One of my earliest memories of my Dad is of him sitting me down and telling me to listen. He had a reel to reel tape recorder and he would hold the microphone up to the radio and record things. He told me he recorded the hit songs of the day, and that he would save the tape for me. Don't know what ever happened to the tape, but I do remember the songs. They were by a little group called the Beatles. That has to be where it all started for me.
My parents had a pretty big record collection when I was a kid. All kinds of albums, from Burl Ives to Frank Sinatra to Johnny Cash to the Kingston Trio. And a huge stack of 45s, mostly stuff from the '50s. I must have listened to them all. Heck I still have most of them.....Sometime around '71 or '72 I hooked up with a neighbor, who had an older sister. She had all kinds of records we would listen to, along with all his mom's old records, stuff like Gogi Grant......I also got a cassette player/recorder around this time, and spent plenty of time recording songs off the radio. I remember every New Years Eve they would play the top songs of the year, and for thee or four years I would make sure to record them all. Don't really recall playing them back all the way through, but they were there.
In l978 things really started to change for me. We were still listening to music at home, but I went and saw my first real concert. Went to see ELO at the Arena. Couldn't really see to much, and I found out later that most of it was recorded, but I didn't care. Oh, and that was the year I went to college. Talk about opening your ears. Introduced to so much more music. Tommy with Rod Stewart and Jackson Brown and Bruce Springsteen. Rebs with old stuff like Jan and Dean. Phil had all kinds of rare stuff---still break out a little Doucette once in awhile. Dan had more records than I did---popular to one hit wonders. And Kenny had the great 60's party tapes. What great music. Motown to country, oldies (old even back then!) to disco---yeah disco. And then the younger kids showed up the next couple of years and we got the start of punk and new wave and rap. It was a great time for listening to music.
I kind of lost track of popular music in the middle eighties. Busy with family and work and what not, and I just couldn't understand the damn stuff. I would catch a new song on the radio once in a while but by this time it was mostly country music for me. Not that I was alone, because it seems like the whole world was listening to people like Garth Brooks and George Strait and what not. Then I found Napster.....
Music on the computer.....for free? Just don't get caught. And I downloaded!! Hear a song I liked? Boom I had it. Just like when I was a kid and recording off the radio. Couple of thousand songs---of course that got shut down, and away they went. Oh well, ITunes works just as well, and I don't worry about the feds getting me.
Back when I was in high school when you played music the people around you knew what it was. You heard the radio or the stereo and you shared the music. I remember in college the first thing you did was hook up the stereo and crank it up. As my kids got older I knew they were listening to stuff, but I didn't have a clue what. Damn Ipods and ear buds! Visit them in college and you don't hear a note. I finally asked them, and some of the stuff isn't bad. Still don't care for the rap stuff, but there seems to be some interesting stuff out there.
The reason this stuff is on my mind now is that when I was last in St. Louis my son's rommie Jose asked if anybody had any cassettes, because he had a boom box and was looking for some music. Since I never get rid of anything, it was his lucky day. And mine to, because when I got home I had to start fishing out the old cassettes. And since I had to know what I was sending him, I had to start listening----and I've gotten to hear songs I haven't heard in 20 or 30 years. Some of the tapes haven't aged very well, but others have. Fun listening to some of the old stuff, sad other tapes can't be played anymore, and hoping Stew and Jose and everyone else within earshot will listen at least once and enjoy as much as I have....
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