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A Memory Test. Your First Record Purchase
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Steppenwolf’s ‘Born to Be Wild’ is a great album Steve. I love the music and lyrics to ‘Monster/Suicide/America especially.
Cal, I too bought my first new album with money saved from a paper run – ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’. Unlike our rich middle class American friends with their ‘allowances’!
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“Ramblin’ Rose” by Nat King Cole, was a great song. I remember it being played regularly on the radio when I was in Primary School. It spent five weeks at number one in my country in 1962.
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Howard, it’s true. When he wasn’t too busy polishing the silver, our butler would drive the Bentley down to the music store and pick up my 45’s. And if there was anything left of my $1.50, a couple comic books too. And maybe some malted milk balls.
Seattle Bob
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I know Bob. One of my nephews was a butler for one of your neighbours, a few houses down the road. They didn’t have a Bentley though. Preferred one of this big American gas guzzlers!
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Hey Howard,
Yes, those were the ‘good old days’ of conspicuous consumption, 10 miles to the gallon, big fins and unfettered hydrocarbons belching into the atmosphere. Good thing we all finally learned the error of our ways before any serious damage was done huh?
I think I remember your nephew. He was that guy who drove the huge V-8 Edsel and said ‘crikey’ all the time.
Seattle Bob
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I think you might have him confused with his bush brother who also had a penchant for the expression ‘fair dinkum, cobber’!
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It was on my tenth birthday in 1969. My father gave me five dollars, and with that I walked to a Thrifty Drug store and bought the albums “Help” and “Sargent Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band”. I think Help cost $1.65, and Peppers cost around $2.75, and I walked out with change. Try doing doing that with five dollars now with brand new albums. The third album I bought was Beatles ’65, which I purchased at a Safeway supermarket. It was interesting because Safeway still had the listening rooms so that you could try out the records before you bought them. This was in ’70 or ’71. And the records are still playable.
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Wow Greg! Purchasing records from Drug stores and Safeway. Unheard of at the time where I come from. The only place to purchase records was at record bars which all had listening booths with headphones. I still remember the time as a schoolboy in 1968, listening to the Rolling Stones ‘Beggars Banquet’ on headphones in a record bar in Adelaide Street, Brisbane and the buzz of hearing ‘Street Fighting Man’ (really loud) for the first time. This is track 6, the first track of the second side of their Decca recording. Such memories.
“Time magazine described the Stones as “England’s most subversive roisterers since Fagin’s gang in Oliver Twist” and added: “In keeping with a widespread mood in the pop world, Beggars Banquet turns back to the raw vitality of Negro R&B and the authentic simplicity of country music.” “Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone considered that the band’s regeneration marked the return of rock’n’roll, while the Chicago Sun-Times declared: “The Stones have unleashed their rawest, rudest, most arrogant, most savage record yet. And it’s beautiful.”
No, I don’t expect a cover of “Street Fighting Man’ or ‘Sympathy For the Devil’ from Mona and Lisa any time soon! Even though I know it really would be something incomparable!
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Hi Greg,
Your post unlocked a memory. I’d almost forgotten that Safeway had albums at one time. I seem to recall at our store there were just a couple of bins and they were primarily budget labels like Pickwick and Camden. But there very well could have been ‘best sellers’ like The Beatles in there too. We didn’t get the listening room in our Safeway (which seems so weird for a grocery store). The nearby hi-fi/music shop had a couple of those though.
In Bellevue WA (where I was raised) there was a store called House of Values….a sort of smaller K-Mart/Rite Aid hybrid with a killer record department. More often I was browser, since I was broke most of the time. What I could afford, I bought there. Most of those albums are now gone, but I still have Connie Francis’s Greatest Hits from ’62 with the $2.98 HOV price sticker.
Seattle Bob
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Forgive me for the double posting. I can’t figure out how to delete. I thought I knew.
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First record I bought, I remember vividly. It was a 45rpm by Chubby Checker called “The Twist.”
We played it at a birthday party over and over and everyone had their own interpretation of the dance.
I was only ten or eleven I don’t remember. Just remember having fun.
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Hi Jerry,
Chubby really built a career on that one! Practically every record he did for the next 2-3 years had The Twist in the title somewhere.
This was a dance even an uncoordinated dolt like me could sort of do. As a kid, real dancing…where contact with the girl was required…caused me to have symptoms resembling a heart attack. But The Twist allowed me to spasmodically jolt around on the dance floor as if I knew what I was doing.
I was lucky enough to pick up that Parkway LP at a record show 20+ years ago. You’ve reminded me what a GREAT party record that was. No other records were necessary. Not only did you have The Twist on that album….but The Slop, The Pony, The Madison, The Chicken (?) and others (none of which I could competently do).
You really picked a classic for your first single.
Seattle Bob
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I’m not surprised you were broke most of the time Bob. Butlers and Bentleys don’t come cheap!
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Thanks, Bob. Yeah, Chubby milked it for all it was worth. Good guy, from what I remember of people talking about him, though. He was born in a little town in South Carolina not too far from where I grew up. Probably why I bought his record.
A better known South Carolinian, of course, is the King of Soul: James Brown. Loved his music, too. Talk about dancing! I remember how he could glide across the stage on one foot. Michael Jackson said he used to watch James Brown and learned some of his moves from James.
I was like you. Couldn’t dance. Except a beautiful little girl named Iris taught me how to Square Dance. Country fun… 🙂
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KISS Alive!
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My musical frame of reference was local Top 40 AM radio in the early 60’s. And Chubby was all over that. I was so conservative and mainstream….and not very adventurous in my listening.
James Brown was anything but conservative. He was his own genre. I’m still not that crazy about his recorded music. But to watch him perform was something else. No one could hold a stage like James Brown. And no one ever wanted to follow him. I remember hearing a story about a major band….possibly it was The Grateful Dead….watching Brown from the wings and having a backstage meltdown about having to go on after him. His live performances were just incomparable.
Seattle Bob
ps: That Kiss album looks like a Japanese pressing. Impressive!
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