I wonder if I can find it on eBay...

It seems like I keep coming back to music and movies and television. They are things that I think about a lot, and generally enjoy. One thing I have been pondering lately is my first real record album, Aerosmith’s Toys in the Attic. The album was released in 1975, when I was three, but I believe I got it in 1977 or 78. The reason I believe this is that for a long time I thought it was by the Steve Miller Band. How could I be so horribly mixed up, and why would that lead to the later purchase date? Good questions.

Basically, I remember a shopping trip at K-mart, and probably the Tualatin K-Mart, which is the one we went to when we lived in Wilsonville. We moved here in 1978. I was taken in by the cover art, but I was told that I would not like it. I wanted it anyway, and got it, but I remember that it did not sound at all the way I thought it would. I believe it ended up going to my brother. The other strong memory I have is of my older sister playing Swingtown over and over again, which I remembered as Spacetown. I think we all got to pick a record, and that she picked up the Steve Miller Band Book of Dreams, which came out in 1977 when I was 5. Looking at that cover art, I can totally imagine her choosing it because she was really into horses. And I did not start reading until after I started first grade in September of 1978 (kindergarten was only offered privately at that time, and a bit expensive for us), so any confusion on titles should be forgivable.

There are several things that I think about with this. One is that the answer wasn’t really that I wouldn’t like it—just that I wasn’t ready for it. I should have held on to it and played it once a year until I could appreciate it. Five-year olds do not tend to be that forward thinking.

My other thought is that it is sad that with CDs being so small now, cover art is kind of a waste. For technical aspects I do prefer CDs to vinyl. I was always worried about scratches with records, and I can play CDs on computer, and burn my own and still have better sound quality than cassette tapes, so that is all worthwhile, but there is still a bit of a loss there.

I also like shopping online, and I’m sure downloading individual songs is convenient, but there is another loss right there as more record stores close down. Having a central place where you could browse for new things to catch your eye was good, and it is a good venue for finding local artists, and just that people would buy the whole album was good. Will people even make albums with a theme or unifying concept anymore if they keep finding that they lay fourteen tracks and people only buy three? A lot of things are fundamentally changing, and not necessarily for the better.

One of my favorite memories is calling Mike one night, and we just spontaneously decided to go over to Tower Records. He had heard this new song on the radio he wanted to check out, which happened to be Roxette’s Look Sharp, and I wanted to get The Promise. I assumed it was by New Order, because it sounded like them, but he was saying it was When in Rome, whom I had never heard of. Obviously he was right, and he did gloat a bit, but the point was he had just gotten out of the shower and his hair looked great and the moon was full and we came away with music. For a junior in high school, that was a great night. The last two record stores that people have really recommended have both closed down. I guess I can try EM, but things just aren’t the same.

The other train of thought is that when I call Toys in the Attic my first real record, I did have some others. They were all Disney or Sesame Street. When I did make the transition to pop shortly thereafter, it was a Shaun Cassidy record. I got it because I knew him from The Hardy Boys on TV. Clearly this would still not be as edgy as Aerosmith, but I am still wearing my hair in pigtails and scared of the dark at this point. In fact, Dah Doo Run Run becomes a defense mechanism for me, as I use it to drive scary thoughts away by singing it in my head. I’m not sure why I never had an Osmonds record because we watched their show too, but my older sister had two. Also, my older sister had a Bay City Rollers record we would listen to, because they had a Saturday morning show.

Perhaps it is fitting that my real introduction to pop music came through television as well, when we got cable and there was this channel called MTV. Clearly the television had influenced my previous listening choices.

To be fair, I think a lot of it is time-dependent. The 70’s seem to have been a fairly depressing time for music, at least on the radio stations we got. I just have very vague memories of Cat Stevens and the Captain and Tenille. In the car there was always a lot of Neil Diamond, the Ray Conniff Singers, and Abba. I could easily never hear any of them again.

We did play At The Hop a lot, so I still have a strong fondness for fifties music, but then these hippie/folk influences crept in and they lost me. What I didn’t know was that groundwork was being laid for good stuff to come.

Again, this is stuff that I want to know more about—what is the musical industry and who influenced whom. Actually, it looks like we might have better music during Republican presidencies. Perhaps it is a therapeutic reaction to bad socio-political situations. Who was in the top 40 five months after Watergate? Some day, I will know.