What I do remember is the decision. The difficult decision, almost impossible to make. Standing between the two rows and having to decide: which will be my first record album.
I'd purchased and received some singles over the years: Popcorn and Last Train to Clarksville
and A Cowboy's Work is Never Done
among others. But I did not own an LP.I now had the money but I had to decide, what was it going to be? My tastes were odd, I think, even for the early seventies. The first song I taped off the radio onto cassette was Also Sprach Zarathustra, Deodato's
jazzy version of the theme from 2001 A Space Odyssey. Later recordings on that same cassette included themes from TV shows (such as The Time Tunnel
) recorded by shoving the microphone up to the television speaker. Yes, my preference for film & tv scores manifested early.But in the aisles of Richman-Gordman that day, I knew nothing of soundtrack albums, just the pop records filling the bins. So I had to choose. I wanted an album that contained songs I knew, and I had it narrowed down to two artists: The Carpenters or Olivia Newton John.
I still recall moving back and forth between them, checking out the contents of the records, trying to decide, trying to decide. I loved Have You Never Been Mellow
and Please Mister Please
and Olivia was, well, really really cute. But the Carpenters had Close to You
and We've Only Just Begun
-- and both songs on the SAME record.I took the albums out of the bins. I gazed into Olivia's eyes, so magical, so inviting. And I bought The Carpenters
. And I loved it. For many years, their version of Help! was the only one I knew.My second LP was probably Westworld
, found in a cut-out bin at a discount store. Or it may have been Live and Let Die
. Either way, it was movie music. Pop radio had already lost its tenuous grip on me.I still own that Carpenters LP. I may go drag it out right now.
3 comments:
Karen Carpenter: What a voice! You can't go wrong with The Carpenters, then or now. Hmm, I may go dig out my Carpenter CDs and give them a spin.
The Carpenters are favorites of mine to this day, too. As is Olivia. I still play those perfect songs. In a much lesser matter, my family had that damn Popcorn instrumental on an 8-track tape, and sadly I can still summon its percolating melody at will.
--ZapBrannigan (from FSM board).
My parents had that same Carpenters album when I was growing up.
Years later, I put a Carpenters tape into the boom box at work, and my coworker calmly told me that Karen's voice sent him into epileptic fits. I don't think he was trying to mock people with epilepsy, but trying to get me to pick something different to play. I selected something different to play.
-TimK
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