They hit me at 12. It really was love at first embrace. The day my Dad left the country and gave me a cassette recorder was the day I actually bought the first two albums I ever bought with my own money {it might not have been mine actually, I might have stolen it}. Two cassettes. I didn't actually intend to buy those two in particular, {the Bay City Rollers' "Rollin'"
and a compilation of original singles called "Supersonic"
that was named after a TV show that used to have the groups miming to them} but they were the only thing they had that day in the shop
Woolworths that remotely interested me. I barely played Supersonic and as my sister was a Rollermaniac, it was great to have "Rollin'" to use as leverage.
Once I discovered the Beatles, my cassette appreciation and usage went up 712% and that was where I was at for the next 40 years. I probably spent more money on blank tapes in those 40 years than any other single commodity.
I was a very late convert to CDs. I didn't buy my first one until 1991. It was called
by these 2 Irish guys, one called Dave Callinan {who went on to write books} and Mick Flynn {who didn't}. I was going through an Irish folk music phase at the time, on the back of my jazz/fusion journey of 1990 and the way the album was described in a free Tower Records mag
really piqued my interest. They described it as "Irish folk played on rock instruments" and as I was on a Horslips kick at the time, having discovered their brilliant first 6 LPs, I went searching for it on vinyl as at the time I just did not want to get into CD.
But the record was £400 !
I looked for a few weeks and had to admit defeat and I went and bought the CD in some sleazy back street record shop that was trying to modernize. I had to get a friend to record it onto tape for me but I loved the album eventually.
Very little of it was really "Irish folk played on rock instruments" but there is some of that and even 30+ years later, it's glorious.
While originally looking for the LP I had bought a copy of Record Collector
and in it, I read of the Mothers of Invention's live album "Piquantique"
which was described as jazz-fusion and having George Duke and Jean-Luc Ponty on it. The previous year, I'd gotten into some of Ponty's stuff and one of the albums was with George Duke so a couple of weeks after buying my first CD I relented and bought my 2nd one
which I got the same friend to record onto tape for me. It wasn't until towards the end of '93 that I actually bought a CD player {I think I bought a DAT the same day or the day after} and that was mainly because by then, I was multitracking and decided that instead of having the final result on vinyl, I'd put it on CD and in those days, one had to get it mixed to DAT then take it somewhere to be transferred.
I bought a couple of CDs around '95 {one was Black Sabbath Vol 4} but it was '96/97 when I really started buying them in earnest although it wasn't really until the episode with the Blackburn batch that I really started going to town.
I would never have thought, even at the start of 2004 that I would ever be in a situation where I had no vinyl and a thousand CDs. Same with cassettes, even at the beginning of 2015. There isn't a cassette in my house. It's like the children left home in one fell swoop.
TMI dogooder, TMI !!
My computer has a couple of quite good speakers hooked up it, a couple of Altecs. They handle bass pretty nicely and are an important part of my mix listening. If my mixes translate to those, then I have no worries about how they'll sound on a computer.
I'd never put my music on my phone {I barely use the phone actually}. There again, I felt that way about vinyl and cassette not too long ago. But I think the ipod was one of the greater musical inventions, dare I say it, even better than cassette ~ which would have been sacrilegious to me even when I entered my 50s.
And when the prince saw that the glass slipper fitted the foot of the dirty cleaning wench, he knew he had found his dream woman and true love and he went home to arrange a huge wedding and he and Cinderella lived happily ever after.
THE END