A friend hereabouts queried his FB pals today as to the “First CDs” they’d purchased.
So I naturally went on at length about my own very peculiar/particular “Journey to the CD”, as it were. Ahem,
I acquired a year-old Technics CD player from a Missoula, Montana friend who was ALREADY upgrading (ca. Summer 1987!), shortly before he relocated to Seattle. Said pal charged me a mere $50; I suspect its list price had been around $250.
I myself was busily preparing to relocate to Northern Virginia, where my folks then resided. I departed Missoula with approximately 2200 LPs, a few hundred formerly-blank TDK cassettes, and a solitary CD, which I wrote about in a piece re: a half-dozen recent Hendrix reissues for a brief-lived weekly called MISSOULA TODAY, published just prior to my move.
My first dozen CD purchases were these (most of ’em purchased at record stores in D.C., chiefly Tower or The Wiz, if memory serves):
The Jimi Hendrix Experience: LIVE AT WINTERLAND ($17.99, 9/1)
Big Black: THE RICH MAN’S EIGHT TRACK TAPE ($16.99, 10/6)
Metallica: GARAGE DAYS RE-REVISITED EP ($8.49, 10/18)
Ornette Coleman: IN ALL LANGUAGES ($15.99, 10/18)
[Homestead Records compilation]: THE WAILING ULTIMATE! ($9.99, 10/19)
Creedence Clearwater Revival: CHRONICLE ($11.99, 10/24)
Howlin’ Wolf: HOWLIN’ WOLF/MOANIN’ IN THE MOONLIGHT ($11.99, 10/24)
Diana Ross and the Supremes: EVERY GREAT #1 HIT ($9.99, 10/30)
Big Star: BIG STAR’S 3RD: SISTER LOVERS ($10.99, 10/30)
Richard Lloyd: REAL TIME ($10.99, 10/30)
The Stooges: FUN HOUSE ($10.99, 11/20)
New Order: SUBSTANCE ($17.99, 11/28; first 2CD set!)
By comparison, most of the new LPs I bought that year (even doubles) ranged in price from $6.95 to $8.99, meaning that anyone on a budget had to weigh each pricey CD purchase carefully.
In my case, I gave special consideration to the newly-invented “bonus cut” (the Big Star boasted 3 otherwise unavailable tracks, the New Order comp an entire disc of UK-only b-sides), “twofers” (double album-equivalents like the Big Black, Ornette, CCR, and H. Wolf discs above, and the Jimi too, for that matter), “enforced scarcity” (the Rykodisc hype re: LIVE AT WINTERLAND was that it would NEVER be issued on LP or cassette; which held true for about a YEAR, as I recall!), or sheer “novelty” (The Stooges….on compact disc! LOL).
I mostly bought LPs for many more years (the U.S. Music Biz simply stopped manufacturing them around late-October 1989, causing stores to cease stocking them, thereby forcing my hand with regard to new releases), THOUSANDS of them used.
Circa Fall 1989 and beyond, there followed a spate of breathless media reports as to the “shocking” decline of LP sales (imagine: they don’t MAKE it, so YOU can’t BUY it!), which solidified (for a brief few years) the reign of cassette tapes in the American marketplace, before they too were consigned to The Dumpster of “Home Entertainment” History!
How ironic then, given the Music Biz’s feverishly arrogant, increasingly desperate anti-file sharing and digital downloading wars (post-Y2K), that the poor CD (which I’ve always been fond of PLAYING), should now occupy a perceived “aesthetic status” even lower than the mildly-resurgent LP and cassette, much less the near-ubiquitous streaming!
Inevitably, given my ongoing lust for music to listen to, that initial 2200-to-1, LP-to-CD chasm slowly narrowed, until about six or eight years ago, by which time I (roughly) calculated that the digital devils had finally surpassed the vinyl fetish objects in my collection, without me quite realizing that this non-momentous “event” had taken place!
By the by, I now estimate that I own between eleven and twelve thousand of EACH, with CDs slowly increasing their lead, year by year. But that’s me, “hard copy” (and real stereo system) to the bitter end! LOL
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As a brief addendum, folks, I thought I’d add the batch of EIGHT MORE CDs I acquired during the 1987 Holiday Season, making a grand total of twenty purchased during the four months (September through December) of my first flush of compact disc immersion:
The Velvet Underground and Nico: THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO ($14.99, 12/3)
Wire: PINK FLAG ($18.88, 12/7)
Wire: CHAIRS MISSING ($18.88, 12/7)
Television: MARQUEE MOON ($9.99, 12/18)
Sonic Youth: EVOL ($16.99, 12/18)
The Rolling Stones: LET IT BLEED ($11.99, 12/19)
Steve Reich: MUSIC FOR 18 MUSICIANS ($15.99, 12/21)
Sonny Rollins: PLAYS G-MAN AND OTHER MUSIC FOR THE SOUNDTRACK OF THE ROBERT MUGGE FILM “SAXOPHONE COLOSSUS” ($11.99, 12/30)
By the by, four of these included those sticky “bonus cuts” (both Wires, the Sonic Youth, and the Rollins), while the Reich afforded me a long-dreamt opportunity to listen to the 56 minutes of the original ECM label MUSIC FOR 18 MUSICIANS sans interruption, as the composer no doubt intended!
I was also thrilled to hear two of my supreme favorite recordings (The Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” and The VU’s “Heroin”) via the newfangled digital system of sound reproduction!
They were actually notably NOISIER than I’d have guessed, since during the years-long infancy of the compact disc its reissue producers and their mastering engineers had yet to perfect the methods of noise suppression that would later (mostly) eradicate archival master tape hiss, without adversely affecting the musical performances.
P.S. Those odd $18.88 prices for the Wire albums indicate that I purchased them at the flagship Dupont Circle location of Olsson’s Books & Records, which was for several decades the classiest spot in D.C. to purchase such items!
Olsson’s specialized in imported CDs, so both Wire titles were manufactured in Japan, while the Velvets’ debut had originated in West Germany. It would be several more years before said masterpieces were available domestically in the CD format.
