Adolescents In Canada

This past weekend, Rob, Paul and I headed out for the 6th Annual Guy's Roadtrip. Our destination this year was a return trip over the Canadian boarder and into Toronto. A 12 hour drive, we made our first stop at a town called Niagara on the Lake, where we had reservations to take a jet boat ride down the river at Niagara Falls. The ride was awesome as the jet boat takes you down some class 5 whitewater rapids, plus it did some pretty sweet 360 degree spins as we were rocketing down the calmer parts of the river. Definite adrenaline rush. After changing into some dry clothes, we headed out for Toronto. We got to the hotel a little late, but we did bump into David Faustino, who played Bud Bundy on the TV show Married With Children back in the 80's. He talked to Rob and Paul for a bit while I was checking us in to our room. Seemed like a cool enough guy. Hanging out in Toronto was a lot of fun. We walked the streets for miles and miles...from record store to record store, but I only bought something at the first store we stopped at, Sonic Boom. Pretty cool record store with a nice selection of vinyl, but they didn't take American currency, so I had to put it on my credit card (which I was hoping to avoid). It made me hesitant to buy anything at the other stores, although I'm totally regretting not picking up the Slayer bootleg album that I had seen at Rotate This. After record shopping, we went to see a Toronto Blue Jays game. The home team won in the 10th inning with a walk off home run. Very nice. All over town we had been seeing movie posters up for this film called Dead Snow. None of us had ever heard of it, but he movie poster was so cool, that we hunted down a movie theater and caught a 10:00 PM showing at the end of the day. Movie was as good as we had hoped it would be...Nazi zombies with plenty of blood, guts, and gore. Nicely done. We spent all day on Sunday driving home, which was a little exhausting. All in all, it was one of the best roadtrips that we have been on. Good times.



The first album that I picked up at Sonic Boom was the Adolescents LP. I first heard this album about four years ago...somehow avoiding this punk/hardcore classic since it's release in 1981...and I've fallen in love with it. I have been meaning to pick it up on vinyl for the past couple of years, always putting off ordering it from Frontier Records. Seeing the 25th Anniversary pressing on grey colored vinyl at Sonic Boom was as good a reason that I needed to finally pick this up.

Another album that I've been wanting to buy for a while now was some of the Motorhead vinyl reissues on Back On Black. The pressing that they have done for the Motorhead catalog have looked absolutely amazing, but due to the price of these UK imports, I've held off on picking any up. I saw a few at Sonic Boom, and finally took the plunge by picking up Volume One of the BBC Live & In-Session double LP. Featuring some early live performances from '78 and '79, I was happy to finally add one of these Back On Black Motorhead pressings to the collection. Sonic Boom also had the 4 LP pressing of the band's 1980 classic, Ace of Spades, but with a $60 price tag, that one was still too pricey for me to pick up. Maybe some day....