Circus Magazine's Yearbook

At 14, after collecting a sizable collection consisting of Grand Funk Live, Cheech and Chong, and a lot of Alice Cooper - as well as receiving my first 8-track tape player/am-fm stereo deck with speakers, headphones and a homemade turntable (from Mom's friend Joe, who fancied himself the technician), I abandoned cassettes almost entirely. It's funny, when reading the history of audio formats, to read that cassettes replaced the unwieldy and low end audio quality 8-tracks, when my personal history was just the opposite. Cassette tapes were very popular in the early 70's. Apparently their ascent was a long one, finally defeating those fat fucking tapes. For me, there were 4 more years of those awful, clicking devices to go.



This is also the year that I bought Circus Magazine's Yearbook paperback, containing a collection of articles from the past year. The article that I remember most clearly was about heavy metal, and was written by Lester Bangs. He described the primal, raw, amplified and distorted sound of Hendrix, The Who, early Kinks, Blue Cheer and the like. Lester's flights of meth-fueled prose resonated with my budding musical sensibilities. The first two LP's that I purchased after reading it were "Kiss" and "Hotter Than Hell", the first two albums by Kiss. I remember referring to them as "full albums of heavy metal" to my buddy Paul Beattie in class at Parkview Junior High in Cranston, Rhode Island. My favorite musical genre now had a name and 70's-era Kiss has remained a guilty pleasure ever since.