The First CD I Ever Heard
Posted on | April 14, 2008 | No Comments
Editor’s Note: This started out as a post for Star Maker Machine but I misread the prompt and wrote about my first CD listening experience instead of a first music purchase. Instead of tossing the post, I’m throwing it here. A more traditional post is in the works.
Strewn across the bottom of my brain pan are a whole slew of musical firsts. The first album that was “mine”, the first mixtape I ever made, the first mixtape I received, the first time I *really* listened to Sgt. Pepper’s, the first time I pitched woo through song. From all of these precious memories, it’s hard to the choose the most important one. So I chose on song.
In 1988, I was seven and living in Yakima, a medium sized city in central Washington. One weekend, the parents threw my brother and me into the back of our crackerbox VW van and drove out to Seattle to visit their old school friends. One family we visited had a teenage son who was directed to entertain us while our parents talked. Not only did he have the inherent coolness of nearly-infallible teenage power, he also had all the newest toys. He was the first one to show us an 8-bit Nintendo, the first to show us a tree house, and the first to show us CDs.
The first CD he played that rainy day in his attic loft was R.E.M.’s Green. For a kid raised on Peter, Paul, and Mary; the early Beatles; the Beach Boys; and other safe fodder, R.E.M. was a revelation. Loud and awkward, the melodies were safe enough to embrace while being different enough to ensure the rest of the family would never like them as much. I became minorly obsessed with R.E.M. as a result. I hunted out bargain copies of old albums at every discount store my parents frequented. I pestered adults with questions about the biology of sleep. I even tried (unsuccessfully) to like the B-52s because they were from the same city.
To be honest, the magic of CDs was not particularly clear to me then and it was another seven years before I owned one myself. The first I ever purchased was a collection of John Williams tracks from Steven Spielberg films, but that is a different story.
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