The very first album I bought was Billy Joel’s An Innocent Man. I had no idea about music outside what my parents owned. I think Mike Trotter had said that Billy Joel was good, but he wasn’t someone my parents listened to, as far as I knew and I had never heard him.
But I had this feeling that buying your first record was a big deal, and that it would somehow influence whether I’d be allowed to buy other records. And we went, either to Walmart or K-Mart and I purchased An Innocent Man. And I remember feeling kind of happy on the one hand, because my dad seemed to approve of the choice after he heard it, but on the other hand, mildly disappointed because my dad had music that blew me away and this? This was not doing the same.
Still, this is a good song.
This was followed up very shortly by Duran Duran’s Rio and, well, there it was. That was music that blew my mind. Something that my parents couldn’t introduce me to, because I knew it first.
But man, these songs! Even now, I listen to them and I am ten or eleven again and I can’t even think objectively about them. Are they any good? I can’t tell. Is there anything salvageable? Again, I can’t tell. It’s hard to believe that I ever used to love such music, that sounds so much like it was all composed by a shitty synthesizer, but, oh, boy, I did. And then I stopped. And I’m not sure why. I just felt like I heard everything out of them there was to hear.
At least for me to hear.
I don’t listen to a lot of commercial radio, but I feel like JackFM has singlehandedly made me hear everything out of “Rio” and “Hungry Like The Wolf” that there is to hear also. :/
Ummm, I don’t even remember the first record I bought, might have been the first Beatles hit. Whatever it was, it was probably a 45.
My first album was “Thriller,” just for full disclosure. But in high school I loved Duran Duran with a white-hot frenzy. I made a whole slumber party sit there while I rewound the video to Rio over and over, so I could watch Simon Le Bon fall backwards into the water.