Do you have any of the Beatle’s CDs hanging around? I do. The thing is, most of the music I own, I have purchased and downloaded electronically. There was a time, however, that going to your local music store was the only way to get your music. I remember the other day, I tried to explain the concept of the LP and 8-track to my children… That was fun!
It’s funny how, regardless of the fact that only a few years separate one invention from the other, it can be enough for children nowadays to be unable to figure out how stuff like that worked. I told my kids the stories of how I used to go to the record company with my father, and that got them interested. Initially, I couldn’t figure out why. Parents in those days had a little bit more free time. The jobs were not as demanding, and it was possible for many families to have a comfortable life with only one of the parents working.
Going to the record company was one of my favorite activities. Back then, artists did not come out with a new LP or cassette-only after a year or something. So, you would anxiously wait to get your hands on the new record, which in the case of the LP, you would play until it was beyond scratched. We had a lot of records back then, the ones I remember the most were, records from Frank Sinatra, Bruce Springsteen and of course, The Beatles.
My father was a young man when The Beatles were very popular. He used to tell me these stories of when The Beatles were performing, and at first, I thought he was exaggerating. He used to tell me that there would be a long line of ladies waiting to maybe say hi to them and that when they finally came out, many of them would faint upon seeing them. I mean, I’ve seen some pretty hysterical reactions at concerts, but fainting?
Anyway, my father had a very impressive Beatles-LP collection. It was the largest one in our neighborhood. He would take pride in taking care of his records and would tell anyone that he owned every single record they had made. He even had the very rare ones that they had recorded secretly, those he never played.
To my surprise, I recently found a video of a record that Paul recorded. This record was recorded around 1965 and it features several Christmas songs. I told my father about it, and it turned out he didn’t have it. I listened to the video and the way it sounds, just gave me goosebumps. If you are a Beatles enthusiast, this is something you don’t want to miss.
