In the Spring of 1981, my post high school band Second Chance played my high school alma mater Ellison High School (EHS). At that point in Second Chance’s history we were doing a lot of Rush songs. Our set at EHS started with Rush’s Xanadu.

If you’ve ever heard the song you’ll now that the beginning of Xanadu has tweeting birds and an underlying synth drone which we wanted to include via a recording from the album (vinyl) onto a cassette tape. We hooked up a cassette player to our mixing board and played the cassette tape with the recorded intro. Eventually the recorded intro fades out while Dennis (lead guitarist) replicated the intricate guitar lick intro while our drummer Mick replicated the album drum hits seamlessly. Steve (bass player) and I (rhythm guitarist) would join in on cue with bass and guitar chords.

It was an impressive epic start to our gig. The band’s playing meshed seamlessly with the tape intro as we kicked into the full song. HOWEVER… our sound guy at the time, George, forgot to press the stop key on the cassette tape player. About 30 seconds into us playing Xanadu we heard a completely different song playing along through the monitor and main speakers. The cassette player was still playing and the cassette tape we had used to record the Xanadu intro had previously recorded music on it. That pre-recorded music was coming through the speakers with us. I don’t recall what song was playing but George quickly realized what was happening and stopped the cassette tape player. I don’t think many people realized what had happened and we continued playing Xanadu.

This is such a vivid memory and we had a great laugh afterwards. The story became a classic Second Chance story that we stilled told thirty years later. For this reason I chose A Farewell to Kings by Rush as this month’s Album of the Month.

NOTE: I’ve changed the name of this column to Album of the Month (formerly Vinyl of the Month) because future posts will include not just vinyl records. I have close to 500 vinyl albums but I have over 900 CDs so it makes more sense to include all formats. Also, with the advent of Millennials collecting vinyl (some don’t even listen to what they buy), thus driving up the price of vinyl albums (both new and used), purchasing vinyl records has become an extremely expensive hobby to maintain. So I have dropped my consumption drastically.