“Some of my earliest memories of music begin with the crackle of a needle drop.”
“I can distinctly remember sitting in my childhood friend’s family room at age 4 or so, around 1980, listening to Disney’s Main Street Electrical Parade and being hypnotized by the disc going around and around on the turntable, totally immersed in the sound and the cover art and all the spectacle and ceremony of the whole thing.
My parents had some vinyl which I listened to—I still have their original 45 of “Funkytown” right here next to my desk—but the first brand-new, just-released record that was my very own was Business As Usual by Men At Work, and I couldn’t get enough of “Who Can It Be Now?” Still can’t. Around that same time, I got The Beatles’ Blue and Red album compilations on cassette and found myself stuck on that first volume of Blue, it simply entranced me. I went through multiple copies of that one.
A bit later I got Synchronicity by The Police on vinyl, around the time when “Every Breath You Take” became a hit, and after hearing side one with the “I” and “II” bookends I have to say I was hard-pressed to even turn it over (same thing happened with side one of Back to Oakland by Tower of Power when I was in high school many years later).
But there was one particular musical experience in 1987 which I still think about frequently. I was 10 years old or so at the time and had been a regular watcher of the syndicated series Solid Gold. The show typically featured hits of the day, but this one episode had a guest who had a hit many years before, making his first appearance on TV in quite some time—the British singer Arthur Brown, performing (cough, lip-syncing, cough) his 1968 hit “Fire.”