Smelling the records at Streetlight. Memories of buying records on a Saturday morning

My parents used to get to the weekly shopping every Saturday morning, they liked to catch the shops before they got busy. Around 1973 I got 50p pocket money a week, and that was just enough to buy a single. Having just been entrusted with the huge responsibility of being able to spend 50p of my own money each week, the only thing I ever wanted to buy was records.

When I started buying records on a Saturday morning, they looked like the one above. I remember they went up to 53p a week due to the high 1970's inflation rates and I had to wait two weeks before getting one single, very annoying. So Saturday morning shopping time began to be associated with record buying around 1973 and it continued to be so, for a large number of years. I'd buy the record in the morning, gaze at it in the car on the way home, then rush upstairs to play it when I got home.

I love the 1970's record sleeves. I searched high and low through images on the internet of my favorite cover. It was the RCA paper cover that they had before they started using the one above. I remember it was very psychedelic, actually probably a little out of date by the time the early-mid 1970's came along, so I guess that's why they replaced it with this swirly design. But I loved the earlier one. I associate it with the incredible excitement of buying my first single, which was "Teenage Rampage" by "The Sweet". "Teenage Rampage" indeed, I was only 6! I dropped it just before I bought it, I can still picture it rolling on the floor, so it always had a crack in it that I had to smooth out before I played it. I can still hear in my mind, the beginning of Teenage Rampage with the little "click" that the crack in the record caused.

I used to buy my singles in Boots in Inverness. This is me outside of Boots in Inverness the last time I was in the city, although the photo is a bit of a cheat, the original was pulled down at the end of the 1970's. This is the new Boots which is part of the indoor shopping centre that was built on top of the old one.

Record Rendevous was just down the road from Boots, in Castle Street Inverness. I don't remember buying much here in the '70's, apart from "Whispering Grass" by "Don Estelle and Windsor Davis". Not as cool as "Teenage Rampage" ("I will not have gossip in this Jungle...."). I remember pronouncing "Record Rendevous" exactly as it was spelt, I had no idea it was a French word. There were always loads of Gaelic and Scottish country dancing records there. I remember being told that the local Gaelic community used to hang around there, I never saw them. This is poor old "Record Rendevous", obviously in it's last days in 2006. I'm glad I caught it on camera just before it went for good.


For reasons I'm not really sure about, I bought less records in the late 1970's and very early 1980's, I was probably too obsessed with science fiction at that time. But as the early '80's rolled on, the shop above became my Saturday morning ritual. I just found out actually that one of the guys in one of the bands I featured in www.kirkcaldybands.com, the Receiving End, worked here. This is Sleeves record store in kirkcaldy. I think it was called "Bruces Records" before it was called "Sleeves", I remember the bin outside still said "Bruces Bin". It was part of a little chain of record shops. I think there were three of them, I remember another was in Falkirk, I can't remember where the third one was. Towards the end of my school days, carrying around a bag with a vinyl album in it in a Sleeves bag, was almost compulsory, if you wanted to be cool. I remember being told off my one of my peers for carrying around a record in Boots bag, seems the Boots habit hadn't quite died.

Towards the middle of the 1980's I remember getting as much as 5 pounds pocket money a week, so one, or maybe depending how cheap they were, two records a week was possible. And as I could now afford albums, I didn't have to listen to the same thing over and over again on a Saturday afternoon. I bought loads of records here. I used to go in and browse and dream that one day I'd have enough money to buy as many records as I wanted. Although looking back I'm glad in a way that I didn't. Some of my musical taste is the same now as it was in the 1980's, some is very different. I'm not sure I really needed to spend money buying every Barclay James Harvest and Moody Blues records.

The ritual was pretty much the same though. Buy the record (always now an album) on a Saturday morning and listen to it on a Saturday afternoon. I don't have my 1980's diaries here, but I recall a diary entry made around May 1984 that said "bought and listened to for most of the day, Pavlov's Dog's "At the sound of the bell"". Now that's one I still listen to.

The above moody black and white shot was taken for the "Kirkcaldy Gallery" page of the original Kirkcaldy Bands website. It was taken in 2000.

Sadly, when I walked down from the train station towards the High Street in May 2004, I noticed Sleeves was empty and looked like it would soon be no more. So I took this shot with my then camera phone. It's obvious why I needed a new camera phone!


My first paying job in September 1986 was in an office block in a place called "Apex House", Leith Walk, Edinburgh. Opposite and up the road slightly was "Vinyl Villains" one of Edinburgh's premier second hand record stores. I think my first pay check was around 200 pounds. When I got it I went straight over to Vinyl Villans and bought 70 pounds worth of records. Thirteen years on from buying my first record, I obviously still thought money was just for buying records with. Vinyl Vllains was great, I hope it's still there. I bought tons of records there. Because it was a second hand place you were never sure what you were going to find there. I remember the excitement as I used to find, what was then, rare Peter Hammill and Van der Graaf Generator albums. One seemed so rare to me that I remember asking the guy to go and hide it behind the counter so that no one bought it when I went off to get money to buy it.


As the '80's turned into the '90's I still bought records, although I switched manly to CDs in the '90's. I still frequented music stores, mainly HMV and Virgin in Edinburgh's Princes St and HMV in Swindon's Regent St.

I got into online music buying very early. One of the constant frustrations of having musical taste that is not the average, was the lack of availability of material I liked in the regular music stores. So, having discovered "CD Now" which was one of the earliest on line stores and realising that you could just search for anything you wanted, I pretty much gave up on record stores after that, especially as the '2000's got going and I saw how amazingly cheap second hand CDs were on eBay and Amazon. The above pic is actually eBay's corporate headquarters, which is just down the road.

One of the huge problems of being a music fan in the '70's, '80's and '90's was the comparatively huge cost of music. No wonder illegal downloading for free got so popular. But with all these second hand CD's around, it seemed a lifetime away from being only able to afford one single every two weeks because they had gone up to 53p.

Having watched "24 hour party people" on the plane over to the UK last time I was there, and with the Ian Curtis biopic due out, I wanted to buy some Joy Division music. I was just about to reach for the iBook to buy them from Amazon, when I decided that I wanted to hear them today.

So then a radical idea struck me, why not go to a record store? And how more appropriate, I could buy then on a Saturday morning 34 years after I had first done this, and listen to them on a Saturday afternoon. So this is where I was today, Streetlight Records in Bascom Avenue in San Jose.

I remember first seeing that in America they put the CDs in these funny plastic holders to stack them in the racks in the stores on our many rummages through the record stores of Manhattan when we were in New York in 1990. I still have no idea why they do that.

Streetlight of course has tons of vinyl. I don't even have a record player at the moment, it's in storage in Edinburgh, so I didn't buy any. But they look great in the rack, much better than the CDs. I even picked up a second hand record and smelled it, took me right back to Vinyl Villains in 1986, somehow the old cardboard of the record covers smells great to me. Must be nostalgia.

I always used to straight to the "V" section in record stores, being a huge Van der Graaf Generator, Violent Femmes and Velvet Underground fan. I used to have to push past all the Eddie Van Halen to find the decent stuff.

Like often, and this is why I went so overboard on on line buying when I could, there was not even a Van der Graaf Generator section, but there was one old friend here today.




I didn't even know that they made vinyl records any more, other than the sort that DJ's use for "scratching", if that's the right hip term. So I was amazed to see this. I wish I had a record player now. This will probably explain where Marketa's songs are that are in the Movie but not "Swell Season".

So having bought the three Joy Division and one Ramones CD in Streetlight records this morning I have spent all this afternoon listening to what I bought this morning. Just like before, it's yesterday once more.

I love the 21st Century

When I was a child my first and most favourite toys at the age of 2 were plugs, just like the one below.



That may seem bizarre, but it's true - really. My Gran and many of her sisters had their houses upgraded to the new UK square pin standard. Like all thrifty Scottish people, they kept the old plugs, I have no idea why, you can't push a round pin into a square hole! In the age old nature verses nurture debate on how children develop, I'm undecided. Often parents will say, where did that interest come from? My friend thought this of his son. When you are very young, the whole world is mitigated through your parents. So why did I find plugs so fascinating? I particulaly liked the adaptors, I used to plug them into each other and out again to my little hearts content.


When I was 2 and a half, my cousin caught me on audio tape. It may have been my first performance! I can actually remember this. I also have found some images of what looks like the actual machine on the net, from a site called the "Rewind Museum". It was a mid 1950's machine made by a company called "Simon". He still has it, but I doubt if it's been used in 20 years,


I remember being utterly entranced by this gadget. What I liked most was the blinking green "Magic Eye" (remember them?). It was a sort of valve that had it's top set into the control panel of the tape recorder. The "eye" blinked on and off as the volume levels increased. It was a form of level control meter.


I have a copy of the recording. It was one of the very few from my cousin's collection that I could play in the slightly more modern early '70's Grundig machine that I had in the early '80's - the other tapes being too large to play on that machine.


I copied the 1969 recording onto cassette tape in 1982, then I copied the cassette tape to CD in 2001, then copied the CD to MP3 in 2005. So the recording went through 4 different recording mediums in 36 years!

What fascinates me about the recording, apart form the funny little "slice of life it captures from 1969; the voices of people sadly no longer with us, like my Gran saying at the beginning saying "what a waste of a tape" and a really funny little conversation captured between my Gran and my Aunt when they must have forgotten that the tape was rolling, lots of conversations about "stoking the fire" "putting coal on the fire", me handling "the poker", was my absolute entrancement with the tape recorder. It was magic to me. I was determined to work it! There is a lovely moment when my cousin is obviously getting concerned with me attempting to play with it and saying "yes there are knobs on the back, but they are too stiff for you to work", at which point, the recording goes dead. I had obviously figured out how to work it!


Gadgets like the one above then became the object of my desire as I got a little older as the '60's turned into the '70's. I wasn't able to find an image of it, which is a shame - my first record player was a blue and white 1965 HMV, with a BSR autochanger deck. It was my Mums, but she gave it to me in 1973, as I think she could see my musical obsession building even at that age. The above image is of the great '60's pop icon, the Dansette, which made record playing affordable for the Beatlemania generation. The image above is from http://www.dansettes.co.uk, truly Paradise for Dansette Fans! I didn't get my first Dansette until 1976.


When I first got the HMV, I got 50p pocket money each week and I used to be taken down to Boots in Inverness High Street to buy glam rock singles with my pocket money each week. I built up quite a collection, my favourite bands were "The Sweet" and "Mud". When most ordinary children were out playing on their space hoppers, I was stuck indoors with my HMV, which smelled just great! The longer it was on, the more the heat from the valves would dissipate throughout its casing as the machine heated up, making this smell I associate with my early musical passions. I love the smell of hot valves to this day. Though my Mum, obviously in a bid for a bit of peace, told me that if I played the HMV too much, it blow up. This sort of made sense to me at the age of 8 as it did get hotter, the longer it was on. So I limited my record playing to around 20 minutes at a time in case my precious HMV blew up. I'm happy to say it never did and I still have it, even though it is languishing in a storage locker in Edinburgh now. It's 41 years old, one year older than me! I did get my own back on my Mum though as, shortly after she told me about the possibilities of record player detonation, I told the babysitter not to watch the television for too long, as it may blow up too, and she believed me. She sat there in our mid 1970's living room with no telly, and as as we all know there was precious little else to do in the evenings in Inverness in the mid '70's!

I ended up collecting loads of electrical junk in the late '70's and early '80's. I still have some of it. I had two Dansettes, about 4 reel to reel tape reorders, three 1950's cabinet radios, and three (yes three!) 1970's televisions. What a valve obsession. I even used to like the fact they had to heat up, what kind of strange behaviour is that!


I still have the above radio. I got it in 1978 and it still works, as far as I know - it's wrapped in bubble wrap, in a storage locker in Edinburgh just now. One of my many 1970's TV's is behind it!


The early days of the home PC revolution completely passed me by. In the early '80's when friends were fascinated with the ZX 80, etc. I couldn't see the attraction. I think I associated computers then, with computer games. I had no interest in games, then or now. I got into computers slowly, via work. In 1990 I was given the an Olivetti twin drive floppy machine like the one above. The theory was, that I would learn how computer's worked and teach the others. This was only a partial success, some of the guys learned, some just left it all to me! But I learned loads of valuable things at this time. Like Dos commands and what "control alt delete" would do.

Having upgraded fairly frequently through the early 1990's my then employers, after some persuasion, let me take one of the replaced Zenith Data Systems 286's home around 1992. Really, having a computer at home in those days was not that exciting. I did a few personal business letters, started keeping spreadsheets to track my expenses (I still use the same format today!) and wrote up the details of who played what on the early Pooheads songs. Oh and I stated my novel, but only managed three Pages! Probably a blessing in disguise.


It wasn't until in 1996, after much more persuasion, that I was able to take home from work a machine that might conceivably connect to the internet, that it really got interesting. God knows how I managed to pull it off. I really had very little clue what I was doing. My then employers, having just replaced a Zenith 484DX with a mighty Pentium 1 (remember how great we thought they were at the time?) allowed me to take the 486 home. I bought a 28.8k modem and plugged it into the only socket on the back of the machine that seemed to fit the cable, and hoped for the best. I was amazed! Even though I only had one friend who I could send e-mail to (imagine that), I was hooked. The early internet was amazing to me at the time, you could only imagine the possibilities that this technology would bring.

The 486 could be horribly flaky. I was originally using the original Mozaic browser, and that would not display all the new fanged web pages properly, so I downloaded Netscape which worked well, apart from an odd error message, "integer divide by zero", which used to crash the programme. If you ask any good computer programmer "integer divide by zero", is complete gibberish! I also didn't realise what a sound card was. Internet radio was just, just beginning. There was a station from Ullapool I wanted to hear, but when I clicked on the link for the audio stream, nothing happened - I didn't realise I didn't have a sound card! Imagine computers without sound now.

The first computer I actually bought with my own money was a second hand Pentium 1 with, miracle of all miracles, a sound card!


But it wasn't until I bought the machine above in early 2000 at the height of the dot com madness, that things really got interesting. The Pentium 1 only lasted 18 months, it was kinda dumb to buy a second hand machine in a time of such technological change, but it was all I could afford at the time. The Pentium 1 did go on to have a worthwhile existence after me, as I gave it to my mate Ian, and it was his first computer - it lasted five years with him. I bought the above Dell in early 2000, at great expense. It let me create the original Kirkcaldy bands webpage, along with my very first stumbling attempts at home recording. Of course, it had the operating system from hell, Windows 98, installed, so there were many, many, many system crashes.


So, enter the 21st century now, and you can do things with technology that would have been pure science fiction when I was playing with round plugs, staring at magic eyes, and bopping to "Tiger Feet" as my HMV heated up. I'm really glad to have been able to live through such a period of fascinating technological change. Even better, I live in the heart of Silicon Valley where it all started, and to a great extent, where it all continues.

I was trying to imagine today, all the new things that would have been science fiction 30 years ago that technology has allowed me to do in the last 24 hours. We take the technology so much for granted now that it's difficult to articulate it all, but here is an attempt -

1. Shoot video with audio and take still pictures in the Fillmore, on a device small enough to fit in my pocket.
2. Send a text message to my friend who I had lost in the Fillmore.
3. Complete the alterations to my Kirkcaldybands webpage, which has allowed me to re-connect with some people I haven't spoken to in as much as 20 years.
4. Send mails to some people I haven't spoken to in years, who I have been connected to again via the website.
5. Get my pictures from the Fillmore uploaded, so a potential worldwide audience can see them.
6. Make my new music available to a worldwide audience, via www.andrewcrescent.com.
7. Listen to numerous BBC radio programmes and watch Gordon Brown on the BBC TV's Sunday AM, even though BBC is not available in the US (apart from the terrible BBC America), and I don't have a television.
8. Sit with my iTunes shuffle play on and randomly hear my entire music collection, allowing me to "stumble" over some songs that I had quite forgotten about, but are really rather good. Cases in point today as Yazoo's "Only You" and Kate Bush's "Flight of the Swallow".
9. Find the hair colour I wanted to buy.
10. Call my ex-girlfriend who was out in Glasgow celebrating her 40th. BTW Happy Birthday Silvana!
11. Write this piece whilst having no clue how top spell certain words, the computer just sorts it out for me.
12. Oh, and spending about 2 hours finding pictures of old technology and writing this piece.


Phew.

I still miss the valves, though both my iMac and iBook are warming up quite dramatically today - hope they don't blow up!

Welcome to Planet Zanak

This is in fact my fist post in Blogger. All the other material before this, was cut and pasted from Yahoo 360. Having been new to blogging in March, I briefly looked at Blogger, but for reasons I can't really remember now, I didn't really like it. I had a Yahoo account anyway, so I used Yahoo. Having looked at Google's Blogger again, I like it a lot better. The user interface is much more intuitive, and you need intuitive if you are going to have to cram in a bit of blogging into a busy life, and the template system makes it a lot more user configurable, which is nice - blogging is all about self expression, right?

I really like the way you can configure a unique URL in the Blogger domain. The challenge always is, try to find a word that no one else has used for your domain. OK - so geek alert! There are loads of words that writers had to make up to name planets and alien species in science fiction. So the name of the URL is actually from the first Doctor Who story that science fiction giant, Douglas Adams wrote. To be frank, it was a real mixed bag. Douglas Adams was a wonderful ideas machine. Some of his ideas I could sleep with under my pillow, he had such a unique mind. But sometimes, he couldn't really do plot. So I think he would sometimes write himself into a corner and not know how to get his characters out of the situation. The classic, which he spoke about himself, was in the "Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy", he had Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect thrown out of the Vogon ship into outer space. He had no idea how he'd get them out of that again. So he invented the "Infinite Improbability Drive", a spaceship that traveled through space, by generating fields of improbability. So, it would be pretty improbable for a spaceship to be able to pick up two hitch hikers, particulalrly picking up those hitch hikers in outer space in the seconds before they froze or asphyxiated to death, and particularly picking them up in the ship that's just been stolen by your half cousin, who used to be the president of the universe and has two heads. Douglas Adams - what a mind!

He did the same thing in Pirate Planet, but I think this script was more of a throw away than his Hitch Hikers stuff. So he painted the Doctor and Romana the first (not my favourite Romana!) into a corner, but just got out of it by some silly messing about in the Tardis. I remember being only mildly satisfied by this conclusion when I first saw it at the age of 12. It hasn't aged well since! The story did have some GREAT ideas though. A pirate captain who had some wonderful dialogue, like "by the great parrot of Hades", and "by the evil nose of the sky demon". It also had a hollow, space jumping planet, that materilised around smaller planets and ate all the goodness out of them - a rather improbable scientific possibility though, what if they wanted to eat a planet bigger than them? How did they cope with their climate changing all the time? OK I'm maybe taking this too literally......

So good old Douglas Adams, the ideas machine. Even from beyond the grave, he is amusing me with unique ideas, even providing me with a unique URL that no one else on blogger has used. My old Yahoo name was "Lochardil", which was the area I grew up in, in Inverness in the Highlands of Scotland. Imagine someone else having that already! I like Zanak better, though now I keep writing it, it does sound like it should be an expensive presciption drug! Google does not do anything much when you put "Zanak" into it - I wouldn't want to use a word that I thought was a harmless 1970's science fiction reference, but actually was slang for a perverse sexual practice!

So it took me about 2 and a half hours to do all the transferring from Yahoo to Blogger, so I have not been able to do any new posts until now. I haven't really decide how often I will post to by blog, we will see how we go.

The weather is wonderful here in the Bay Area now, I'm really looking forward to the summer. I'm trying to avoid using the air con in the apartment, but the windows have been open all night, and the temperature inside is stuck around 78F, so maybe I'll have to be a bad global warming creator and have some air con later - we all have to do our bit though.

And, happily, I'm over the jet lag already. After feeling pretty rotten on Tuesday, I was a lot better on Wed, then could hardly get out of bed at 06.00 am on Friday - hooray, back to normal. It's a beautiful day, and it's 7.52am on a Saturday morning and the Scottish Football is streaming on the internet (Dundee United, V Inverness, Dundee are playing better and are one up at half time, if you are interested......), lets see what the new day brings.