My First Records

(from 2014)

What were the first recordings you ever bought?

It is probably a reasonable guide as to your age. The music we first chose for ourselves tends to fit a fairly tight age group – depending on surrounding social mores and whether we had older siblings who introduced us to decadent teenage stuff a little early.

I’m afraid my venerable age takes me back to the tail end of the era of 78s. In fact, for many years I belonged to a club of grumpy, elderly people who scoured boot and garage sales for the glorious sight of shellac – as long as it hadn’t been played with a knitting needle or left out in the sun to warp with interesting consequences for the music’s tempo. I still have the bottom of cupboards and floorboards creaking under heavy discs. And I keep threatening to take them out, crank up the phonograph, and disturb the neighbors. There is no volume control on the 78 rpm machine, other than stuffing something down the sound horn – hence creating a well-known phrase this side of the Atlantic – “put a sock in it...”

There was one 78 my parents had that probably introduced me to “folk music” - Delia Murphy warbling “The Spinning Wheel.” It was recorded in 1939 and became a world-wide hit. Murphy wasn’t a professional singer, she was actually the well-heeled wife of an Irish diplomat, who ended up in the Vatican during World War 2, and later became the Irish First Ambassador in Australia, Canada and Washington. The song actually benefits from having the amateur voice of an older woman on the recording. I keep on stressing this when Mrs Occasional sings it at folk clubs, but somehow in that context it is never quite the right thing to say...

But MY first 78 – I can remember to this day, going to the record store with my mother and my pocket money and listening in the booth and then coming home with 10” of heaven. Yes – Mel Blanc singing “I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat” – a spin-off from the Warner Brothers’ Sylvester and Tweetie Pie Cartoons. Yes, you could tell at that early age how I was destined for a life of sophistication and good taste... Or something like that...

But then vinyl came in – very quickly indeed, singles and EPs (extended players with usually four tracks) and of course the magical LP (long players) – which soon settled on 12” in size and could play up to half an hour on a side! Wow!

And I remember the first two albums I bought with my own saved money. The very first was a classical LP that I still have in the attic somewhere – Rossini Overtures. It was a cheapo label that specialised in repackaging older recordings so that the worthy poor (which included me at that stage of life) could still get a bit of culture.

I liked Rossini. I like the way he started quiet and slow and then built up until the orchestra was having a positive fit by the end. I liked the fact that he wrote the theme tune for The Lone Ranger. And as I learned more about him, I like the fact that – unlike all these serious driven composers who produced great art – his main concern was getting a hit and making money. He was forever recycling the best bits of his operas, and there are far fewer overtures than operas because he was lazy and just re-used some again and again, even though it often meant that the music bore no relation to the opera that followed. He wrote arias to deliberately annoy certain singers – who found the high notes unreachable – and one overture required the violinists to tap their bows against their music stands at regular intervals, damaging all the varnish on them. Yes – a man after my own heart...

And the second album was pure pop. (My first EP was folkie – Pete Seeger whooping it up with audience and Wimoweh at Carnegie Hall – but the first long-player was pop). Buddy Holly. I could write a long post about Holly. The man with glasses and a Tex-Mex drawl, who wrote his own songs – with a limited range that meant we all could sing them. The man whose last tour was such a disaster – his drummer, Carl Bunch, got frostbite on the bus and had to be hospitalised – which indirectly saved his life – when Holly then charted a plane to get himself and band to the next stop in time for sleep and to get some laundry done... The rest became as Don MacLean sang “The day the music died.”

My first Holly LP was actually the “Buddy Holly Story Volume 2.” They found a stack of self-penned songs on his tape recorder – never intended for release – and hastily dubbed in backing and released them. He remained a hit recording star in Britain through the 1960s, long after being virtually forgotten in the States. And those self-penned songs... I must have spent a fortune in small coins putting them into the juke box on one vacation to keep on hearing “Learning the Game” while gazing into the calf-eyes of G. Aaah. I just had to save my pennies and get the LP.

It was followed by all the other Holly LPs, and me joining various clubs and writing articles (as was my wont) and castigating published biographies that got the details of Holly’s career and music wrong (as was also my wont – still is, in another context). In fairly recent times, my daughter tracked down the ultimate bootleg of 10 albums of everything but everything Holly ever did – including a raunchy number recorded by wire when he was 12 - and produced them as a classy CD box set as an anniversary present. And she and I actually saw Holly’s band the Crickets, when they backed Nanci Griffiths back in the 1990s. Highlight? Sonny Curtis (lead singer and famed songwriter in his own right) announcing that the next song was written by our drummer (Jerry Allison) about his “first ex-wife...” (pause) “She gave him some of the best weekends of her life...” Then wham, bam – straight into “Peggy Sue!!”

So that’s my little excursion into history. So what were your first records or purchases? And were they shellac, vinyl, cassette, CD, mp3 or iPod download..? Be warned - you are bound to give away your age by your answer.