My Favorite Music

Favorite Songs

1. Surf's Up - The Beach Boys
2. Oh Candy - Cheap Trick
3. More Than A Feeling - Boston
4. Escape - Alice Cooper
5. I Was Made for Lovin' You - Kiss
6. Say It Isn't So - The Outfield
7. Just What I Needed - The Cars
8. (Just Like) Livin' In Paradise - David Lee Roth
9. Stacey's Mom - Fountains of Wayne
10. Another Nail for My Heart - Squeeze
11. Everyday I Write the Book - Elvis Costello
12. Hopes Go Astray - The Northern Pikes
13. The Ballad of El Goodo - Big Star
14. Reactionary Girl - Robin Zander
15. Heart & Soul - Huey Lewis and the News
16. Life On Mars? - David Bowie
17. Baba O'Reilly - The Who
18. New York Groove - Ace Frehley
19. Saturday Gigs - Mott the Hoople
20. Dear Prudence - The Beatles
21. Bat Out of Hell - Meat Loaf
22. On the Border - Eagles
23. Do Ya - The Move
24. So Lonely - The Police
25. Cruel To Be Kind - Nick Lowe
26. Hurricane - Bob Dylan
27. Come Sail Away - Styx
28. Brick - Ben Folds Five
29. Maggie May - Rod Stewart
30. Remember - Nilsson
31. The Soft Parade - The Doors
32. Armageddon - Prism
33. Pinch Me - Barenaked Ladies
34. 2-4-6-8 Motorway - Tom Robinson Band
35. Saturday Night - Bay City Rollers
36. Overnight Sensation - The Rasperberries
37. Love is Like Oxygen - Sweet
38. Your Imagination - Brian Wilson
39. Babe - Jack Green
40. Joining a Fan Club - Jellyfish
41. Rosalita (Come Out Tonight) - Bruce Springsteen
42. American Girl - Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers
43. Beach Baby - First Class
44. Girlfriend - Matthew Sweet
45. Don't Bring Me Down - E.L.O.
46. Hidin' From Love - Bryan Adams
47. Airport - The Motors
48. Peaches - The Presidents of the United States of America
49. Scenes from An Italian Restauraunt - Billy Joel
50. Live and Let Die - Paul McCartney & Wings
51. Pen Pals - Sloan
52. Carry on Wayward Son - Kanas
53. Levon - Elton John
54. Everytime I Think of You - The Babys
55. Hetrosexual Man - The Odds
56. New Mistake - Jellyfish
57. Heat of the Moment - Asia
58. Fell in Love - Moxy Fruvous
59. So You Are A Star - The Hudson Brothers
60. Bang A Gong - Power Station
61. I Believe in a Thing Called Love - The Darkness
62. Rusty Cage - Johnny Cash
63. Sail Away - Randy Newman
64. The Cowboy Song - Thin Lizzy
65. Don't Play Your Rock'n'Roll to Me - Smokie
66. Shootout on the Plantation - Leon Russell
67. Girls Talk - Dave Edmunds
68. Looking out for Number One - Bachman Turner Overdrive
69. We Gotta Get You a Woman - Todd Rundgren
70. My Sharona - The Knack
71. American Pie - Don McClean
72. Hold Back the Rain - Duran Duran
73. Xanadu - Jeff Lynne
74. Follow Me - Jason Falkner
75. Brain Damage/Eclipse - Pink Floyd
76. Shannon - Henry Gross
77. At The Hundredth Merdian - The Tragically Hip
78. She May Call You Up Tonight - The Left Banke
79. Rock Me Gently - Andy Kim
80. Johnny B. Rotten - The Monks
81. Underground - Men At Work
82. Sky High - Jigsaw
83. Is She Really Going Out With Him? - Joe Jackson
84. Tusk - Fleetwood Mac
85. It's a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock'n'Roll) - AC/DC
86. Helpless - Sugar
87. Na Na Na - Cozy Powell
88. Alone Again, Naturally - Gilbert O' Sullivan
89. If You Could Read My Mind - Gordon Lightfoot
90. Have Another Drink - The Kinks
91. Taxi - Harry Chapin
92. If You Leave Me Now - Chicago
93. Girls with Guns - Tommy Shaw
94. This Beat Goes On/Switchin' to Glide - The Kings
95. The Girl Most Likely - Greg Kihn
96. Raise A Little Hell - Trooper
97. Dance - Queen City Kids
98. Somewhere Only We Know - Keane
99. Hang On to Your Ego - Frank Black
100. Epic - Faith No More

Favorite Albums

1. Destroyer - Kiss
2. Heaven Tonight - Cheap Trick
3. Boston - Boston
4. From The Inside - Alice Cooper
5. Rockin' the Suburbs - Ben Folds
6. Author Unknown - Jason Falkner
7. #1 Record/Radio City - Big Star
8. Spilt Milk - Jellyfish
9. Gordon - Barenaked Ladies
10. Skyscraper - David Lee Roth
11. Pet Sounds - The Beach Boys
12. Bargainville - Moxy Fruvous
13. Nilsson Schmilsson - Nilsson
14. Snow in June - The Northern Pikes
15. Jailbreak - Thin Lizzy
16. The Wall - Pink Floyd
17. Volume 1 - The Traveling Wilburies
18. This Year's Model - Elvis Costello
19. Traffic and Weather- Fountains of Wayne
20. Into the Great Wide Open - Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers

Favourite Box Sets

1. Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of the Beach Boys - The Beach Boys
2. Sex, America and Cheap Trick - Cheap Trick
3. Playback - Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
4. Message In a Box Set - The Police
5. The Kiss Box Set - Kiss
6. The Life and Crimes of Alice Cooper - Alice Cooper
7. Thirty Years of Maximum R&B - The Who
8. Shine On - Pink Floyd
9. Flashback - The Electric Light Orchestra
10. The Byrds Box Set - The Byrds

Favorite Greatest Hits Collections

1. The Best of Sweet - Sweet
2. 1962-1966/1967-1970 - The Beatles
3. Greatest Hits - Mott the Hoople
4. Basher: The Best of Nick Lowe - Nick Lowe
5. Alice Cooper's Greatest Hits - Alice Cooper
6. Greatest Hits Volume I and II - Billy Joel
7. Greatest Hits - The Cars
8. Changesonebowie - David Bowie
9. Greatest Hits - Queen
10. Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy - The Who

The Superstar

Confession time: when I was 14, I used to take the cushions off our couch, and I would "professionally wrestle" them.

I did this while wearing a set of navy blue sweats with a pair of pink swimming trunks over top. (The pink trunks were originally white, but had been washed in the wrong temperature with colors.)

I was attempting to look like this guy:

I think I ended up looking more like this guy:

Albeit, my bulge was more pronounced. ;)

-------------------------------------

So why did I do this?

Was I acting out my inner rage?

I was never a tough guy. Outside of the occasional fights with my brother & and the controversial Chris Eisler/"I'm going to cut your hair in the parking lot of the Circle K" showdown of late '87 (Don't ask!) ... I never fought.

I'm sure being 130 pounds had something to do with it.

Not that I didn't have my share of run-ins.

I drew the ire of Shane Lorencz in gym class one day for some rough fouls during in a basketball game.

(I hated getting pushed around in gym class. Once pushed around, I immediately resorted to poor sportsmanship. Even as an adult. Ask the guy from Business "D" who suffered the wrath of my obviously wide slide during a SIAST softball tournament. I went by him with slide that half resembled a chorus girl performing for Bob Fosse. )

I remember another guy in my 9th grade class who wanted to fight me. I don't remember his name off the top of my head, or why he wanted to fight ... but I do remember that I waited for him outside after class, and he walked right by me like he forgot about it.

I think he realized it was a lose-lose situation: if he won, nobody would care; if he lost, he'd have the infamy of losing to Mr. 130 Pounds on his head. I also remember that he was a huge Huey Lewis fan - and a "Hip to Be Square/Doing It All For My Baby"-era Huey Lewis fan at that; so his toughness may have been in question as well.

I did have the occasional bouts with bullies. In Grade 9, my brother's friend Kim Fransen, a senior, once whipped me with a Twizzler so hard, that it left licorice shaped welts on my arm for days.

Another Grade 9 incident involved a guy by the name of Ed Begonia. Ed used to arm punch me, or push my stuff on the floor. One day I got pissed and shoved back. Ed stopped after that, I think in part, because he wasn't so much of bully as he just seemed like a guy who wanted friends, and just had a weird way of showing it. (Makes me sad thinking about it. Or maybe he was just an *sshole.)

Honestly, I believe that I dressed in stylish ring attire and performed such diverse moves as the "Dive Bomber" and "The Slap Jack" because I identified with wrestling.

Not the fighting and the violence.

No, I identified with the performing.

It was never "real" to me. It was an art form.

Laugh if you want, but pro-wrestling is ballet and physical comedy on the fly. It's co-ordinated but rarely choreographed. Wrestlers plan "high spots" like the finish and big moments in advance, but they also ebb and flow as the match occurs. (Imagine Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers making up a dance as it went along.)

I never doubted it that it was entertainment, but I also never doubted that it was athletic and took a certain skill level that no other "legitimate sport" has.

Wrestling goes in trends. It's hot topic one minute, and the next, it's blamed for all of society's ills.

I grew up watching Chris Benoit. He wrestled on the first live card I ever saw in Regina, at the Exhibition Auditorium. I remember after the show getting Owen Hart's autograph. He and Chris Benoit seemed not much taller than I did, and they both looked worlds away from the WWF.

When all the stuff about Benoit started last year, it did make me take a moment to review whether this was something I should be supporting. (I did the same thing when Owen Hart died.) The drugs, the constant physical damage and the real life violence seems too much to take at times. It can be vulgar, silly and offensively xenophobic. (Hilariously, at one point, Canadians were the bad guys.)

However, here's my theory. Sports, entertainment, literature and arts in general are one of the only areas in life where you can really express yourself. Not all of us can play a violin or paint the Sistine Chapel, so for some their theories on life are better expressed in somebody else's 3 minute pop song or in the joy of watching athletic ambition fulfilled.

I know that a lot of this sounded hooey-phooey psycho-babble from a douche-bag who dressed up in swim trunks and tight sweats as a teenager and delivered "The Hot Shot" to a sofa cushion, but I learned a lot from the behind the scenes and inner workings of the professional wrestling business.

I learned about the value of finding your own niche. Not everybody is 6 foot 4 and 250 pounds. Not everybody has an IQ of 180. Not everybody has a full head of hair. But to find out who you are and what your passions are and how you can make something of yourself is a prototype I've seen in hundreds of people who are living their dreams.

I learned about the value of putting everything you have into your art. I heard the stories of wrestler Dynamite Kid, who performed the same way at a community center in Red Deer, Alberta in 1978 that he did in front of a world wide pay-per-view audience almost ten years later. I spent seven years shooting and editing and treating everyday like a performance whether it was in Minot or for the national news.

I learned that nobody else is going to do it for you.

I learned that the gift of entertainment is a fabulous thing.

I learned that there's comedy in everything.

I learned hink that failure happens to everybody, and that you have to make your own second chances. I've read biographies of wrestlers who reached the top of the mountain, only to get pushed off. They started all over again, and climbed to even higher heights than they ever dreamed. Been there ... going to do that in the future.

I also learned that life is a career, and it's something that you have to work on.

Well, I gotta go. I think I'm going to take on my wife for the Heavyweight title.

The Bro

1990. Skinny leather tie with zipper. Stylishly fluffy hair. Waif-ish good looks. Youth truly is wasted on the young.

The folks in this picture ... from left to right ... are Chris O'Donnell (not the actor), Fabian Cascante, Pat Amon and me.

Almost 18 years later, Chris and I still are best of friends. He lives in Alberta, and daily deserves strong emotional punishment for his poor choice. ;)

It's hard to condense 20 years of friendship into a handful of paragraphs. In someways, we were polar opposites: Chris - a trumpet playing basket-baller, with an undying love for cars, Iron Maiden, fishing and the code of friendship; me- a skinny, nonathletic, KISS-loving ladies man, with an intricate knowledge of baseball, pro-wrestling, 70's television shows, and glam rock. (I kid on the ladies man thing.)

We had differing philosophies on many things - Chris believed in quality over quantity, the necessity to stay out as late as you wanted, and he pioneered the concept of "Bro's before ho's" long before "Bro's before ho's" had it's name. (I don't know how to write this phrase without apostrophes. Otherwise it looks like this - Bros before Hos. Which makes it read like Bross before Hoss. Which brings to mind ...

However, I bet that these guys firmly believed in Bro's before Ho's as well.)

Me, I loved a good value - especially when it applied to used records and books. I had to be home at 1:00, or my mother paced the floors and called people's parents. And while I believed in Bro's, I also liked the Ho's.

Not that we didn't have bonding topics - politics, the Saskatchewan Roughriders, Canadian entertainers, the work of the Traveling Wilburies.

We also shared a love of 70's culture and 80's heavy metal. Chris was the type of guy who understood where "Dyno-mite!" came from. (Remember that this was Canada and "Good Times" wasn't necessarily a big show.) We spent hours reviewing his record and tape collection, which contained the first time I'd ever seen the booklet that came with the Kiss Originals album. (A big frickin' deal for 16 year Kiss fan in 1988.)

Along with Fabian, we engaged the perpetual three way battle of who rocked harder - Kiss or Iron Maiden or AC/DC? (I attempted to enter Cheap Trick into this epic contest, but the combination of "The Flame" and later, a cancelled 1990 Regina concert because of poor sales, left them too open to ridicule.)

We also debated lots, pushing each other buttons on sensitive issues. I kept failing my driver's license road test. He rarely had a girlfriend. I could not bench press anything more than the bar. He had to shower before going out anywhere. I knew nothing about cars - he rarely had a girlfriend!

We each went thru phases and trends: I grew my hair out and became Mr. Alternative; he got a truck and started wearing cowboy boots. I went to Moose Jaw and took public administration while he moved to Lethbridge, Alberta and took criminal justice.

But we've always remained close, and it's because of the following: Chris is definition of loyalty and class. I've had my struggles and problems, and I can always count on Chris to be there. Chris is the kind of person who puts the proverbial bro before anything else. (And on at least occasion, he literally chose a Bro (me) before this bro's ex-Ho.(Janelle Audette - who probably wasn't a Ho - but that's beside the point. All this Ho stuff is going to get me in so much trouble with Mr. Wood.)

When I got married, Chris was there, tuxedo and all. (Despite his theory that buying a suit was so much better than just renting a tuxedo.) When my Dad died, Chris dropped everything and drove 9 hours to be there for me.

Opinionated, honest, funny, loyal ... necessary qualities for friendship and for being a good human being, in my opinion.

Twenty years later and still my friend.

P.S. - Kiss still rocks the hardest.