From RDA to GNR

On my way to work this morning I was standing outside the Chinese restaurant by the bus stop next to a seemingly shady couple who seemed to be on their way home from a night of debauchery. I was listening to my iPod and came to think of this recent near-obsession with Richard Dean Anderson that has been going on here on our page. That somehow made my mind drift away to another blast from the past, not sure how this came to mind but could be because it happened around 1987-88 and my brother recently posted a photo on Facebook of this object he purchased back then.

I was remembering a day when my mom, my brother and I went to ‘Tore Henrikssons Radio & TV’ in Kalix, Sweden, where we lived at the time. My brother had gotten some money to shop for, most likely a birthday present, and our cousin worked in this radio-shack-type store. So, we went in to buy an LP record and my brother is only just over 2 years older than me, so 2 young kids and their mom who probably did not know what was about to hit her.

Our cousin, who obviously was older than us and also much, much cooler than us (he could make the best mixtapes, complete with a cassette song index where the song titles were highlighted with various neon colors), greeted us in the shop and he already knew that we were there to buy a record for my brother. He walked us over to the chart topping records at the time and recommended this horrible looking album sleeve with a dead hooker in an alley who was surrounded by robots; it was ‘Appetite for Destruction’ by Guns N’ Roses. Our mom shrugged a little, but as our ‘more mature’ cousin said it was ok, my brother was allowed to buy the record. The fact that it was a very loud and screechy rock album is a whole other story.

Funny how all of the sudden I would recall exactly where in the store we were standing, how the surroundings looked like and the manner of how our cousin took us straight over to that infamous album cover. That boggles my mind a little bit. Must have been those sketchy looking people that subconsciously reminded me of the dead hooker and the robot dressed in a flasher-coat. My subconscious mind could of course also have been influenced by my iPod playlist.

An interesting piece of pop culture trivia is that this album sleeve, the one with the dead girl, was banned shortly after we purchased the record and was replaced with a more subtle album cover and the nasty picture was put on the inside of the sleeve instead. I mentioned this to my brother when I visited him in Stockholm a few months ago, as memorabilia collectors pay good money for rare items like that. The sleeve is now hanging nicely on the wall in his apartment.