Through My Eyes: My First Vinyl

I sent this message below as an email to the KFOG Morning Show in response to ...

June 19th is Vinyl Friday on the KFOG Morning Show :

In honor of this weekend's Vinyl Saturday, the KFOG Morning Show will be spinning some of their favorite vinyl on Friday morning, discussing their first 7" and LPs, as well as giving away some vinyl albums and sets. Drop us a line with the story about your "first" at mornings@kfog.com.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My First Vinyl

Hello, my name is Mick Flaire and I am a born and raised San Franciscan who will turn 55 years old this coming Monday, June 22nd, 2009.

My first vinyl purchases were made during the Summer of Love, in June of 1967, when I was 12 and going on 13 years old.

With my transistor radio in hand, I was skateboarding south on 3rd St. just pass the Lefty O’Doul Bridge when I stopped to make a call at a phone booth on the corner of 16th & 3rd Streets.

I just happened to look down on the ground in the phone booth and saw a $10.00 bill lying there.

Many times as a kid walking along the streets of San Francisco I had picked up nickels, dimes & quarters, but at the tender age of 13 years old, that was the most money I had ever found.

Most kids would have instantly run off to the closest grocery store and bought as much candy as they could for $10.00, but not me, because I was an absolute AM pop radio junkie!

So what did I do?

I skateboarded over to my local record shop on Leland Ave. in Visitacion Valley, and bought 10 of my favorite 45 rpm records of the time.

The first record I bought was a song that still to this day, 42 years later, is my “favorite song of life”, The Doors’ Light My Fire.

The other 9 singles that I bought that day were;

2) Society’s Child – Janis Ian

3) Somebody to Love- Jefferson Airplane

4) Let’s Live For Today – The Grass Roots

5) Windy – The Association

6) The Golden Road (to unlimted devotion) – Grateful Dead

7) Sing Me a Rainbow – The Sons of Champlin

8) Let’s Get Together – The Youngbloods

9) Live – The Merry-Go-Round

10) Brown Eyed Girl – Van Morrison

I still have all 10 of those 45 rpm singles, as well as over 8,000 long-playing 33 rpm record albums, including my very first LP, the Jefferson Airplane’s “Surrealistic Pillow”.

In the Spring of 1968, as a student at Luther Burbank Jr. High School in the Excelsior District of San Francisco, my friend Genaro Ocreto and I would race over to his house after school and play DJ.

First we would go down to the Woolworth’s store on Mission & Brazil Streets and buy the latest releases, and then go to his house and play them in the sequential order of their debut on the Top 30 record charts.

It was those afternoons spent playing records in Genaro’s living room that has led directly to me playing those very same records, 41 years later, for audiences in the Poster Room Lounge at the Fillmore since 2002, for my mythical radio program “Just For The Record”, on my imaginary radio station “KBGP, 98.7 FM, in San Francisco, a tenth of a degree higher than normal”

It is my pleasure to share with you, and the KFOG listeners, the story of my first vinyl record purchases.

Thank you so much for keeping the tradition alive, as I have also done for all these years.

Cheers,

Mick “Professor Phil Moore, Jr.” Flaire
San Francisco, California

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here is a compilation of great songs from my favorite music year of life, 1967!

Enjoy!