When Rachel asked me to contribute to this column, I was immediately keen on the idea. I’ve often spoken fondly of that first full-length album, Sly & The Family Stone‘s album Fresh. Now, I have to frame things for you slightly because, really, we’re talking about an entirely different era and time. Yet just as if it had happened yesterday, I can remember as vividly as any event of my life the day I bought that record.
I turned four years old in 1973, and of all the toys my mom & dad had bought for me, the one I had taken to most readily was my Fisher-Price Turntable (which looked an awful lot like this one ). My brothers Charles & Steven were teenagers at the time & both of them had already amassed collections of records, some of which they had grown tired of. Several of my father’s clients worked for record labels and/or record manufacturing plants here in Memphis. From time to time, dad would bring home these boxes of LP’s and 45’s and give them to my older brothers. Being finicky teenagers, they didn’t really care for most of them, so I would always end up with a cache of these second-hand records. In retrospect, I wish that I had already known how to take better care of most of those records; a lot of them (it would turn out) are now out-of-print Stax/Volt classics, promotional items from Warner Brothers, Columbia, Hi Records, Motown, Tamla, Harvest, Playboy, and other various labels.
But, I digress. On the occasion of my fourth birthday, dad told me that I could buy a record album (as they called them) of my very own that I would get to pick. I remember that there was a song which played on the radio that I liked a lot called “If You Want Me To Stay”, and I used to get really excited whenever it came on. So there, on my fourth birthday, they took me over to Zayre, a store kind of like what would be like K-Mart or Wal-Mart today but on a much smaller scale. I remember pouring over the racks of records and affixing on the one with the guy in the leather jumpsuit doing a jump kick on the cover. It just so happened that record had my favorite song on it, and that would be my fourth birthday present.
On that day, when I got home with my record in tow, I remember how my brother Charles taught me how to care for records properly. He taught me how to carefully remove the record from the inner sleeve and place it gently on the turntable, how to put it back in its case, how to hold the center with one hand and the edge with the other so as not to get fingerprints on the vinyl. As I became fixated on the album, I also became fixated on taking care of records so they would last a lifetime. Though it’s been played a great deal since 1973, I still have my original copy of Fresh on vinyl, and it remains one of my favorite albums of all time.
At the age of 10, E.J. Friedman’s first job was a weekly DJ gig at the original Silky Sullivan’s in Overton Square where (according to a piece from the Memphis Press-Scimitar) he would “prod patrons to disco.” A graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, he began splitting his time between working in film & television production and writing the music blog Loudersoft in 2006. E.J. loves the sound the needle makes in his headphones when it drops and hits the first groove. He approves the usage of ‘disco’ both as a noun and a verb.
