For my eleventh birthday I was given a small portable record player — one of those little numbers meant to play 45rpm singles but capable, at a stretch, of playing full-length albums. Along with the record player I received two singles: Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue” and “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition. Someone — I believe it was my uncle — thought I would listen to country music, AKA The Music Of Our People. For many years this was not the case, but in retrospect I am pleased and proud that the first record of my own that I played was by Johnny Cash.

Soon thereafter my grandmother took me to Rumore’s Record Rack to get my own first 45s. I chose “Laughing” by the Guess Who — though I soon discovered that I liked the B-side, “Undun,” better — and “Oh Well, Part 1,” by Fleetwood Mac, backed by “Oh Well, Part 2,” which puzzled me extremely. (N.B.: This is not the Fleetwood Mac you know, it’s something way cooler.)

Later that year, or early the next, I visited our local drug store — in those days many drug stores stocked a few records and some racks of paperback books — and bought my very first album: the first Allman Brothers record. I’m pretty proud of that. If I remember rightly, on that same visit I bought Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. So at age eleven I was reading The Godfather while listening to the Allman Brothers. What an awesome kid I was. 

That said, one of the next records I bought was by Grand Funk Railroad. So I had some room to grow.