Re: (TV) First recorded Television moment

["Rex Broome" <rexbroome@gmail.com>]

I got into "pop" music in general, having previously written it off as lame,
in 1986 or 1987 (which probably explains why I thought it all sucked).  For
various reasons the gateway drugs were Talking Heads and R.E.M.-- I had
grown up on folk and country and like the immediacy and guitarrishness of
those genres but wanted something weirder, and smart.  As my interests
spiralled outward from those two bands, I real a lot about them and and a
lot of interviews with them, and Television kept coming up (I was reading
the current version of Creem along with Musician, Spin, Rolling Stone, and
any rock reference books I could score).  Everything I read about them made
them sound like something I had to hear.  I lived in the sticks, in West
Virginia; the closest record store was in Cumberland, MD, about 45 minutes
away and me too young to drive.  But I took to "special ordering" stuff from
the catalog at Camelot Records-- remember that, they used to have a giant
dog-eared book for customers to peruse, with alledgedly every record in
print, from which you could order"?  So anyways, I ordered MM on cassette
(which was my format at the time) along with some other stuff and waited
impatiently for them to call me.  They never did.

Meanwhile, in the cutout bin at GC Murphy's department store a a little
closer to home, amongst great heaping loads of Musical Youth and Kenny
Rogers, I discovered a copy of "Dream Time" for maybe $2 on vinyl.  Took
that home, recorded it onto a cassette.  By that time I'd heard Echo & the
Bunnymen and almost loved them, but something seemed to be missing.  "Dream
Time" was like Echo & the Bunnymen with that missing "something" and then
some.  I was also entirely taken with the lyrical style and content.  This
was exactly what I'd been looking for-- although I could only listen to it
on headphones, as I was pretty sure that if my parents heard Verlaine's
voice, they'd think there was something really wrong with me.

A few months later I went back to Camelot Music and there in the cassette
section was Marquee Moon.  So I'm all, fuckers, I know this is the copy I
ordered, and they never called me... what if somebody else had bought it.
And then a second later I'm all, oh, nobody else was going to buy this---
that's why I had to order it to begin with.  So I took it home and listened
to it forever.

Summer of '88 I did summer school at Northwestern and scored Flash Light on
cassette and Adventure on red vinyl (which I couldn't listen to until I got
back to West Virginia). I wasn't able to fill in the rest of the gaps until
later, when I moved to LA, but the first two I ever heard remain my
favorites, almost equal in my esteem.

-Rex
--------------
To post: Mail tv@obbard.com
To unsubscribe: Mail majordomo@obbard.com with message "unsubscribe tv"