The Magic Machine

By whiteray

Sometime in the spring or summer of 1964, my dad brought home a magic machine: A silver-grey RCA portable stereo.

We didn’t really have a place for it. At first, it sat awkwardly on the floor near my dad’s rocking chair in the living room, extending one of its speakers into the open space between the living and dining rooms. Then, if my memory serves me, it sat on the floor in the dining room, near the bookshelf where we stored a small but growing collection of LPs.

Eventually, in the autumn of 1967, it found a permanent home in a newly built rec room in the basement, when the rough, open play space that my sister and I had enjoyed with our friends for about ten years was transformed by Dad’s hard work into a paneled rec room suitable for teenage gatherings of her friends and mine.

Now, it wasn’t the stereo – our magic machine – that brought music into my life. Music was already a large part of me. By the time 1964 rolled around, I’d been taking piano lessons for three years; in 1958, when my sister was eight and I was five, my folks had bought a 1902 Wegman upright, and she’d started taking lessons. Hearing her unlock the mysteries of its eighty-eight keys made me want to do so, too, so I begged and wheedled my parents until, finally, when I was seven, I began to also take lessons from Mrs. Kiffmeyer down the street.

And the silver magic machine wasn’t our first record player. There was a 78-rpm player in the basement play space, with a collection of kiddie records typical of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and some classical records discarded from the library of St. Cloud (Minnesota) State College, where Dad worked. And upstairs in Mom and Dad’s bedroom was an old 45-rpm player, on which my sister and I listened to our first Beatles record – “I Want To Hold Your Hand/I Saw Her Standing There” – in February 1964.

So, there was music in my life even before the magic machine found its place in our front rooms. The most recent addition to my musical life had come in the spring of 1964, when I’d begun to play the cornet, a brass horn with the same fingering and key as a trumpet but with a slightly different design.

But the RCA portable unlocked something in me, and it did its work especially after it found its place in the rec room. The performers I listened to shifted over the years. Trumpeter Al Hirt was the first, followed by Herb Alpert and his Tijuana Brass. There was soundtrack artist John Barry and his work on the James Bond films. Then, when I was sixteen in 1969, I tipped to the Beatles, and then came Chicago, the Bee Gees, Eric Clapton, Delaney & Bonnie, Joe Cocker, the Allman Brothers Band, and more and more.

The music I love has provided a soundtrack for my life since those days in the mid-1960s, and that’s the kind of thing I plan to write about here during my once-a-week turns for the Consortium of Seven. I’ll write about music, and I’ll write about memory, because they are entwined. I’ll offer pieces that are newly minted, and I’ll pull things from the archive created by thirteen years of blogging, a well of about 2,200 posts.

And I’ll share music. One of the first records I ever owned was Al Hirt’s 1963 album That Honey Horn Sound. One of its tracks, “Java,” was a Top Ten hit in early 1964, and hearing it inspired me when I began to play horn in the spring of that year. Early in the morning on my birthday that September, my sister ducked downstairs and cued up “Java” on the RCA, then came running upstairs to our customary birthday celebration, with the sounds of the tune telling me she’d given me the Al Hirt album for my birthday.

Now, I liked “Java” a lot (and still do), but the first of many musical awakenings came that evening, when the stereo’s needle went to the opening track on the album, Hirt’s take on the standard “I Can’t Get Started,” an entry in what we now call the Great American Songbook.  As Big Al leaned into the song, his horn swooping and soaring in and around the melody, I was lost, pulled into the music for the first time I can remember, with thousands and thousands more of those moments to come, thanks to that first magic machine and to the other magic machines that have come my way in the past fifty-some years.

Here’s Hirt’s take on “I Can’t Get Started” from 1963’s Honey In The Horn.