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My First Job... My brother, who is 5 years older than me had a small collection of 45rpm records and his friends all had larger collections. We did (however) have a reel-to-reel stereo tape recorder. This allowed my brother to record what he wanted and create a custom song list. That had to be around 1965. That tape recorder got lots of use as my dad had movie sound tracks, Broadway shows and some jazz style dance music. My brother mostly listened to popular music of the late 50's to early 60's. I was learning to play guitar and they bought some Chet Atkins guitar records that drove me crazy... although Chet was a fantastic guitarist, into his style of music, it was too complex for me. Folk songs bored me to tears and it wasn't until The British Invasion (Beatles, The Animals, Gerry & The Pacemakers, The Kinks, The Yardbirds) that I started listening to music that appealed to my taste. When a musical group appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, we had the tape recorder to catch their performance. First it was with a microphone resting on a pillow near the console speaker, but that often picked up noise in the room... One time my mother was clearly heard telling me to wash the dishes !! My dad got the idea of a direct connection with clips to attach to the speaker wires. Instead of a microphone, there was a long cord with a transformer and resistor circuitry that dropped the volume going to the recorder as the speakers had too much power to go into the recorder. This allowed us to practice songs directly from tape. After a few months of learning songs, I joined a group that would play music in the hotels on Miami Beach. Our parents volunteered taking turns driving up to these engagements. Real simple, you contact the entertainment director and get him to listen to a tape of the band. If you were good enough (and we were) he would write you in on his calendar with available time slots to play poolside in the summer when were on vacation. You set your gear up, play for 20-30 minutes, pass the hat for donations, then play a few more songs before packing up and heading to the next hotel. We could do this 5 or 6 times a day, everyday. It didn't cost the hotels anything to provide music as the tourists would tip the band when they liked what we played. All the money we collected got split equally between the band members. It was great I remember coming home and laying my wrinkled money on an ironing board and ironing every dollar I made perfectly flat. When I had a stack, my dad would drive me to the bank so I could make a cash deposit !! . |
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My first job... 
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