From the Vault: First Record

By Eilene Lyon

Very few possessions followed me through all my many moves. Music, to me, is life. If it didn’t exist, I’d have to invent it! That would be a sorry scrap, for sure. It’s a rare day when I put a disk on a turntable. But there are those times when it’s a blast to “relive” the days when I bought these 45s. Where has the time gone?

My very first record purchase cost well under a dollar: Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Down on the Corner.” The B-side (or do I have it backwards?) is “Fortunate Son.” I now find John Fogerty’s voice to be quite irritating, much the same with Neil Young. So, this record never gets played, but many of the others are fun to hear again after decades collecting dust.

I have a few more that don’t fit into the box, but this is about the entire collection.

There aren’t very many, nor do I have loads of LPs. The first LP I bought (and still have) was Chicago’s Greatest Hits. I’ve seen people with collections in the hundreds, or even thousands. No, I could not have been hauling those around!

By the time I landed permanently in Durango, formats had moved on. I started buying cassettes. They degraded, though, and have been relegated to the landfill. CDs came along, then MP3s. I still have my fair share. Now there’s streaming. Sadly, algorithms just don’t thrill me the way picking my way through 45s or listening to an entire old album do.

Do you still have the first records you bought? What format do you prefer to play?

The earliest 45s came in fairly plain paper sleeves.
Later ones showed album covers or art specific to the song.

77 thoughts on “From the Vault: First Record”

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  1. Wow! A box of 45’s… that is way cool. I never got into buying the 45’s but I did albums. My very firsty albums were Styx’ A Grand Illusion and Supertramp’s Crime of the Century. Unfortunately, one day, my husband and I just decided to get rid of all our albums – hundreds of them. I think we regretted the day after!

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      1. I had a box of cassettes. When my car was stolen, so were they. Sad day because a lot of them were mixed tapes from a friend. Of course, I no longer have the player, but still…

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      2. Oh my gosh! Can’t imagine having my car stolen. It happened to my brother. We had burglaries, though. My mandolin was taken—not that I had any talent for playing it. I suppose the thief did me (or my friends) a favor.😆

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      3. Not only was it stolen, it was stolen in broad daylight next to the Children’s hospital where I was visiting my first-born. Not only was it stolen in broad daylight, we hadn’t even made the first payment on it!
        Stealing an instrument… from your home?

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      4. Same here. House burglarized in broad daylight. I wonder if that’s the usual thing. We think of thieves in the dark of night, so they actually work in the day when no one is suspicious. Or at home. I actually came home during the event. He went out one door while I came in another. It took me a while to figure it out and by then they’d gotten away. At least I didn’t get hurt. Sometimes people get killed or injured when interrupting a burglary.

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      5. Good grief. My sister had her catalytic converter taken from her car in her driveway!
        My other sister’s son came home for lunch, going in the front door while someone went out the back! That scared the bejeezus out of everyone. This time the kid burglar went home empty-handed.
        Talk about brazen!

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  2. Larry was an audiophile, so I have the record collection in the thousands. I don’t have my first record purchase though. We hauled it from BC to the Yukon and to Saskatchewan. Our collection grew more here as we bought a gramophone and the records to match…I still listen to the records on occasion, but it used to be our regular Saturday night thing. And of course a huge CD collection, and still some cassettes. Larry’s own music is mostly on cassette although I do have a couple of CD’s of his.

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    1. I think I would just be overwhelmed to have that many records. They’d have to be well organized! I wish I’d kept the cassettes. There were a lot of them. But I just don’t have the storage space. That is one good thing about digital music!

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      1. The 33’s are organized alphabetically, but the 45’s and 78’s aren’t really organized, and probably never will be. The cd’s are alphabetical too! But, my next move after i retire, I will probably only keep the 33’s and some of the cds because that is what I listen to the most

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      2. That’s impressive! I used to have a collection of 78s, picked up at auctions. But I did not listen to them, really, so off they went! I loved how colorful some of them could be, not just black vinyl. Might have made some use of them in an art project, I suppose.

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  3. First albums… as a young teen I was a huge Monkees fan so I’m sure that’s where my money went along with The Beach Boys. Of course then 70’s bands came into the mix but overall I wasn’t a huge buyer of music. I depended on my local FM Rock station for my tunes. The youngest daughter and husband have a huge collection of albums of all genres. Literally IKEA cubes full of music. For me now everything is still alive on a Spotify playlist.

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    1. I still have my Monkees album! And a Herman’s Hermits and Tommy James and the Shondells. I did get rid of The Beach Boys. Good music, but I got tired of it. I grew up listening to Casey Kasem’s Top 40 show every week. I cannot listen to radio now—ads just drive me crazy! And I don’t like listening to chatter, either.

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  5. I think my first was a Helen Reddy album, but I’m not sure I still have it. The ones I DO still have are those by Shaun Cassidy (yep, you can date me from this one fact! 🤣), Supertramp, and my prized possessions – my Kate Bush collection.

    We still have many, many, many albums. Sean also has his grandfather’s 78s, mostly jazz. We BOTH have a copy of Stevie Nicks’ Bella Donna.

    The only ones we really play are my family’s Christmas albums – Mitch Miller Gang, Bing’s White Christmas, Mario Lanza’s Christmas album and my favourite, Snoopy’s Christmas!

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      1. My husband and I are both pack rats… I also have some of my parents albums (Beatles etc). When my mum moved from my childhood home in 2014 I desperately wanted the cabinet stereo system I grew up with, but there was no practical or inexpensive way to move it across the country. I still mourn that loss.

        One of our nephews is now very much into vinyl – we’ll have to show him our collection next time he visits!

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      2. We had one of those stereos, too. My dad has quite a few albums still. When I visited last month, we listened to the musical “1776” one of my favorites. My favorite Christmas album as a kid was The Chipmunks. Guaranteed to drive the adults to drink.🤣 I was wondering if Dad might still have it.

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  7. Yanno, I had a box full of 45s that I am fairly certain I still have somewhere. Those 45s were so much fun, with the adapters, oh yes. And as far as LPs go, don’t get me started. I lost a bunch of them to a girl from Port Richey Florida when I was 19. She broke it off with me after I moved there and then she kept my stuff! Beatles White album included. I had a nice little selection. Not big either, but nice.

    You scored on your first selections.

    PS- To me, a turntable remains the most magical musical delivery system. When that needle drops down and then . . .

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    1. Yeah, I think I still have a bag full of those yellow plastic adapters so you could stack them on a spindle. Don’t need them with my current turntables. Dumping someone is bad enough, especially after they moved for you, but keeping their stuff? That is seriously low.

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  8. Mrs. B and I have a bunch of records, cassettes, and CDs/DVDs. And of course, we now only listen to music on our phones. SIgh. The collection means a lot to us from a nostalgia feeling, but we have admittedly hit fast forward on the technology advances. I don’t know if we have any 45s, but now I am off to investigate that. I literally grew up on 45s!

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    1. Honestly, we mostly listen to streaming, too. But I’ve been changing that up lately. So many great tunes on my hard copies that I’ll never hearing from a streaming service. I mostly bought 45s in my early teen years—so affordable and you got just the song you wanted, and sometimes a decent B side, too.

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  9. I had a pretty big album collection. I gave most of them to one of my college roommates whose family has a summer house on Hoods Canal, WA. They had a record player there and said they wanted my albums. I saved a few and was thrilled when my son wanted vinyl in college and gave him what I had.

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  10. Wow! Nice 45 collection. My husband has hung on to everything. So did my family. I am working on a 20th century media room in my basement. I have an inherited Victrola and many 78s from 100 years ago. We have turntables, 1000s of albums, reel to reels, 8 track players, 8 tracks, cassettes, and CDs. Of course we only stream our music! We also have slides, a projector, super 8s, VHS, DVDs. . . .OMG, we’re hauling around a museum. My first albums were Leif Garrett and Get Up and Boogie on KTEL, followed by Barry Manilow. (I no longer have them, except maybe Barry.)

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    1. I played a bunch of them recently while working in my art room (that’s the best place, since hubby doesn’t care for pop—he’s a metal head). It does sound like you have a museum collection going there! I remember having KC and the Sunshine Band. My only disco now is on the 45s.

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    3. PS. I also have a 1970’s pioneer stereo set which costs $700 at the time…..a Sears turntable which will play albums, tapes and cd’s, an old Sony Walkman casette player and a disc player…..and an original 1986 computer complete with flickering orange DOS screen. Waiting for it all to achieve museum status. I figure I’ve held onto it all this long, what’s another few decades.

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  11. This was a fun post Eilene and it brought back memories of my own box of 45s which was the color orange. It was actually a double box, side by side and it was filled up. My indulgence was going to Kresge’s and buying a 45 from WKNR Keener 13’s Top Hits chart. I just got rid of the entire collection about ten years ago. Before I did so, however, I tried to donate the collection, but was rebuffed for my efforts. We have a classic car cruise every June that goes through the main drag of several cities near me. A local oldies radio station sponsored the cruise, so they used to broadcast the entire day and I asked them if they might like my collection, perhaps to put on the walls around the station to lend a little ambiance with the “real deal” but they just looked at me like I was crazy! I think my first 45 was “Sugar Sugar” by the Archies. Yes, very cringeworthy, now that I think of it. 🙂

    I can’t remember the first album, but it might have been Chicago’s Greatest Hits or Cat Stevens Greatest Hits. I no longer have a turntable to play them, so I have no albums. I bought a few cassettes to listen to in the car, but yes, they were not so durable as vinyl, but I still have them downstairs. I never bought many CDs except some Christmas music. My stereo system I purchased in the mid-70s had an 8-track player and when I was in Greece in 1981, I liked the bouzouki music and bought a tape. I played that Greek music in the basement, but probably too loud (and too much) as my mom called downstairs one day and suggested I buy some headphones as she was sick of listening to all those songs which sounded alike! The headphones weren’t a great idea as I would have had to lay on the basement floor to listen to my music. I still have that tape downstairs.

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      1. I remember seeing those records on the back of a cereal box too. When I was much younger, my parents had a small stereo and they bought me the Christmas children’s 45s, but instead of being black vinyl records, they were different colors (red for Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, blue for Frosty and other colors for popular children’s holiday songs/books). Yes, I’m sure lots of teens do hear about their music volume from their parents.

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  12. I still have a collection of 45’s and LP’s in the basement, and I’m sure I have Chicago’s Greatest Hits too….plus an old Pioneer stereo system from the late 70’s, which I have had offers for. I also have cassettes and Cd’s, and a Sears turntable/combo unit which will play all of the above. I figure some day when I move I will donate it all to the local museum….if they want it.

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  13. An impressive collection and find. I was never into 45s, I had hundreds of Laps until the basement flooded. Now years later I bought a couple turntables and started buying original copies of vintage vinyl. Picked up a really nice copy of Purple Rain last week. O

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      2. I picked up a couple records today—one I was looking for specifically: the “1776” soundtrack (set me back $1). I probably could have left with a dozen records, but combing through the boxes gets a bit tedious, especially the vendors who cram them in so tight you can’t flip through them—dumb move. And there were quite a few bodies to wade through, too.

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  14. I love this essay! Isn’t it funny the way we can tell so much of the story of our life through music and the formats we bought it on?

    I used to love going to the store to comb through cds for just the right thing to add to my collection. I still have most of my cds and a pretty decent collection of LPs. I started collecting those ahead of the trend when they were still easily found for a few bucks in a junk shop.

    Music plays here often but it’s typically some background sound streaming on my phone. Putting a record on the turntable feels like an event. It’s special. It seems like we lost something when we started streaming and stopped owning.

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    1. I agree with that last part. What if you want to listen to something over and over? Better to have it in your personal collection. And yes, it is more work, but the best things in life aren’t the easiest ones. And a particular record really can call up memories.

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      1. Oh gosh. Sometimes I just want to put a song on repeat and it’s a lot harder these days. My fella still has a cd player in his car and I’m so envious. Mine does not and I miss it terribly.

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  15. So fun! You’ve got some great albums there. I came up in the cassette tape era. My first was Wham!, which my parents bought me. The first cassette I bought with my own money was Tears for Fears–I guess I liked the Brits. But then I moved on to Whitney and Paula Abdul, etc. My husband and I still have CDs, and thankfully my car has a CD player. I get a lot of audiobooks from the library, when they’re culling their CD-format audiobooks. Streaming just isn’t as fun–and I miss the tactile element–but it is a way I can share music with my teens, and they can share their music with me.

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    1. I’m convinced, especially after the commentary on this post, that owning music, in whatever format, beats streaming. But it does require more from us—and that’s not a bad thing. The more we outsource effort, the less we become as people.

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  19. Last spring I finally sold my entire collection of 45s. I had nothing to play them on, and as much as I treasured each one and the memories they triggered, it was time. I went to a used record store, and the guy offered me $10 for all of them. I took what I could get. 😦

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    1. There definitely comes a time to clear stuff out. It’s too bad they offered so little. I tried selling my remaining Chinaware to a consolidation company and I would have gotten less than the cost to ship it!

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  20. My friends and I used to stop by a record store that was on our walk home from school in Eagle Rock, Los Angeles circa 1973. You could get a little sheet put out by 93 KHJ listing the songs in the top 40 that week, and you could buy a 45 for 99 cents. I also had Chicago’s Greatest Hits! I think if my singles still exist, they are probably melted in my mom’s attic.

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