High Fidelity

What was the first album that you ever purchased?
I love music more than anything in my life that is not a person or a dog. My first listening was my parents' record collection which I loved. I felt free to listen to & dig through their large LP selections. My favorites by age 6 were Dinah Washington, Rosemary Clooney, Bobby Darin & Nat King Cole. I was crazy for thier Broadway musicals including South Pacific, The Music Man & My Fair Lady. I thrilled to carefully taking the record from its sleeve & placing it on the black rubber turntable pad. I would push the button on the gears would engage with a whir & the tonearm would magically lower to the outermost groove of the record. How did it know? My first stereo of my very own (age 8) was an RCA portable, all in one unit with detachable speakers, that sat on a table beside my bed. By the time I was in high school, I thought bigger was better (in more than one way) & I had Yamaha amplifier with Thechnics turntable & 4 big enough to be furniture speakers by Genesis, that were placed in each corner of my room.

My first album that I bought with my own money was Meet The Beatles. The Husband says that his first, with money earned from baby sitting, was the Original Cast recording of West Side Story & housemate T says that his was Little Criminals by Randy Newman because of the song- Short People (he still likes his men short). In my high schools years I had every musical i could find including hard to find Original Casts of Goldilocks (Elaine Stritch & Don Ameche), Greenwillow (Tony Perkins), Salad Days, Cindy, & Henry, Sweet Henry. I had Hello, Dolly! with Carol Channing, Mary Martin, Ethel Merman & the Japanese & Swedish casts. How could my parents not know that I was gay? I also really listened to a lot of Bread, Cat Stevens, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, & Carly Simon... plus the constant rotation of Godspell, Company & Follies. Forty years ago today, I was listening to Joy To The World by 3 Dog Night, I Feel The Earth Move by Carole King, You've Got A Friend by James Taylor, What's Going On by Marvin Gaye, & Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves by Cher.

I lost most of my albums to Mt. St. Helen's eruption. I was living, with the future Husband (then the boyfriend) in Spokane & the ash from the volcano was mid-calf deep & it got into everything, including our LPs. The dust actually got into the sleeves & made cuts into the records' grooves. I then went to cassettes & eventually CDs. Now, I almost exclusively download my music & I listen with little tiny earbuds (which sounds so Van Gough-ish) on a device the size of a credit card.