What Were You Listening To?

[billvon]

One of my favorite posters on another forum started a thread entitled "what are you listening to?" so I'd start a thread about songs from people's pasts.  The first one from me goes back almost 40 years:

In 1976 my parents started to look at buying a new house.  With six people in a three bedroom house it was getting a little tight, but we couldn't really afford a new house.  We spent a lot of time in bank offices getting turned down for mortgages.

One of those times was an evening in the winter in Huntington, NY.  I didn't really want to sit in the bank with my parents so they let me go to the radio shack next door.  (I was 12 at the time.)  I saw a computer there - a TRS-80 - which is the first computer I got a chance to look at close up.  It was just set up for anyone to use.  I looked at the manual (also there) and it had a little program you could enter to calculate sales tax.  I tried it and - it worked!  I was hooked.

From that point on I started spending more and more time in radio shacks.  In the summer of 1978, when my friends were hanging out at the mall, I was going to the mall to get some time on a computer at the radio shack.  I got to know the store employees really well; they'd leave me there by myself when they went out to get lunch from the pizza place across the street.

My strongest memories of that summer were standing in front of that machine, listening to Gerry Rafferty sing "Baker Street" from one of the dozens of stereos on display in the store.  The stores themselves would change - I'd go to the radio shack in the Hicksville mall, in a store in Huntington, in Roosevelt mall, wherever I could manage to get a ride - but the music was the constant that summer.  That song still brings me back to the sight of that dismal little machine that back then was the coolest thing I had ever discovered.

=========

Winding your way down on Baker Street
Light in your head and dead on your feet
Well another crazy day, you'll drink the night away
And forget about everything

This city desert makes you feel so cold
It's got so many people but it's got no soul
And it's taken you so long to find out you were wrong
When you thought it held everything

=========