When putting the cart before the horse paid off
My friend Rahul and I recently exchanged messages praising the 1977 Fleetwood Mac album Rumours, particularly Lindsey Buckingham's gorgeous guitar in Never Going Back Again.
Which reminded me of how I started building my CD collection.
It was 1989 and I'd just arrived in New York as a student with no cash to spare. I didn't own a CD player (just a Walkman and speakers) and had no money to buy one. But I knew that I would one day, and didn't want to have just a measly few discs to play on it: once I bought a CD player, I wouldn't have had much left for groceries, much less CDs.
I decided that I would only buy a CD player once I had at least 25 CDs. Planning for the future was out of character for me. Friends laughed.
The first CD I bought was Dark Side of the Moon. Rumours was another. Steely Dan, Dire Straits, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, The Clash, Diane Krall, Eric Clapton, Donald Byrd, Ike Quebec, John Coltrane, Ry Cooder, Hariprasad Chaurasia and Bhimsen Joshi all featured in the first 25.
This took about six months. Then, through a series of coincidences, a Japanese businessman, recently arrived in New York, hired me to teach him English. 4 days a week, he'd come and tell me stories of his life in Japan and I'd gently correct his mistakes. He told me that he liked me because I was polite and didn't have an American accent.
At $20 a hour, it took me two months to save enough to buy a Denon DCD 830. Which I then connected to my Walkman speakers and played my 25 CDs.
It took me another six months to buy an amplifier and proper speakers, but that's another story.