When I was 7 years old, the ways to listen to music were pretty limited:
A. Go to a concert and listen to other school kids sing “ O Canada “. Catchy, and you could always sell it at morning assembly, but limited.
B. Turn on the radio and listen to the Children’s Hour. It started with The Skater’s Waltz, and didn’t last for an hour, but they told stories. Nowadays you need to listen to the parliamentary broadcast from Ottawa to hear fairy tales…
C. Play 45rpm records on your little portable record player. If you were stuck with the ones that had big holes in the middle you needed the snap-in adapter to go onto the small spindle, but eventually you could listen to the Little Golden records. Even then I was unimpressed with the fact that a simple thing like a record had several standards that were incompatible. Little did I suspect the future…
LP’s. 331/3 rpm ( I mean…1/3? Jesus H. Christ…who designs anything that runs at 1/3 of a evolution? That sort of incompetency is Soviet…. ).
I missed out on music between 7 and 17. Really. We moved so much that nothing survived the shifting and I was reduced to listening to the car radio or infrequent television. I did not rock nor roll, and my parents were probably glad of the silence. But I bught a tape recorder when I was 18 and a turntable, and it all started from then.
Started? A continual quest for an easy way to hear music. And it has never happened in the subsequent 5 decades.
More on the failures next post.
