Rockers and Their First Record

Before booze, pills, and powders, countless rock stars experienced a natural high when they bought their first record. Back in the day, saving enough pennies to splurge on a record was a source of pride to a teenager. What they heard indoors was more exciting than what existed outside of their home. This was the case for a 13-year-old lad in Worcestershire, England, who recalled:

“I used to deliver newspapers, and I got enough money to send off to King Records in Cincinnati. I got the original pressings of James Brown’s Live at the Apollo— a voice that’s absolutely unbelievable. And then, whoop, some crackling radio underneath my pillow gives me Smokey Robinson singing ‘Way Over There.’ What’s this? This is people letting every single breath that they’ve got out. It’s just too much. I had to try and get there. So many white kids, English kids — we had no culture. We had no points of reference, really, apart from these hazy radio signals fading in and out depending on the weather over your mom and dad’s house. We just ate it up and just tried to get it like that. We all failed miserably.”

That former paperboy was Robert Plant.

In 2020, to promote Record Store Day, Paul McCartney confessed: ‘‘‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ was the very first record I bought. I saved up all my pocket money and I went down to the city center in Liverpool. There was a little shop called ‘Currys’, and it was really an electrical goods store, but in the back, there was a little record booth, and I knew I could get the record there. And I took it home and played it to death.”

Paul later recorded his take of Gene Vincent’s ditty on his 1991 album Unplugged (The Official Bootleg).

The first records purchased by two of his Beatle bandmates featured lyrics that foreshadowed the zaniness of some future Beatles songs (i.e., “You Know My Name (Look Up My Number).” A young Ringo’s first love was Charles Penrose’s “The Laughing Policeman,” which features  Charles crazily cackling between verses like:

“I know a fat old policeman/He’s always on our street/A fat and jolly red-faced man/ He really is a treat.”

John Lennon became a first-time record buyer on his 16^th birthday when he bought Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog” and the wacky “The Ying-Tong Song” by The Goons (a British comedy troupe featuring Peter Sellers). Tom Barry, a current teacher at Liverpool’s Quarry Bank School, where Lennon spent his teenage years, recently revealed that John was a terror. He would sing the Goons’ tune as he bullied others:

“Hear the crazy rhythm driving me insane/Strike your partner on the buns
Ooh! I felt no pain!”

In 2011, Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts told BBC Radio 6 Music that his favorite music to play was jazz. “The first record that was mine that I fell in love with was a thing called ‘Flamingo’ by a saxophone player called Earl Bostic. I was into jazz straight away. That was my uncle’s. Then, soon after that, I bought a record called “Walkin’ Shoes” by Gerry Mulligan.”

Records have always been great teaching tools for budding musicians. One musician who blossomed into a superstar by mimicking the music he heard on records was Tom Petty’s guitarist, Mike Campbell. Campbell noted in his excellent autobiography, Heartbreaker, that he grew up poor, and at fifteen, his record collection was very sparse.

“I owned two records. Something New by the Beatles and Beach Boys Concert.” Mike learned to play by ear and play like Beach Boy Carl Wilson. “I thought Carl Wilson must have hands like [wrestler] Killer Kowalski. I would imagine him gripping the neck of his Rickenbacker with a left hand like a gorilla’s. How else could he do it? I found a How to Play the Beach Boys guitar book for a dollar. It had pictures of Carl Wilson’s hands demonstrating the chords he played on Beach Boys’ hits.”

Keith Richards summed up why certain songs that stand the test of time are also some record buyers’ “first time.” “I think the first record I bought was Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally.’ Fantastic record, even to this day. Good records just get better with age.”

-Mark Daponte

Photo: Robert Plant (Getty)