'When We Collected 45's'
When I was a kid in our little terrace house in England, all we had was a wind-up gramophone playing 78's, first in my Gt-gran's attic next door, later moved into our front room.
Then, one day in 1960, Dad came home with a record player! I distinctly remember him putting it down in the kitchen, taking out the lightbulb and plugging it into the socket, then sending my sister over the road to the neighbours house to borrow a 45rpm record, because we had the machine but not the vital bit to put on it.
My sister came back from the neighbours house clutching a record - it was placed lovingly on the turntable, the needle was dropped and the strains of 'Theme From A Summer Place' by Percy Faith and his Orchestra filled the room.
As a family we started getting records but for Christmas 1963 my sisters boyfriend bought me my very first single - not for the family - for me. Gene Pitney's '24 Hours From Tulsa'. I played it until you could see through the vinyl. It was where it all started for me.
The value and importance of these 7" gems cannot be overstated. Artists lived and died by their sale - radio stations fought and cheated and ran scams and payola schemes to promote them. Phone-in competitions gave them as prizes and teenagers around the world crowded into booths in record shops to listen.
They came in many forms and between me and Tracy we still have examples. There's a Beatles picture disk, a Dylan limited run, a-ha, 10,000 Maniacs and Simple Minds cover art, Desiderata's lyrics on a 7' EP, Dream Academy's ex-jukebox stock with a spider to fill the middle, Max Romeo's 'Wet Dream re-issued classic.
There were obscure b-sides, double a-sides, album track releases, non-album stand-alones. They were cheap(ish) and cheerful and could be bought out of one week's pocket money or allowance. You could stack 10 on an auto-changer and sit back for the next 20 or 30 minutes listening to your own version of a mix-tape long before we knew what a mix-tape was. They started as 2 or maybe 3 minute songs until 'House of the Rising Sun' by the Animals broke out at one second under four and a half minutes and opened the floodgates. I was excited to buy Nilsson's 'I Guess the Lord Must Be In New York City' .. it was the first STEREO single I owned !!
For a while you could buy portable 45rpm players that looked like overweight 90s CD players. There were even some that fit in your car. It was affordable music for the masses and something you took with you whenever you visited a friend.
In 1966 I fell off a motorcycle I was riding illegally, wearing only a pair of shorts. I ripped open my elbow, took off the end of my toe and scrapped up my hip, but the thing that upset me most was that I lost the copy of 'Rocking Goose' by Johnny and the Hurricanes that fell out of my knapsack.
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