I can’t be any more precise about the date other than it was probably late 1981 or early 1982. I do remember the place, though: Budget Tapes & Records in Albuquerque. I was 21 or 22 at the time and I’d been working in record stores for a couple of years. There were two Budget stores in Albuquerque: One right across the street from the University of New Mexico at the corner of Central and Harvard, and the other one way the hell up in the Heights in a strip mall at the intersection of Eubank and Candelaria.   By all rights, the store across from UNM should have been the hip one, what with its built in collegiate clientele, but it was an aggressively uncool establishment. The store was company-owned and its inventory was therefore restricted to whatever bland swill was available via the Budget corporate order book from the Budget corporate warehouse in some corporate business park somewhere. Very dull, milquetoasty and mainstreamy stuff: Styx, REO Speedwagon, Journey, Heart, Kenny Rogers, Lionel Richie, the Oak Ridge Boys, Huey Lewis & the News—whatever musical plaque was clogging up the Billboard charts at the moment. I worked at Budget with the Goof and together the two of us waged a subtle insurgency against the middlebrow aesthetics of the place, bringing in our own records from home—ones that Budget would never stock—and playing cassettes of our own original recordings when management wasn’t on hand to shut us down.   The NE Heights Budget store was locally owned and the owners, while not musical aesthetes by any stretch, were cooler than the corporate bollards at the Central Avenue location. The Heights store was free to stock the racks from whatever distributors it saw fit and therefore had access to a wide selection of esoteric material and hard-to-find imports. That said, most of the specialty stuff they stocked was metal (Anvil, Dokken, Iron Maiden, the Scorpions, Ynge Malmsteen—pick your Poison) but not exclusively. Eventually, my refined sensibilities could abide the Central Avenue store no longer and I started working at the Heights location exclusively, even though it was a long haul from my student ghetto apartment. There was an Arthur Murray Dance Studio next door and we took special orders from the slinky, heavily made-up girls that worked there. Budget Tapes & Records has long been consigned to the shitecan of history, but the Arthur Murray studio still abides. Go figure.   Gentle Reader(s), I can feel you out there thinking, ‘All of this is more than adequately fascinating, Humble Narrator, but get to the goddam point already.’ Patience, patience—I’m getting there.