I must have been aware early on that you could buy a record. So I started to buy records I heard on the radio, that I liked. The first one was "Walk Right In" by The Rooftop Singers. And I kept on doing it, particularly after 1970 when I changed the station off the MOR format my parents listened to, to see what else was on the radio. And that's how it started. Buying songs I like. Then, I started reading about artists and who influenced them, and I started to buy records by those other artists. In the meantime, members of my family passed away, and I got their 78s from the '40s and '50s. In the '70s, before anyone at these stores bought a record price guide, I used to go to the Salvation Army stores and other charity outlets, and lo and behold, teenagers grew up and moved out, and their mothers gave all their records to the charity stores. I have hundreds of records from there that only cost me a dime, or a quarter for albums, some of which are all but impossible to find now. And there were 78s, too, in cardboard albums, or singly in paper sleeves, some were even unplayed. I found a Canadian pressing of "Good Rockin' Tonight" by Wynonie Harris on the King Maple Leaf label. This record is so scarce that in a book on rare records, they couldn't locate a copy of it to show you a picture! It cost a dime, too.
In the '70s, my voice changed to bass/baritone, and I started visiting radio stations and learning how to operate the equipment. Radio was a job that gave me access to all kinds of records, hundreds of them promo copies that had a different mix than the commercial issues. You could only hear them on the radio, but could not buy them. If you looked at a graph of the records I own, it would start in the 1910s and rise steadily through the late '60s and have a huge bump during the '70s when I was in high school, and it would gradually taper off until 1990.
I missed out on punk rock. During that, I was exploring the '50s and '60s. When I turned on the radio again, the first thing I heard was "Tainted Love" that some guy played on a synth with one finger. I checked out of the Top 40 again and played in bands. I missed out on hair metal, too, and when I turned on the radio again, the older stars were having their last gasp. By 1990, I realized that I had aged out of the demographic - new music was something unlike any previous music, like they were trying to write anti-pop songs, and they were not attractive to me. That was when I bought my last new single.
My special interest has been The Beatles, together and solo. I have thousands of records and CDs by them. In the years since, I've worked on buying the complete discographies of artists I liked on CD, and restoring many of the records I had - this is why I bought a computer in 1998. I heard it was possible to remove all the extraneous noise and lessen the surface noise, so I set about learning how. I still see my old works on the internet. I wish they would be traded freely, but a lot of people have made a lot of money off my work. In any case, there are thousands of people all over the world who collect my record restorations. I guess I did a pretty good job.
