3 1971🔗

We lived in a decent rented three-bedroom bungalow, with a full unfinished basement, in a small Northern Ontario pulp-mill town, a full day’s drive from anything we had previously considered civilization. Our house was the last one built on the street; to the east were unfenced empty lots, over which our neighbours would snowmobile in winter.

My father obtained a crystal radio kit, from where I do not know. It had a little shiny crystal diode, an attractive coil of copper wire for a tuner, and a few other components on a plastic base. He strung a long antenna of copper wire along our front eavestrough, using plastic insulators, and fed it through my bedroom window. There was an uncomfortable headphone with a metal band and a single hard plastic earpiece.

The point, and this was a powerful metaphor to me at the time, was that there was no other source of power. It operated entirely on the energy from the radio waves picked up by the antenna. I wanted to be a physicist at the time, and this was the electromagnetic spectrum in action. I could lie in bed and listen to the radio.

I could only get one station, but that was because there was only one AM station within range. (Not entirely accurate; there was a French-language station, but it would never have occurred to me to listen to it, even though my French got pretty good by the end of my time in this French-majority community.)

It was not the only radio in the house; the clock radio had made the move, there was the receiver of my father’s hi-fi system, which included an FM band useless that far north, and we even had a portable battery-powered radio with tinny speaker, made in Japan, as with many cheap electronics at the time. But the crystal set was mine.

I was on the cusp. I would now fall in love with songs on the radio, and one could call up the DJ (five-digit numbers, rotary dial phones) and make requests. I didn’t understand why they wouldn’t play my requests for songs that had fallen off the charts months ago. They were still great songs!

One of my desert island discs was released this year, though I would not hear it until somewhat later. It is "Hunky Dory", the fourth studio album by David Bowie. The critical and popular consensus favors the next album, "Ziggy Stardust", which did not have as much of an impact on me.

I was still years away from being able to choose what new music to listen to. I don’t know, to this day, where my peers would have obtained records, in that tiny town. We were the only Indian family there, and yet the kids in the only Chinese family and the only Japanese family managed things better than I did. I was several years ahead intellectually and several years behind emotionally. The dubious benefits of the former faded; I don’t think I ever caught up on the latter. I had few friends, and could not keep close ones for long, probably because I was either too selfish or too intense.

I had already started trying to borrow records and tape them onto reel-to-reel (one early success was the concept musical album "Jesus Christ Superstar", which I borrowed from the son of the United Church minister). At some point in this period, I was given a combination radio and cassette recorder, so that I could tape songs off the radio and not have to beg DJs or listen for hours until they were played. I would have no money to freely spend until I had moved away from home and worked at well-paying internships. This would bias me heavily towards borrow-and-tape for many years.

The radio station had to serve everyone in town, and it often had programming I did not care for, but on Saturday morning, it would air Casey Kasem’s "American Top 40". The little blurbs before and after some songs were the only information I had about them. It’s there, in 1975, that I would have heard the first song on the album, "Changes", re-released as a B-side to "Space Oddity" as a single that made the lower reaches of the charts. I wouldn’t hear the album until a few years later, when A lent it to me while I was in university, and it would be only then, reading the credits, that I would realize that the piano part was played by Rick Wakeman, whose solo albums were among the other loans I had managed to cadge up north.

It took me a long while to realize how much British pop music of the ’60’s and ’70’s was influenced by the music hall tradition, but once I realized it, I heard it everywhere, and certainly hear it on this album. Bowie’s marriage was going well and his first child was born during the recording sessions. The album exudes optimism, but it is not all sweetness and light; the penultimate track, "Queen Bitch", reaches ahead to his harder glam rock phase, and the last track, "The Bewlay Brothers", is full of obscure foreboding.

Another artist whose music from this time I still listen to is Neil Young. I would first hear his 1972 hit single "Heart of Gold" on the radio, and would borrow the album ("Harvest") on which it appeared, but I don’t like that album now (as opposed to what he did just before and after it), or anything he’s done since about 1976. But I’m happy to listen to the double compilation album "Decade" which has the best of his early work.

There are a few other major names I could add at this point, but I think I’ll talk about them in the next installment.

There was one radio station available during the day, but at night (not on the crystal radio, but on the living-room hi-fi) I could tune in stations in Chicago, and further south, Indiana and Ohio and even Kentucky on occasion. While the top-40 hits were largely the same, there were some regional variations, and it kept me in touch with the wider world that I could only visit once or twice a year.