O.K. This was a long, long, time ago and I can’t be certain all the facts and numbers are 100% accurate, but for the sake of this tale, we are going to say, yeah, that’s how it happened for sure! The year was 1978. The Day was March 11th. The time was 2:48p.m. precisely when I heard something on the radio that really blew me away and just spoke to me in a way that I decided I needed to be able to hear it again and again. I needed to purchase my first record. The band was the Bee Gees, the song was Stayin’ Alive, and that was all I needed to know.

There were some things that needed to be figured out, like how was I going to come up with the $2.50 I needed to purchase the album when my allowance was only 25 cents a week and much like it is today, I had no concept of how to save money. At age 5 I was also a fairly limited money earner. Fortunately my father was trying to teach me this concept by showing me a second quarter every week and placing it into my ‘college fund’. Apparently I was going to go to a pretty shitty college if I didn’t get a scholarship because 25 x 52 weeks is $13 x 13 years before I graduated high school equals $169 to put me through college.

No matter, I didn’t really think about college when I was 5 or look at the costs so the plan seemed fine as far as I was concerned. Now what my dad would do is give me my quarter, put the other quarter into a Folgers can with a coin slit in the lid, then open the lid and let me have a peek inside to see how much I had ‘saved’. It looked like there was enough in there for an album to me so I devised a plan. My plan was, fuck college, I’m buying an album. That was the point where the concept of stealing from my future for something today was born. A concept which still works good for me today. As long as I steal from my future til the day I die, which is what I’m going to do.

So a day or two after I established my plan when my mother went out shopping I asked if we could go to the record store and told her I had been saving up to buy an album. I’m sure she was impressed with how well I managed my money and off to the record store we went. It might have been my first time in a record store, at least it’s the first time I can remember, but I knew this was a place I would be spending a lot of time in. At least once every 10 weeks when I had enough college fund to buy another record.

Then I saw it!

There was no mistaking that this was the album that had Stayin’ Alive on it. The glitz, the glamour, the three kinda diso Jesus looking superstars with their long hair, gold chains, and manly beards had to be the soaring chipmunk voices I knew so well by this point. Maybe the statue of liberty guy would announce the three white angels as he pointed to them saying ‘direct from heaven itself, I give you The Bee Gees!’.

I was in heaven, and from that day forward I dominated the family record player. As the years went on I had this indescribable need to hear something darker, faster, heavier, louder. It was a long an confusing quest with the only source of new music being my mothers mellow rock radio, oldies stations, and show tunes. Journey was pretty heavy right? Styx? I bought these albums and loved them believing they rocked harder than anything else. One day a few years later I would hear Black Sabbath for the first time, and that opened the gateway to a whole new musical kingdom. But that is probably best told another time. So yes, there was a time in my life where the Bee Gees where my favorite band. But hey, I was five.