I taped songs I liked when I was a teenager from the radio, but when I was a younger kid, I’d record from the tv with my boombox all the songs from Jem. They’re showing it again on The Hub now and it kind of made me sad thinking that if I were a kid now, how easy it would have been to have all those songs.
In the late 90s, I got a stereo that I hooked up to my tv/vcr for stereo sound. It came in handy when there were televised concerts. I’d record with both the vcr for later viewing, but also to cassette tapes to listen to in the car. Now I capture streaming audio and put it on my iPod. Technology is awesome.
Lord, yes. I recorded Barefoot Jerry’s Ain’t it Nice In Here because I couldn’t find it anywhere else. I eventually got to hear them play it live at Nashville’s famed Exit/In. I recorded a song that I think was called You Owe it to Me, that I’ve never been able to find since. Don’t know the artist, but this was a Nashville station in the late 70s. I had a cassette recorder/AM FM radio combo and kept my finger poised over the record and play buttons.
Yep–that was it. “Mr. Jaws”, huh? I was racking my brain and couldn’t come up with anything from that era except (Og help me!) Ray Stevens’ “The Streak”…
Oh mercy…my kids are SOOOO fortunate that they’ll only have Justin Bieber and Hannah Montana to live down!
Oh, yes. I spent countless hours sitting with my tiny tape recorder pressed up against the tv, recording all the songs from musicals – the one that really springs to mind is “Blue Hawaii”, a classic Elvis glurge that I adored. And then my siblings and I would sing along in the car to all these scratchy, muffled songs. Ah, childhood.
I used to record a few theme songs from TV shows. The two I liked best were CHiPs and Unsolved Mysteries.CHiPs had a theme song for season 1 and an updated version for seasons 2-6. The pilot episode had a prolonged version of the season 1 version, so I had three songs to listen to. Thrice the fun!
I also used to play a card game on my Atari ST computer. I religiously wrote down the results after each session, with a session consisting of 25 hands. (The results were in the same format as baseball standings.) After this, I recorded a radio show where all I did was read the standings from first to last place, along with a little commentary.
In the early 70’s I occasionally recorded in front of the radio speakers. I only recorded off the air regularly from 1980 on, as all stereo’s I owned had two tape decks and direct from the amplifier recording of records or whatever you amplified. All the duel decks let you dube tape to tape.
Ah, the good old days of AOR…I recorded a few Led Zep albums directly from the radio – no breaks, no commercials.
When I was growing up, a kid in my neighborhood was a baseball fanatic. He had his own fantasy league (this was 1972-75 time frame). He’d record the opening of the ball game of the week, then play that as he tossed a wiffle ball in the air, hit it, then wrote the result (single, homer, etc) on a paper on a clipboard.
I, on the other hand, recorded songs and later, albums.
Yep, for crude “mix” tapes of various TV themes when I was a kid.
And a few years later, with an actual stereo setup hooked into the TV/VCR, I made a few recordings of MST3K episodes, mostly for long car trips. Even Manos was fun.
When I was in college, WBCN in Boston would have a rare tape night, where they played their collection of bootlegs, no longer possible to get singles, live versions, and other rare stuff. (This was ~ 1970). Lots of it has since been released. I (and many other people in Boston and Cambridge) spent all evening with our my tape deck recording nearly everything of interest. The record stores had a special tape sale for this event. I recently moved these from 30 year old cassette tapes (recorded from 10 year old reel-to-reel tapes) to CD.
