Tygers of Pan Tang - “Tyger Bay”
1981
Part One: Michael Moorcock As Secret Influence in Seventies and Eighties Metal
“Let’s go to Down in the Valley,” somebody said. Cool, some random weeknight fall of ‘88 with my three roommates. I hit the used racks, found omigod Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited in great shape, cover beat up but who cares if the vinyl is nice? I spotted a used Tygers of Pan Tang album while walking to the register, sitting right there in the front of a rack. Tygers of Pan Tang … had never heard them, just knew that my new faves Metallica raved about them in magazines I flipped through at Shinder’s and the library. But I didn’t pull the trigger on buying it, likely I didn’t have much money in my checking account, maybe I didn’t want to risk it, maybe I was too cheap to pay the eight-dollar price. And maybe I wanted to quit while I was ahead — how often do you find an all-time great Dylan LP in the used racks?
Over the years, Spellbound became a white whale, especially when I scored the two-disc New Wave of British Heavy Metal 1979 compilation about fifteen years ago and it featured the Tygers’ “Killers” on it. And I didn’t want the album on CD (yawn), I wanted it on vinyl like that beauty I saw in the store years ago. Occasional trips through the used racks around town didn’t materialize in a find. Then up stepped the great equalizer, eBay. Spellbound was almost always available on their site, but it usually went for twenty bucks or more and then usually another fifteen bucks or so for shipping because the seller tended to be in the UK. But last fall a copy popped up from an American seller, in Very Good (VG) condition for fifteen bucks and nobody had yet bid on it. I contemplated making a lower offer but ending up winning it for that price. And no other bidders, suckers! Were they scared off by the VG grading of the vinyl, that it wasn’t Very Good Plus or Near Mint? I’ve had good luck with VG albums on eBay, they usually have some surface marks but play quite well. This LP also had a sticker on the cover, who cares I just want something that sounded good via my eighties dorm room stereo system of Audio-Technica turntable, Technics receiver, and ancient JBL speakers. VG = Virtual Gold.
So what about the music? As Chuck Eddy wrote on the New Wave of British Heavy Metal: “(The artists) had Learned Lessons From Punk: Gone were the bloated excesses of yesteryear’s dinosaurs; in their place were shorter, faster, hookier, angrier songs.” So it goes with the Tygers. The riffs are played at breakneck speed with fast fast fast solos thrown in. The singer isn’t obnoxious — many times a crucial metal differential. And cooly, titles like “Gangland,” “Minotaur,” “Blackjack,” and “Tyger Bay” all point to some tough Thin Lizzy-like street-smart universe*.
Part Two: I Shun Microeconomics Unless It Favors Me
So Spellbound ended up being $20.63 total after shipping and sales tax. (An eBay vendor charging sales tax? Go figure.) How does this compare to what I would have paid thirty-five years ago? Back in ‘88, the album was $8.00 and I think the sales tax then was about five percent. I took a “how much is a 1988 dollar worth today” calculator I found online — a dollar then is $2.54 now — and I came up with this:
Eight dollars plus sales tax is: $8.00 x 1.05% = $8.40. And then taking that sales price and multiplying it by how much a 1988 dollar is worth in 2023 is: $8.40 x 2.54 = $21.34.
So Spellbound would have cost me $21.34 in 1988 and I “won” by playing the long game and paying $20.63 in 2023. I saved 71 cents hoo-boy but missed out on thirty-five years of Tygers of Pan Tang fandom while also annoying folks with my raves about the band. As John Maynard Keynes once wrote: “In the long run we’re all dead.”
*Here’s the part where I admit to failing at describing music, which is why I’m moving on to write about accounting, business, and economics in my new zine/blog Troller or Controller? (Not to be confused with a rumored under-the-counter zine allegedly titled Bookkeeper or Bookmaker? It will have features such as “Bill T’s Guide to T-Bills,” “What Your Chart of Accounts Says About Your Love Life,” and “Shutout? NHL Teams May Found the Key to Not Having to 1099 Emergency Backup Goalies.”
