{"id":2753,"date":"2010-05-25T10:35:00","date_gmt":"2010-05-25T14:35:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2010-05-26T12:52:34","modified_gmt":"2010-05-26T12:52:34","slug":"do-you-remember-your-first-music-playing-device","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/do-you-remember-your-first-music-playing-device\/","title":{"rendered":"Do You Remember Your First Music-Playing Device?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Some of us are old…<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Do you remember your first music-playing device, be it a record player, 8-track, cassette player, Walkman, CD player, or for our youngest Townspeople, mp3 player? Care to describe it? Does anything stand out in your memory about it?<\/p>\n

I had a record player that was plastic, olive-green, and textured on the outside. Flip up the top and the plastic was off-white – also textured, to better pick up smudges from my dirty hands. The turntable itself was brown. I can’t remember for sure if the arm was brown or off-white, but I remember my shakey hands were always challenged by lifting the arm onto a specific track. The cord was a 2-pronged brown affair. I experienced my first electric shock on that cord, leaving one of my fingers between the prongs as I plugged it in. Ouch!
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I used that record player from the ages of 4 or 5, playing “She Loves You” over and over, singing along with my speech-impeded l<\/em> sounds (She wuvs you…<\/em>), through about 15. It was kept in what was originally our spare bedroom, before my little brother came along 5 years later. A few years after that, when he was set up in his “big boy” room, he continued to want to sleep in the same room with me, so the record player remained in that spare bedroom until its demise. Then my brother and his damn KISS cassettes finally found their own space.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, beginning around the age of 12, I’d bring records down to our living room, where we had one of those gigantic wooden stereo consoles, as wide as a piano, with built-in, cloth-screened speakers. It was a substantial piece of furniture, holding foot-high reproductions of sculptures representing conquistadors, for god knows what reason. The midsection of the top flipped up to reveal a metal turntable, sunken, on springs. The knobs were big and black. They clicked into place just so<\/em>. As the tubes warmed up the stereo gave off a pleasing hum and fire-hazard odor. When I was little and my Dad was around he used to play me the “1812 Overture” on that thing. It sounded great, and he’d get lost in thought the way he did only over that song and “Mack the Knife.” <\/p>\n

My Mom played Dionne Warwick, Johnny Mathis, The Surpremes, and later, all the TSOP records, Barry White, and The (disco-era) Bee Gees. She loved to dance and, when I was old enough to stay home and watch my brother, would go out disco dancing with friends, meeting guys in wide-collared silk shirts. In my middle school years, when middle school dances were in vogue, she’d crank up that console and try to teach me a few of the period’s happening steps. I loved hearing “The Hustle” as much as any budding music savant, but dancing was never my thing. I shudder at the thought of my incompetence and extreme discomfort.<\/p>\n

I took me forever to get an actual cheapo, solid-state, all-in-one stereo\/cassette player of my own. I was in 10th grade, officially in the process of transferring my fantasy life from Professional Baseball Player to Rock ‘n Roll Musician. That old, green record player had life. The surface noise it gave off was exciting. It was better than anything I’d own until I was in my late-20s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some of us are old… Do you remember your first music-playing device, be it a record player, 8-track, cassette player, Walkman, CD player, or for our youngest Townspeople, mp3 player? Care to describe it? Does anything stand out in your memory about it? I had a record player that was plastic, olive-green, and textured on […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[56,99],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2753"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2753\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}