itunes 30-some years ago.....

I was talking with Sara a couple of weeks ago in the car about the way listening to music has changed in my lifetime. It's gone from albums and 45s, to 8-tracks, to cassettes, to CDs, to digital - all in the span of about 40 years. She acted interested in the conversation, but I know behind those eyes was a "so?" thought or two.

I mentioned how I wasn't able to take my music with me and listen to it in the car when we went on vacation in the late-'60s and early '70s. Where would you put a turntable in a car, and how would you keep the tonearm still? Now the girls just download their music, transfer it to their iPods and listen on the fly. And when they want to torture me with Justin Timberlake or Hanna Montana, they just plug in the adapter and listen to it through the van's sound system.

I, of course, didn't have iTunes growing up. But none of us did, so it wasn't like I thought I was missing anything. I had my own version of iTunes. I had a Sanyo 15 watt receiver and a Realistic (Radio Shack) cassette tape deck in my room. I bought these, along with some Pioneer speakers , with money earned from my paper route. And Santa brought me a BSR turntable for Christmas. Because I'd spent all my money on this unbelieveably expensive sound system (seems like my part was just over $300 for all of it), I didn't have alot of discretionary income to purchase albums, 45's and cassettes. So I'd listen to 101.5 WQUT and wait for the DJ to announce the next song. If it was a song I liked, I'd hit the "record" button on my cassette deck just in time and catch the whole song. On Saturday nights the station would play the latest albums in their entirety without commercial interruptions. That was like striking gold for me because a blank cassette cost me $3 and the album would usually run around $12-15.

See? I was even cheap when I was a teenager.....