October 7, 2005

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  Disclaimer: The music playing on this site is not on my server. I stole it from another website and have given credit in the sidebar. The song is “Come On, Eileen” from the year 1983, and is performed by the band, “Dexy’s Midnite Runners”. It is one of my all time favorite 80s pop songs.

  
  

  This is a Featured Grownups Blogring themed post on the decade of the 1980s. Read more posts HERE at Featured Grownups.

  
  

  

  
  

  I began the decade of the eighties as a record collector. I’m a music nut, and had most every song I loved on record. 100 percent vinyl, on LP format, which played at 33-1/3 revolutions per minute on a machine called a “record player”. I didn’t collect what were known as ‘singles’ or 45 RPM records, but albums. I had (and still have) a lot of rare albums which contained hit singles. I liked the way all my 12″ vinyl records stacked up neatly in my record cases. I even had a “record browser” which I had taken from one of the retail stores in which I worked. By the dawn of the decade, I’d amassed about a thousand vinyl records. Each weekend, with paycheck in hand, would see me haunting the record stores across the southland, from Pasadena to Manhattan Beach, in search of the all important “DJ cutout”, which were promotional copies of new albums sent to the radio stations, and then sold for a buck or less, at a time when new music sold for the unheard of price of $7.99 with new shrinkwrap at the major retailers like “Licorice Pizza”, “The Wherehouse”, and “Music Plus”.

  
  

  Each week I would “stock up” on music both old and new. I had a television set, but home video was only beginning to be invented at the time, so my tv didn’t get much of a workout. My two turntables in my apartment did, however, and I played DJ for our apartment building throughout most of the latter half of the “smiley face decade” of the 70s.

  
  

  The “Smurf decade” or “MTV decade”, as the 80s would be known, arrived with a whimper, and I was happy collecting my records. Unbeknownst to me, however, Sony had developed a new music delivery system called the “compact disc”. Soon, the record stores were stocking these new “digital” creations, which were smaller, held more music, and could be played by a laser instead of a diamond stylus, on a machine called a “CD, or “compact disc” player. Audiophiles across the country and the world threw their disdain on this new product, and within five years, the vinyl record started to get scarce, and then almost disappeared completely. CD’s started flooding the record stores, and some artists would “debut” their album on CD instead of record. I thought this new “format” would die a quick death and quickly go away, and I still collected my “records”, until they started to disappear.

  
  

  Needless to say, I didn’t collect much music during the decade, as the whole music industry switched gears almost overnight, and the little plastic “CD sleeves” started showing up next to the album sleeves in the record stores. I was listening to a lot of pop music at the time, as well as rock and roll by artists who disdained this new format, so I was allright for a while. When a record would come out on CD that I wanted, friends would “tape” the CD for me on “cassette tapes” so I could listen to them in my tape player in the car.

  
  

  Also around this time, home video took it’s first babysteps, and I had always wanted to buy movies on “videodisc”. The RCA company invented a machine called a “CED Videodisc” player, which played movies on discs that resembled long playing records, so I could store them next to the 12″ albums already in my collection.

  
  

  In the eighties, another thing happened to music which didn’t set too well with us audiophiles. First we had to suffer the “tinniness” of the new “compact discs” which just didn’t sound as “real” or as “warm” as vinyl lps. Probably we were just not used to hearing music without scratches and hiss, pops, and jumps, so the new format was strange and foreign to us. The second thing that happened to music was the proliferation of “music videos” and the new cable television station “MTV” or “music television” played heavily rotated promotional films for the music on the CDs.

  
  

  I saw my first “music video” at a Dave Edmunds concert in 1978 at the Roxy club on Hollyweird Blvd. in Hollyweird. Before the concert began, music videos were projected like a movie on a screen at the front of the club. MTV would take these promotional videos and play them like records over and over again on their cable channel. Kids ate this stuff up. I was an old man in my 30s by then, and the whole music scene seemed to change overnight. The music changed too. Bands like A-ha, A Flock of Seagulls, and the ubiquitous Duran Duran took over the world, and slowly but surely, Rock music started it’s slow but sure downfall in a blend of synthesized pablum for the masses.

  
  

  Sometimes I take out my vinyl records, and play them on my computer, which I think is the funniest thing that somebody can do with their old record collection. I still have a “turntable”, although the diamond stylus didn’t cost me $250.00 which is what I once paid in the 70s for a “top of the line” audiophile component. Now the “stylus” has been replaced by the laser, and the crunching and grinding of an actual “turntable” or “record player” has been replaced by the sound of “nothing”. Now that the 21st century is here, a full 20 years after the ancient CD technology of the 80s, music is stored on little cigarette case sized players called “ipods” and the music only exists in bits and bytes on memory cards.

  
  

  I still love music, and I finally did start collecting the “new” CDs in  about 1989, almost a decade after they had been introduced. I never “watched” MTV, and still don’t like “music videos” or what they have done to the latest generation of movies, which are directed for the most part by people who got their start in MTV directing videos.I probably have about 800 CDs in my collection now. I keep most of them in a “jukebox” and even played them in the car in the “pre-ipod” days.

  
  

  I always say I “missed” the 80s, because I stopped drinking and partying like I did in the 70s, and I was employed by a series of retailers which kept going out of business. I still didn’t watch much television, because as I mentioned, I was really into home video, amassing lots of CED videodiscs, and Beta videotapes, which are two formats which aren’t around anymore.

  
  

  As the years go by, they seem to introduce new formats at a more rapid clip. Who knows what the children of today will be listening to in 10 or 20 years. I just hope my turntable still works, so I can play my Go Gos and Madness lps, which I never duplicated on CD.

  
  

  I wonder, did those Smurfs ever cut a record? I have a real big hit from the long ago 70s called ‘Sugar Sugar’ by the cartoon group “The Archies”. It was number one in America for almost two months straight. I don’t know if it were released on CD or can be downloaded to my ipod, but it probably can, somewhere in time.     Click here for a “history of the CD. ”                                                              

  
  

   

  • 8:14 pm
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