It Started with a 45

I got my first transistor radio in 1961. It was cheap, made in Japan, and the brand was Lloyd’s — anybody remember that one? I couldn’t wait to listen to it. At first, I thought that when the DJ said, “Here’s Neil Sedaka with his latest hit, ‘Hey Little Devil,’” that Neil was there in the studio performing! Hey, I was only nine years old and a little naïve. That was the first song I heard on that new radio, and I wanted to buy the record. It wasn’t until a year later, on a family trip through Central California, that I found a copy at (nostalgia alert!) a Ben Franklin five and dime store.

The next 45s that I bought included “Telstar” by The Tornadoes, “Out of Limits” by The Marketts, “Mother-in-Law” by Ernie K-Doe, “Bumble Boogie” by B. Bumble and the Stingers, and “Talk Talk” by The Music Machine. Even then, my taste was all over the place. I also bought “She Loves You” b/w “I’ll Get You” when The Beatles burst onto the scene. It was on Swan Records, and the label included the admonishment “Don’t Drop Out.”

There were three Top 40 stations in the Bay Area at the time – KYA and KEWB out of San Francisco, and KLIV from San Jose. The first LP I ever bought was a KEWB compilation record called Disc/Coveries, with 12 hits of the day, including “Cathy’s Clown,” Walk, Don’t Run,” “Spanish Harlem,” “Quiet Village,” “Sleep Walk,” and “Alley Oop.”

 My father had assembled a “hi-fi” system from the fifties that included a Bogen tube amp and a Garrard changer. He played the piano and sang in choral groups, so there was a lot of music in the house. My parents had a Sony reel-to-reel recorder with speakers that folded up into a sort of suitcase, and my brother and I had great fun with that, doing fake interviews and speeding up the tape to make us sound like The Chipmunks.

My first record player was a battery-powered portable made by Singer (yes, the sewing machine company). It had a built-in speaker, but I installed a headphone jack so I could listen to ‘phones or an external speaker. The case was plastic, so I opened it up, cut the wires to the speaker, and hooked them up to the kind of headphone jack that cut the signal when a plug was inserted. I drilled a hole in the side of the case to mount the jack. For the external speaker, I took an old television speaker and mounted it in a gallon ice cream tub for the enclosure (no jokes about “tubby” sound – it was definitely better than the original).

My first real audio equipment was bought when I was in high school. I had a Garrard SL-55 turntable that I stripped down to semi-automatic by removing the changer arm, installing the single-play spindle, and blocking the off/on/changer switch from going all the way. It was fitted with a Shure M44E cartridge. I bought a cheap Nikko TRM-40 amplifier with separate tone controls for each channel, a Sony 355 reel-to-reel, and Pioneer SE-30 headphones (those white semi-spherical ones). My speakers were towers by Pickering (!) that my father bought in 1948. Actually, he had only bought one, but I happened to find another one languishing in a local Radio Shack store. The original drivers were replaced with Wharfedale 8-inch two-ways, and the cabinets had a tunable port on the back. I borrowed albums from friends and taped them, ultimately amassing a collection of over 90 reels with two LPs on each. I recorded stuff from The Who, Fleetwood Mac, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Chicago Transit Authority, Sly and the Family Stone, and Pink Floyd, among many others.

 A Garrard turntable similar to the one Rich owned.

Orange crates were the budget storage medium of choice in those days, but the sag factor meant that you had to put a good solid board between them if you wanted to stack them. Once I got to six crates (three high on either side of the audio equipment), it was time to build real shelving. Another collector that I knew had made open-back shelves using 48 x 12 x ¾ particleboard, and I copied his basic design. I made four-foot, three-foot, and two-foot modules, ultimately totaling 75 linear feet.