First love never dies

Yesterday while driving I was listening to this show on a radio channel here about the first tape one’s bought. Boy, that made me think!!!

I remember that I asked my mother, I think I was 12 or something to buy me a cassette player and I went with her to a shop nearby and bought one of those 2 rooms stereo cassette players, I even remember the brand name, if it is even a brand…It was called International. Well, that was it! I had my stereo, just that I had no cassette to listen to so I went to a store nearby that was our local half bookstore/half anything else that had anything to do with paper, pens, cassettes, whatever…

I didn’t even know what to buy, you imagine that back then, in Romania we didn’t have any music televisions to give the children any musical taste, even a bad one. So, for I don’t remember what reasons I picked a tape (that was as much as I could afford at that moment, I was 12 or 13), payed for it and went home to listen to it.

Imagine that the tape I picked was Jimi Hendrix!!! Without any musical culture at that moment, with a dubious musical taste and nobody to lead me through music (my mother didn’t have anything to do with music, so…) I picked something that was out of my league for that age…

I played that tape wanting so much to love it, to have something to speak about the next day with my colleagues…but all that I could get was a head ache (no kidding, it is real!) I could not listen more than one side of the album. I don’t even know what album was that!

How unfortunate was that? One of the most important electric guitar players of all times to make such a bad impression on me? I totally hated it and switched to rap music, which I listened until I was about 16 I think when rock music asked it’s share…

A few years later I tried to come back to listen that tape, but I still didn’t like it. I think that the first impression counted a lot in my case since, despite the great appreciation that most guitar players show to Jimi Hendrix and despite my intellectual appreciation for him, I still don’t like his music. If somebody asks me, I rather say I like other kind of guitar players, and it is true, but I think that it is really related to this first experience with rock music, is related to that first tape I bought…

So, do you remember the first cassette you’ve bought? Or was a vinyl?

What’s your story?

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