45' s

One of the joys of being a teenage music fan for me, was the excitement of visiting the Record Store on a Saturday morning to check out the new releases, which in those days in Britain, were issued on Fridays.
However, before that, the music in our home was usually bought by my Mother and were big, clumsy, breakable 78 RPM records.
I do remember buying my first 7-inch vinyl single and it was a particularly momentous choice; one which has gone on to become a rarity: Elvis Presley's Heartbreak Hotel on HMV, not RCA.

History of singles, (thank you Wikipedia.)

By about 1910,  the 10-inch 78-rpm shellac disc had become the most commonly-used format.
The advent of the new system was not unveiled suddenly one day at a "Press Conference". 
There was plenty of information 'leaked' to the public about the new 45 rpm system through front-page articles in Billboard magazine on 4 December 1948 and again on 8 January 1949. RCA was trying to blunt the lead Columbia had established in releasing their ​33 ¹⁄₃  LP system back in June 1948.

The 7-inch 45 rpm record was released 31 March 1949 by RCA Victor as a smaller, more durable and higher-fidelity replacement for the 78 RPM shellac discs.

The first regular production 45 rpm record pressed was "PeeWee the Piccolo" RCA Victor 47-0146 pressed 7 December 1948 at the Sherman Avenue plant in Indianapolis.

So began an era where these 7-inch discs were the basis of so many great parties enjoyed by the young baby boomers, moving through their school and college days. Of course, that included me!

View-Master

I may have been very young, but I have been endowed with a good memory. Certain events are like tattoos on the inside of my eyelids; I can close my eyes and see these events happening in front of me right now.

One of my strongest childhood memories is from 1951. We were living in Calcutta and my grandmother had gone to visit her daughter (my aunt),  in Florida and she returned just before Christmas with a thrilling gift for me:  it was a View-master. I’m sure many of you listeners know what a view-master is, with its exciting 3-D pictures. 

One of the View-master reels my grandmother brought back for me that Christmas was the story of Rudolph the red nose reindeer. The song was written by Gene Autry and remains a staple of radio playlists for the Christmas season. There is also a television broadcast using stop-action models which tells the story with little (wooden?) figures. Every year when I see it, my View-Master reel comes flooding back into my memory-bank!

Bridget Riley

Bridget Riley is one of the British artists that came to prominence in the sixties with Pop Art & its influence spilling into the music world and our everyday environment.
She has an exhibition currently open to the public in late 2019. The quote below is from the Guardian's art critic. I think it is so eloquent: 

A fourth colour appears in the next version: dull turquoise – and yet the day brightens. The painting has its own weather. This is a marvel considering all you’re looking at is an array of drab discs on white paint;

I love that sentence, The painting has its own weather.

I fell in love with  her work from her early days. She is forever as much a part of my 1960’s experience as Andy Warhol was. My friends & I were eager to “grow up” & experience adult things... she was one of those things!

my life in music, chapter 1,002...

My early exposure to music was pretty unusual and radical for a six-year-old. It was the American forces network radio and BBC overseas programming !

So my childhood memories are songs such as Les Paul and Mary Ford's The World is Waiting for the Sunrise and Hank Williams' Hey, Good Looking and the giants of the immediate post-war music scene, Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Andrew Sisters, Eddy Arnold, Glen Miller, you get the picture!

However the first album I acquired reflected a peculiar fascination for a preteen with the big band sounds of the 1930's. That first album was a recording of Benny Goodman and his band's radio performances of the late 30's. They were issued in the mid-1950's. If I am correct in my thinking, a neighbour had a copy and I heard them there. With my early Calcutta immersion into the sound anyway, these recordings struck a chord with me. (To coin a corny phrase.) I went on to acquire many other Benny Goodman albums and they are still with me down in the storage room of our Condo.

Me and my Little Transistor Radio

Like most of us when we are young, our frame of reference is obviously the environment around us and our family and you think that what you are experiencing is the norm.
However looking back over my life, especially as young Michael, I am very appreciative of how special were the experiences I had early on in my life. 

I was going back into hospital in late 1959 when a family friend, who was an ex pat Brit from our days in Calcutta returned to England and he came to visit us in London. He showed me this newfangled device that he had. He bought it at the duty-free stop en route, which I no longer remember it was Aden or if he came back the long way from Calcutta heading east,  and picked up the "toy" in Hong Kong. What it was, was an early transistor radio. It was the size of a current cell phone, had a plastic body and for protection it had a lovely real leather case. 

He gave it to me so that I could listen to the radio when I was in the hospital. He knew how much our family loved music.

I remember well listening to that little transistor radio, which in England in those days we called the "tranny."  Probably not politically correct these days as the term does not refer to portable radios anymore but refers to one’s gender identity.

However, I spent hours and hours listening to my little transistor radio; hunkered down under my bed coverings. I was in the children’s ward, so it was lights out at 9 pm and hello good morning at 5 am!

It was the height of the Trad Jazz fad in the UK so the BBC regularly had shows on Dixieland music which the trad jazz genre constantly referenced. Of course I listened to the 'BBC Light Program'  for a miserable few hours of popular music back then. But I fell in love with Dream Lover by Bobby Darin much of Paul Anka’s many hit tunes, especially, I liked Lonely Boy which was prominently featured in late 1959 and so much Buddy Holly.

Even though it was only an AM frequency Radio (for which Halifax is poorly serviced) I still miss my little transistor radio.

New Canadian

Pretty much like the stories from the turn of the century, on March 15,  1970 I arrived in Toronto with $200 Canadian and a steamer trunk full of my worldly possessions; which included far too many thick sweaters to protect me from the harsh Canadian winters. I guess my brain had not processed the fact that North America had central heating pretty much everywhere.
I emigrated with two friends who had come ahead of me and had an apartment already.

One of the friends was from my college days and shared my love of music. Especially American girl groups and girl singers and R&B artists. It was the first Sunday after I had arrived, he and I headed to Sam’s record shop on Yonge Street while my other friend, his girlfriend at the time, later his wife, cooked dinner for us. (They are still together and we are still friends.)
We were overwhelmed by the fact that shops were open on Sunday and a record store had so many of our favourite artists with material that we had not seen before. We were also interested in so many new artists for us to pick over.  My friend bought Roberta Flack‘s debut album called First Take. 
I bought an Ella Washington album which included a minor hit named, He Called Me Baby. I love that song and I had the 45 RPM disc back in London.

Roberta Flack’s album contained a soulful rendition of English rebellious folk singer Ewan McCol's  The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. A beautiful song he wrote for his girlfriend back in the early 1950's named Peggy Seeger. (They later married and she is still performing.)

I remember seeing Roberta Flack performing music from the album on the Johnny Carson show.  However, Roberta was not well known until Clint Eastwood used her version of The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face as a background music for a romantic interlude in his 1972 movie Play Misty for Me.  The track was released as a single that year and  eventually topped  the Billboard charts.

In 1972, I bought a Mini 1000 and commuted to work in it; braving 16 lanes of Highway 401 and its daily chaos. I also often gave a ride to anyone who asked for one. Soon I had accumulated three regular companions and we packed into that little car, turned on the radio, usually to 1050 CHUM, and sang along to all the hits. Johnny Nash, I can see  clearly now, You're so vain Carly Simon and of course Roberta Flack among many more.

It was a wonderful year. My friends had returned temporarily to the UK for many months and I found crazy new companions in Toronto. Many born and raised there who exposed me to so many great new experiences.  It was the year I felt I had found myself as a genuine new Canadian; and Roberta Flack's song is forever associated with that initiation.

Conway Twitty

I was a teenage school boy in Northwest London when I first heard Conway Twitty sing It's Only Make Believe. I loved it. Linked to those great memories of sharing music tastes with other school friends. For awhile, when Conway went Country he lost favour with me, but in adulthood, I came to appreciate him once more.  
I was lucky enough to see him perform at the first country and western exposition in London in  early March 1970. It was just shortly before I emigrated to Canada. A friends mother worked at the old Wembley Stadium and adjoining showplace. The exposition had sold too few tickets, they gave every employee a couple of tickets; hence we got in for free.

So when I was in Nashville in the early 80's I couldn’t miss up the opportunity to go to Conway's home and as it turned out it was a museum about his rise to fame.  It was called Twitty city I love that name.

The site is now owned by Trinity Broadcasting Corporation and no longer functions as an homage to Conway Twitty. 
Another piece of Americana lost to the mists of time.