunately, this was pre-smart phone, so I jotted down what I could remember about the song and what time it was played. Upon returning home I called the radio station, by which time a classical guy was manning the radio booth. He was kind enough to go back to the previous jockey's song log and start rattling off song titles, eventually coming to the title “Here with Me” by an artist named Dido. That was it! One of the best songs of the 1990s. 

1995: After flying into Detroit, I borrowed my brother’s car to drive to Grand Rapids for a friend’s wedding, and on the way a very angry woman spouted off venomous words to a former lover. I needn’t have jotted down the song title or the woman’s name the way I did, as the song “You Oughta Know” by Alanis Morissette consumed the airwaves for the next six months and beyond. It was a game changer, and it was evident upon first listen.

1995: Just six months after the revelation of Alanis, I heard the pounding piano, falsetto voices and witty, sardonic lyrics of Ben Folds Five. Driving with my handheld recorder that I used to quickly document song ideas, I pressed record in case the DJ of WXPN didn’t announce the artist and song right away. I still own the tape today of the fantastic final thirty seconds of “Underground.” Four years later I was recording my own songs that were directly linked to that revealing day driving around in my crappy Dodge Neon.

Lately, I've been tuning into classical radio when I'm in the car. The songs I’m hearing on XRT are predictable and lifeless. The songs on classic rock radio are overplayed and cumbersome. Jazz on WDCB is hit and miss. But classical often provides the challenge my ears are searching for, something I wouldn’t have predicted just a few years ago. 

Where music goes from here is open to debate, but there will always be opportunities to discover “ah hah” moments - if not from new artists, then retroactively. Leaning on the familiar denies the spark of insight and emotional intensity that the soul seeks. Keep searching and once in a while you may find it.

The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock

David Weigel’s book The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock traces the arc of a semi-vague movement in rock history, devoting a good deal of space to the usual suspects of Yes, Genesis, Rush, Emerson Lake and Palmer, King Crimson, etc., while highlighting various bands who may have fallen under the radar for some listeners (me, for instance). If nothing else, the book provides a jumping off point to discover new music, but unless you’ve already submerged wholeheartedly into the waters of 20-minute long epics, this book will not wade you in gradually via the shallow end and let you get used to the temperature. You’re getting thrown into the deep end and will likely drown.

Weigel doesn’t hand-hold, so that when he delves into the history of chaps named Daevid Allen and Robert Wyatt – two people I had never heard of – he doesn’t give the reader the benefit of context. In the hands of a better writer, I would have expected a brief “…who would later form Soft Machine…” No such luck. Mercifully, a few pages later he applies this technique for Michael Giles, as “…the future drummer of King Crimson.”

But until the Weigel anchors the reader firmly in the 1970s and the bands that gained traction, the book is a bit of a mess, devoting a page to one band, then a page to another, so that it’s hard to find one’s bearings. The promising prologue is the only thing that kept me turning the page at first, but once we reached 1970, I was all in, finishing the book in just over a day (which, for me, is quite an accomplishment).

Once again, I had my handy streaming service next to me throughout the reading of this book, playing hours of music to see if any music struck a chord. Recognizing that I didn’t give compositions the same chance I would have had I shelled out $7.99 for an LP in 1980, here are some of my hasty conclusions:

1)     I hadn’t considered Procol Harum a prog rock band, and really, I hadn’t considered them at all. But after streaming through half an album, I’ve decided that I need to investigate them more fully (I'm listening to them as I write this blog). Aside from their breakout hit, “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” I have no clue, but I like what I’ve heard thus far.

2)     The funnest fact I learned was that the vocal/organ line of Yes’s 20-minute epic “Ritual” was sampled for a song by De La Soul called “The Grind Date.” Now THAT was something Jon Anderson couldn’t have foreseen back in 1973 as critics were panning the double album, Tales from Topographic Oceans (one of Yes’s best).

3)     The prog rock bands that hit the big time were likely the best, so give a hand to the masses for taste. I listened for a while to Soft Machine, Van der Graaf Generator, Gong, etc., and more modern bands like Porcupine Tree and Dream Theater, and none of them grabbed me.

4)     Given the inclusion of Gong, I was surprised that 10cc wasn’t given a brief shout-out, as the quirky nature of the music is similar. Styx too is mentioned only in passing on page 214, a little surprising given the content of their first several albums.

5)     Two additional bands that I’d like to investigate more are Hatfield and the North, and Gentle Giant. My ears perked up for both and I’ll need to add them to the list along with Procol Harum.

6)     A great deal of space is devoted to Robert Fripp, from his King Crimson output to his work with Brian Eno, David Bowie, Peter Gabriel and Daryl Hall, and I found both the man and his music to be insufferable. I’m not a fan of Bowie’s Heroes and Gabriel’s second album, and last night I listened to the Daryl Hall release Sacred Songs – terrible. And then I found a King Crimson concert recorded just last June from the Chicago Theater – a concert I actually considered going to until I learned that neither Bill Bruford nor Adrian Belew would be on stage – and I’m so glad I saved my cash. Aside from the song “Three of a Perfect Pair,” I guess I’m simply not a Fripp fan.

7)     As a vinyl purchaser, I’ve occasionally had a Jethro Tull album in hand before placing it back in the record bin (they tend to be pricey). After listening to Thick as a Brick in its entirety, I think I’m going to pass on this band. Aside from a few songs, they aren't my cup of tea. However, I have to give Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull a bit of a shout-out, as his 1980 description of why prog rock went out of favor is spot on:

Ten years ago, there was a great deal more flexibility and freedom both in radio programming and in terms of the record company policy, as to what they would take a chance on.

I agree, but the rise of the Internet and home recording studios of course changes all of that. As connoisseurs we can listen to anything we want whenever we want, and I imagine that aside from the terrible metrics that Pandora uses to crap out the same old shit time and time again, there has got to be access to interesting, innovative music at everyone’s fingertips. The trick is finding it. If I put in a Yes song in Pandora and press play, I’ll get the usual Genesis, Kansas, Styx and Rush – nothing that exposes me to interesting bands I’ve never heard of, including many of the bands explored in Weigel’s book. But I suspect if I were 20 years-old and cared more, I would find the music I was longing for.

For the time being, I’m going to go backward and explore some of the bands I missed the first time around. And then I’m going to put on Close to the Edge. Because really, it doesn’t get any better than that.