Sunday 13 May 2018

My Bruce Journey - Part 1


"If dreams came true oh wouldn't that be nice"

Originally posted on 10th January 2010
 
I first came across Bruce Springsteen in 1984. 


Mike(my husband) came to me with a dog eared copy of ‘Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits’, every album Donna Summer had released (including a very obscure one only released in Europe) and a cassette which he had recorded himself of his favourite songs.

Ahhhh cassettes - do you remember those. I was never really taken with the pre recorded cassette. I loved my LPs. I loved everything about them the size of them, the feel, the look but the great thing about cassettes was that you could buy them blank to record on yourself. Nearly everyone of my age from the UK will remember setting up the cassette with an external microphone propped up near the radio on a Sunday afternoon taping that week’s charts. You hardly dare breathe because the mic picked up every little noise: and all that stopping and starting so you didn’t get any talking in between records. Oh and how irritating when Tom Browne (who remembers him ? - I looked it up on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Browne_(broadcaster_and_actor) talked over the intro or outro of the one record you really wanted that week. The advent of the music centre made all this much easier but that story is for another time.

Anyway back to my tale.

I had fallen hopelessly in love with Mike so his favourites became the soundtrack to my life for a while. Music has always been important to me and knowing Mike’s taste was a way of getting to know him better. He later admitted they weren’t his favourites at all apart from one or two tracks!. The rest were just included to fill up the tape.

My record collection was a little more extensive - some Rod Stewart a couple of early David Bowie and lots of Motown. My music taste was moulded by the disco and pop of the seventies and yes I was a teeny bopper. A bit of a flighty soul though as I liked both David Cassidy and Donny Osmond - you were supposed to go for one or the other.

In my poverty stricken days of my late teens I sold a load of LPs to a second hand record dealer on Louth market. He didn’t give me much for them as I recall. David Cassidy, Donny Osmond,   The Bay City Rollers etc. went but I held on to a few faves including The Monkees which was the first album I ever owned - Davy Jones was a practice run for David and Donny. My brother bought the LP for me one Christmas or birthday and that makes it special. It hasn’t been played for years but I will never part with it.

So…1984 ‘Born in the USA’ … to be continued next week.





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