I first became conscious of the music that was playing on the radio when I was in second grade and wanted to hear songs from “Grease.” Back then, the stations to listen to in the New York area were WNBC-AM and WABC-AM. Those were the ones with the top 40, the Disco, the Donna Summer. I would be sitting in the bucket seats of the Chevrolet and ask my father to put either of those stations on. I couldn’t identify the singers, but I knew which songs I liked – “Freak Out” by Chic and “Hot Child in the City” by whoever that was. One time, my family was heading to the shore and “Born to Run” came on. My father told me that the Highway 9 mentioned in the song was the same Route 9 that we were on. A month later, I heard a song on the radio with a similar scratchy vocalist and thought, “Maybe that’s Bruce Springsteen.” When the disc jockey said it was, I was so proud of myself. I normally couldn’t identify singers by their voices, like older kids and adults always could, and this was the first time I had.
In fourth grade, I came to notice that a lot of the songs on the radio that I liked, like “My Life” and “Big Shot,” were by the same guy – Billy Joel. I started taking piano lessons that year, like many of the kids in my community did, and my teacher gave me a book of patriotic songs and a book of exercises called “A Dozen a Day.” For my recital, I played the “Star Spangled Banner.” But when I switched piano teachers, the new guy made it more interesting. He gave me a Billy Joel easy piano book, and I was very very happy.
In sixth grade, I spent a lot of time in school folding over notebook paper to create a magazine called “Liskid,” which my father photocopied for me at his part-time job when he went there once a week. (He didn’t have copier access at his main job, and there actually weren’t many places back then to copy things besides an office.) One of the highlights of the magazine were the charts of the top 10 TV shows and songs of the week. I didn’t make them up, though; I cut them out of the Asbury Park Press, but it was still a valuable resource from my two to six consistent subscribers (the number vacillated depending on how many friends I had who weren’t mad at me). I’d add in my opinions by putting an “X” for “Good song,” a circle for “OK song” and a dash for “Bad song.” My magazine tended to gravitate around the lunchroom, and one time, a semi-popular girl named Deena came up to me in her overalls and Clash T-shirt. “I like how you X’ed ‘Rock the Casbah,’ she said approvingly.
Seventh grade was the big year – 1984. Madonna, Michael Jackson and Prince flew to the top of the charts. Van Halen named their album after the year. Everyone thinks junior high was the best time for music no matter how old they are, but my junior high experience happened to coincide with the acts who defined the sound of the decade. I always had had a tape recorder of my own, which my brother and I would use to make funny tapes and pretend to interview celebrities, but I also made tapes of my favorite songs, as most kids did. I would listen to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 each Sunday morning in the den – now the radio stations of choice were on FM, like the very new Z-100 and its competitor, WPLJ. I would hold my tape recorder up to the speakers when a song I liked came on. My mother would say something to my father while I was taping and I’d hiss, “Shhhh!” Worse yet, the dog would bark. But I managed to get clean recordings of “Our House” by Madness and “Come On, Eileen.” I was still at the stage when I thought it added something to be a pretend DJ between songs. “That was General Hospi-tale,” I would declare, “a great song about a great show.” Eventually I learned to keep my voice out of it.
By high school, I was tired of hearing the number one song over and over on Z-100 or PLJ, and that was when I discovered another new station – 92.3 K-Rock, which boasted “no repeat Tuesdays” and came up with the phrase “classic rock.” The year before, “We Are the World” had come out, and there were supposedly-legendary voices in it whom I’d never heard of, like Bob Dylan (“Who’s Bob Die-lan?” I had thought when I’d read the articles). Now, on K-Rock, songs by Dylan played regularly. There were pieces from the Who’s “Tommy,” a movie my brother and I had seen because he was into video games and pinball, as well as older songs by that guy who had sung the recent hit “Let’s Dance,” David Bowie. There was a whole world of music I hadn’t known.
By then, I had acquired, for my birthday, my own stereo with a vaunted “dual cassette deck,” so I could actually put the tape into a tape player and it would record directly from the radio. No more interference or holding a machine up to the speakers. There was so much classic rock that was new to me that I filled up tapes quickly.
When I got to college, there were a great many songs I had liked but had never gotten the chance to tape. Invariably, someone on the floor had the song I wanted, so I would tape it. I’d always liked Sting’s now-very-dated song “The Russians” (“Mr. Reagan says he will protect you, I don’t subscribe to this point of view…I hope the Russians love their children too.”) My R.A., Ammar, had “Dream of the Blue Turtles” on cassette, so I got to add “The Russians” to my tape. Any song I wanted was somewhere on my floor.
After I graduated in the early nineties, most of the music was dance, rap or grunge. It seemed like re-treads, but there would occasionally be a song that amused me – maybe an Ace of Base goodie or U2’s “One” or Mr. Big’s “To Be with You.” But it would be rare for me to run to the stereo and hurriedly press record like I used to. My tapes filled up much less quickly.
I thought about all this the other day – and not because we’ve eased into a time when kids can download almost any song you want. I thought of this because the tape now in my stereo is labeled in silver marker, “1999-2000.” And only one side is filled up. Only forty-five minutes of songs in the past five years have thrilled me enough to tape. Of course, I do buy CD’s occasionally, and someday I’ll even get around to learning how to download stuff. But there is so little that is new to me.
I still have a wooden tape holder filled with almost forty tapes I made back in the day. I know that nowadays, kids don’t have to wait around with a tape recorder to nab the song they want. It’s no longer much of a struggle to find out who sings what. And I continue searching for new bands and genres I haven’t really considered in order to strike the chord of excitement I used to have when I was a pre-teen. Even if it takes a long time, though, I will always love listening to those old tapes, the ones created with dog barks and bad DJ interruptions and squawks, because they remind me of the pre-internet era when music was less accessible but still oh so wonderful.
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