Music (Premium)

I’ve been a music lover my entire life. Literally: I received my first album, Mister Rogers’ Won’t You Be My Neighbor, at such a young age that my mother had written my original name, Paul McKiernan, on it in her careful script and then later had to cross out the last name and replace it with “Thurrott.” I was adopted---and legally changed my name---when I was three years old, so the album must predate that.

Helping matters, my stepfather, for all his other problems, was also a music lover, and I grew up surrounded by original albums from 60s bands like The Beatles, The Doors, and The Rolling Stones. I would sing along to music on the pop radio stations my parents preferred, and in 1979, when we spent a summer in Washington D.C., I bought an album for myself for the first time: The soundtrack to the first Star Wars movie. I also received Barry Manilow’s Greatest Hits as a Christmas present that year.

But my music buying experiences took a leap forward in 1981 when I was able to go out into the world by myself and visit local record stores like Popcorn and Strawberries. The first pop/rock album I ever bought was Billy Joel’s Glass Houses, and the first three singles I purchased on vinyl were Stars on 45 (by the Stars on 45), Kiss on My List by Hall & Oats, and The One That I Love by Air Supply. Suffice to say, I’m a bit prouder of that album choice than I am by those singles.

As a child of the 1980s, I was influenced by all the usual rock, pop, and (occasionally) dance music of the day, was a disciple of MTV from the moment that cable TV arrived in Dedham (and was a fan of Friday Night Videos before that). I can’t really explain or apologize for any of that beyond noting that some of it still holds up today while much does not. What can you do?

From a purchasing perspective, I had some rules. Singles were easy enough: If I liked a song, I’d just buy the single. But albums, which were much more expensive, required some thought. So I determined that I wouldn’t buy an album unless I knew that I liked at least three of the songs. (I guess is that albums were roughly three times as expensive as singles? I don’t remember.)

In buying albums, I quickly determined that many albums had great first halves and forgettable second halves. But I was particularly fascinated by the concept of “perfect albums,” those albums you could listen to from front-to-back without skipping any songs. Glass Houses was such an album, so I set an unfairly high bar by making that my first (pop/rock) purchase. AC/DC’s Back in Black. Asia’s first album. Boston’s first album. And so on. I was a huge fan of the Beatle’s Red and Black albums, which were basically dual-album collections of the band’s greatest hits from their earlier and later periods, respectively, and often switched back and forth about which I liked better.

All that early music, of course, was purchased on vinyl: 33-rpm albums and 45-rpm singles. And ...

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