Mixtapes — The Seventies
My first exposure to music was from listening to a Telefunken, my family’s only radio with buttons and dials. A perfect German-made beast that sat in the middle of our family living room. It operated on batteries before my neighbourhood was connected to the electricity grid.
There was only one broadcaster in Sri Lanka, the state-owned broadcasting authority. Channels were few. AM and Short Wave were the frequencies used. There were no FM or digital radio channels then.
My father listened to the news on the radio regularly. The rest of the time, we listened to music from it. I did not listen to Sri Lankan music much. I liked Hindi music from Bollywood movies which were beamed to Sri Lanka from India. In between, I listened to English music. One could pick short wave signals from BBC on a good day, with some disturbance. That was good enough for me.
I was more of a fan of contemporary English pop music from the early seventies. So I bought a Sony Radio, which became my companion. I fell asleep to my music. My father checked on his children before retiring to bed himself and turned my radio off every night after I had fallen asleep.
Soon after, when I started working, I wanted a stereo badly. In a country where imports were restricted, they were costly. Stereos were considered luxury items. It was equivalent to about ten months of my pay. It was an impossible dream to buy one.
When I landed in Dubai a few short years later, a stereo was the first thing I set my eyes on. I bought one with my first week’s pay. What an achievement! I was so proud of myself. I had arrived. It was a National Panasonic stereo with an FM radio and a cassette player.
Long after, I started making mixtapes, buying some on my own, and borrowing cassettes from my friends while living in Dubai. I became so good at it that many friends got me to make mixtapes for them. Every day after a full day’s work at the bank, I came home, lay on the ground at my apartment, and got to work experimenting with music selections. It was one of my past times. I’d make them and write each song’s title and the singer's name with a felt pen on each tape. My friends tell me that I made legendary selections for them back then.
Back in the day, there were no international phone calls between families. Necessity is the mother of invention. I recorded my news and whereabouts with my voice on cassettes and posted them to my parents in Sri Lanka. They listened to my voice after a two-week gap, the time taken in transit in postage. It was my podcast to my family. It was better than writing letters. I did write letters to them, though. Regularly every week, numbering each one sequentially. I wrote 300 of them in all to my parents and kid brother.
Let us come back to my mixtape story. Here are the songs that were my all-time favourites from the seventies. If I were to make a mixtape today, picking one song from each singer and each band from that bygone era, this would be my favourite selection.
Carl Douglas — Kung Fu Fighting
Eric Clapton — I Shot The Sheriff
George McCrae — Rock Your Baby
Engelbert Humperdink — A Man Without Love
Hues Corporation — Rock The Boat
David Bowie aka Ziggy Stardust — Starman
Marvin Gaye — I Heard Through The Grapevine
Smokey Robinson — Tears Of A Clown
Bee Gees — You Should Be Dancing
Hollies — He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother
Jackson Five — I Will Be There
Leif Garret — I Was Made For Dancing
Tony Orlando and Dawn — Tie A Yellow Ribbon
Yvonne Elliman — If I Can’t Have you
Come to think of it, my music taste was weird — no particular genre. Funks, Soul, R&B, Rock, Disco, and everything else were there among them.
My all-time favourite bands are Santana and Bee Gees from the seventies, the era of free love, sexual awakening and bell bottoms. I rate them equally at the top of my favourite bands. Santana rocked the music world, revolutionising music. Which lad in the seventies did not love music from Bee Gees? Eventually, from a melody band, they became a disco band. Bee Gees were originally from Bondi, Australia, my country now.
Then there was David Bowie, the first star who turned sexuality on its head and was admired by many teenagers. At seventeen, I bought a recycled pop magazine, only to pull out its centrefold of Ziggy Stardust. The poster adorned my bedroom wall in my parent’s home in Sri Lanka, where I grew up.
Among the remaining bands I loved are Jackson Five, Abba, Led Zepplin, Queen, Rolling Stones and The Who.
I still reminisce about my first radio, bought for Rupees 210 (equivalent to $40, back in the day) while still a schoolboy from Seidles Cineradio, the distributor for Sony. It was made in Sri Lanka in partnership with Sony. It was the most valued asset I had at the time.
I still have a music device by my bedside nearly er. It is quite different now; my smart speaker can stream music and recognise my voice. I have so many choices now, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Spotify, Podcasts, YouTube Music, TuneIn, SoundCloud, and many Internet-only radio channels to listen to on-demand. I have Bose sound-cancelling headphones as I walk my 12,000 steps a day. Over 1000 songs are stored on my phone. I stream music via my Sonos sound system everywhere in the house. Thanks to Google, I still fall asleep to music on my bedside speaker, which automatically turns off after I fall asleep. From an original base of about a maximum of 50 songs, I can now access 100 million songs. I am now spoilt for choice.
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