My dad used to bring home duplicate 45s from the radio station he worked at. As he usually got home long after I had gone to bed, he would leave a little stack of singles on my portable record player for me to find in the morning when I got up.
I spent a good portion of my life playing records on that little machine, but the only thing I remember about it now is the blue fabric with metallic threads on the front. Even though it had a spindle on the turntable so that you could stack records up and play a bunch of them one after the other, I preferred to listen one at a time, A-side first, B-side second. I felt that it was my duty to the records (and, I guess, my dad) to listen to both sides of all of them. I even had a rating system and would stack the records I liked into the order that I liked them. Whenever I played a record, it would move up in the stack so that my favorites always stayed on top.
After a while I knew that it was pointless to listen to yet another Bert Kaempfert or Jackie Gleason Orchestra single, but I did it anyway just in case it happened to be something I’d play again. We got in a lot of 45s from Decca and Capitol, so I was always one of the first people in America to hear anything new by the Beatles, Beach Boys and The Who (among others). The really fun part of the whole endeavor was telling my dad which ones I liked and he would play those on the radio instead of some of the typical top-forty stuff. Other DJs were probably getting paid off to play certain songs, but my father played songs just to make me happy when I listened to him at night.
I still think deep down in my heart that “I Can’t Explain” by The Who was played for the first time in America on WICY in Malone, New York by my father, at my request.
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