The Hilltoppers, “P. S. I Love You” (1953)
I just loved opening a record and smelling that wonderful smell. (Diane Schuur)
Extended play and long play records hit the market around the time I landed my first regular job, a paper route for the (now defunct) Cleveland Press, fifty customers. From nine through thirteen, I had subsisted on a measly fifty cents a week allowance. Now, at fourteen, I was suddenly –dramatically!— rich, clearing $6 to $7 a week at a time when that much money really meant something. (A 6-1/2 ounce bottle of Coke cost five cents then and Esther’s father used to buy her an ice cream cone for a dime.)
My parents covered my basic needs, so I had nothing, literally nothing, to spend my money on until I discovered girls a few years later, with the attendant cost in wooing them. In the meantime, I spent my money on subscriptions to science fiction and fantasy magazines like Astounding, Galaxy, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Beyond and I joined the Science Fiction Book Club, receiving a hardcover selection every month at a dollar a pop. I bought records too. Lots of them.
My parents insisted that I put money away for college each week. I did, but deferred gratification was never my game, so every cent they let me keep, I spent as quickly as I took it in.
That’s when I discovered pop music. What I liked most about pop music was that it was my music, not my parents’. The idea of targeted marketing to teenagers was just coming into view in the ’50s. The Depression was past. War rationing was a memory. Suddenly, teenagers had cash to spend on their own. They hadn’t quite reached that point in 1950 but soon companies and performers would cater directly to callow but affluent youth like me because we had money to spend burning a hole in our pockets and no long term commitments to direct it away from our immediate gratification.
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This long after the fact, it’s hard to say what appealed to me in the records I bought back then. Mostly, I bought whatever was on the hit list, plus whatever I heard on the radio or the dee jay had played at the last record hop.
Cleveland’s Bill Randle, the top dee jay in the country then.
I liked some singers and groups more than others but at heart all I really wanted was to stay ahead of the curve on the latest teen hits.
Record companies had just started exploiting the longer playing formats of 33 and 45 rpm. Columbia issued its first 45s in 1948, RCA Victor the next year. 33s took longer to catch on, probably because producers and listeners were habituated to the three-minute format of pop music. I started with 78s but soon converted to the longer play formats because they offered more music before you had to change records. I bought my own record player in the tenth grade. It was a boxy thing that handled all three speeds, 78 rpm (max. three minutes a side), 45 rpm (three to six minutes a side, or with a double album, twelve minutes on two discs), and 33 rpm (a humungous twelve to fifteen minutes a side). 78s and 33s fit directly on the spindle. For 45s, you inserted a metal or plastic disc in the center of the record to make it fit the spindle.
Dancing the Bunny Hop
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
Ray Anthony: “The Bunny Hop” (1952)
MUSIC & ME 