May Day May Day

thorens td150 junk sale 22 years ago
never looked back since
cost
five uk pounds
absolutely hooked ever since
terry

Forgot about records of my choice back when I was a pup.
Stones High tide and green grass
Steppenwolf live
Mountain Nantuket sleighride
Savoy Brown raw sienna

My mom gave me her old record player when I was around five or so. I don't remember the name of it but it looked like a grey briefcase. The table would flip down when the clasp at the top was opened and the speakers were on detachable hinges at the sides. I loved the thing. My Dad owned a few bars and would bring home restaurant bus trays full of 45s. I couldn't read yet but I sorted the records by the pictures on the label. I had big stacks of Atlantic, Columbia, MCA and Capital singles from the mid 60's through the '70's. I would spend all day spinning records. I think I played "Dueling Banjos" so much the needle wore clean through to the other side of the disc. Ah...good times.

Cheers,
Jim

My Mom & Dad got tired of listening to me whine about wanting to play rock & roll on their stereo ( a nice looking walnut veneered Zenith console.) Mom was a music snob who used her love of classical music as way to put down anyone who enjoyed "lesser" forms of music and she sure didn't want to listen to what her teenage son did. So Dad took me to some old guys house who was selling his small Zenith unit with hinged speakers and we got that along with some free Hank Williams records. I promptly recovered the speakers' grills with a suitably psychedelic paisley cloth and went out and bought the Grateful Deads', Doors, and Mothers of Inventions first albums at Kmart. I think they were about $3.50 each.

In my household, all we had were 78 rpm players for the first few years--a walnut-finish wood tabletop model in the basement (about 2'x3'x3') where we played Disneyland records and Davey Crockett and some old acoustic count-tree square dance record. Upstairs was a 78 tube floor-standing console made (I think) of mahogany, where it took a stack of 78s to play one symphony.

When I was about 6 or so my dad got our first 33-1/3 RPM player--a portable RCA with built-in speaker. He'd set it on the kitchen counter and we'd listen to Beethoven or Tchaikovsky during dinner. When I was about 8 we got a floorstanding stereo console as the family Christmas present that played all 4 speeds from 16-2/3 to 78 rpm. This was back when you weren't supposed to play stereo records on mono equipment.

I remember one of the first stereo LPs we played on it was the Chipmunks Christmas, vol. 2. Fast forward a few years and at the end of 6th grade one of my sisters gave me a Gene Krupa compilation, "Drummer Man" LP on MGM records. Although I didn't buy it with my own money, it was the very first record I owned. The next one was given to me by another sister, "Time Further Out" by the Dave Brubeck quartet.

Finally, for my 15th birthday I got $5 from my Grandma. To that I added about $1.50 and bought two new LPs at $3.19 each--Creedence Clearwater Revival (self-titled, with the extended version of Susie Q and I Put a Spell on You) and Blood, Sweat, and Tears 2, the one with Spinning Wheel and You Make Me So Very Happy.

That Spring my older brother bought the first componenet stereo I ever saw, and the beginning of my 38-year (and counting) audio obsession. It was an Electrophonic POS with whizzer cone speakers and a built-in 8-track. Soon after he bought a mid-level Garrard turntable and battery-operated Cal-Rad mag phono preamp.