Tales From The Back Pages

itinerantvae:

river-b:

ifshehadwings:

clio-jlh:

heidi8:

dontbearuiner:

airspaniel:

badndngirl:

speakerwiggin:

If you are old enough to have had cassette tapes before CDs existed, what were the first CDs you got when you got your first CD player? Were they new albums, or upgrades to your collection?

I was fourteen when I got my first CD player, all my friends had had them for years, and my first CDs were Revolver by The Beatles and a John Lennon’s Greatest Hits. I mean, at the time? That afternoon? Pretty much the greatest thing that had ever happened to me.

I was about 10 years old, and my first CD was “The Simpsons Sing the Blues.”  My second was a copy of the score for Jurassic Park, which I had already burned through two cassette tapes of.

I received my first CD player for my 12th birthday.

My brother gave me The Best of Blondie, and The Best of The Cars. I also had Annie Lennox’s “No More I Love Yous,”  that I’d received as a give two years prior, but had no way of playing.

“The Simpsons Sing The Blues,” however, was one of my favorite cassettes.

That, and The Beatles Vols 1 and 2. 

I am pretty sure that the first CD I bought, just before going off to college, was Temple of Low Men by Crowded House.

I got a CD player for high school graduation, and I bought the first four Beatles CDs: Please Please Me, With the Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night, and Beatles for Sale.

I think my family may have had a CD player for a little longer, but I remember a lot of CD’s coming into the house around when I was 8 or 9.  I bought my first CD for myself when I was 9.  That was Ace of Base’s The Sign :-) 

Bonus fun fact! Last time I was home, I imported one of our oldest CD’s into my itunes.  It was so old it had literally no metadata. 

I saw my first ever CD in a glass case on the sidewalk outside a department store in West Berlin when I was 14, and it looked like something from science fiction. I got my first CD player at a sidewalk sale when I was 16, and had bought I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got and The Lion and the Cobra two days before in preparation. They were new albums rather than updates of my cassettes. 

That would have been… hmm. The RSC’s 1992 recording of The Beggar’s Opera, which I previously had on cassette, and the first CD I played in my first CD player was a birthday present - Take That’s Everything Changes.

My parents had a CD player a little before that, but those were their CDs, not mine.

I clung to cassettes for a pathetically long time.  I don’t remember if it was actually the first CD I bought/received but the first CD I remember owning and listening to a lot was Oasis’ (What’s the Story) Morning Glory. And I know I bought the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack on both cassette and CD because I couldn’t decide which I wanted it on.  

And then my first car which was handed down to me in 1998 only had a tape deck so I continued to actively listen to cassettes until it died in late 1999. 

For all my love of music my CD collection never got very big as I was living in college dorm rooms/tiny corners of shared living spaces in the late 90s - early 2000s and transitioned very smoothly into digital music being the norm in the early/mid 2000s.

I still own cassettes and vinyl and have a digital music collection so large it’s spread across multiple devices. The stack of CDs I hung on to fit on a quarter of a small shelf in my bedroom.