Since I ran an article a few months ago regarding the hobby of taping off the radio, starting in the late 1940s and the growth of the home tape recorder. I thought I would post an update along with a sampling of what the average kid was most likely doing, glued to the radio on any given day in 1959.
I was hesitant to run it at first because nothing is complete and the frustratingly tantalizing banter by the legendary disc-jockeys of the time were put on pause in favor of whatever new song was being introduced, or racing up the charts – even at times missing song intros or fade-outs. Kind of a mess and I was certain to get a lot of complaints from readers who would question my sanity in running it in the first place.
Fact of the matter was; the post brought a lot of pleas for more – that this haphazard method of preserving history to some people was more common than imagined and that they in fact did it themselves.
To be honest, there are a couple hundred tapes just like this and they go from roughly 1958 to the early 1970s – all from the New York area.
So I thought I would run another one as a way of breaking up an otherwise contentious and loud week with some distractions by way of perhaps pleasanter times – whether we were in them or not – just fun to listen to and a lot of music that has long been forgotten, if in fact much of it ever made it to the charts in the first place.
Suspend the world for the next hour and seventeen minutes. Put yourself in the place of a kid, any kid – maybe you – your first tape recorder, most likely a present for Birthday or Christmas – with one free reel of tape and a determination to get as much music on that one reel as possible since, as you probably imagined at the time, buying the corresponding 45’s would be an expensive proposition. All your money in the future would go to buying more reels of tape and, in time, you would have a pretty healthy history of rock n’ roll on your shelves and the go-to place to bypass the outside world for an hour or so.
The stations (from what I was able to identify) were WINS, WABC, and a few stations from upstate New York – one disc-jockey stands out – the legendary Alan Freed and you get maddeningly frustrating samples of him at work.
Just a fun listen – nothing critical or demanding – a snapshot of being a teenager in the 1950s when you were smack in the middle of Rock n’ Roll and you didn’t want to miss a thing.
