“Break My Stride”: Remembering my first ghetto blaster

 

It was the Christmas that changed everything. In 1984, I got a ghetto blaster from my Mom and Dad, that just helped my interest in music just explode.

Yet, it was not so much the medium as the message. With all due respect to Marshall McLuhan, it wasn’t the recorder, but the music that mattered. The ghetto blaster just recorded it for posterity.

Recently, I found on YouTube a list of top 100 songs from 1984. Hearing one led to memories of others.

That’s because the first thing I recorded in earnest, was the year-end countdown on LA-107 FM.

And it all started with “Break My Stride” by Matthew Wilder.

The gift
One of my closest friends, Mat, had a good job in Grade 10 and bought himself a ghetto blaster from Simpson Sears. It was state of the art at the time with two tape decks and this feature called synchro-dubbing. If you were taping one tape off the other, you could press the pause button and both tape decks would pause.

He was really good with technology. Mat would tape songs off the radio and use that ghetto blaster like a surgeon and trim away any hint of commercials or talking. He would buy these chromium dioxide tapes from Radio Shack and make these great mixed tapes. He even made one for me. He then added to it when I asked if he could tape “Out of Touch” by Hall and Oates. Sure enough he did – perfectly.

Christmas was coming, and I mentioned to my Mom how much I like Mat’s ghetto blaster.

Sure enough, that ghetto blaster was sitting under the tree when I opened my presents on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1984.

Whole new world
Having that ghetto blaster opened up a whole new world to me. I could tape anything I wanted off the radio, other tapes, or even the TV, whatever I wanted.

I did a little bit of that, but Christmas break was busy with family and other things.

That changed on New Year’s Eve.

The top 100
I may not have necessarily been recording a whole bunch, but I was using the ghetto blaster as a radio a lot. It was perfect for background noise while I played Intellivision in my room or designed programs on my Commodore-64 personal computer.

Initially, I bought into the hype of some of my classmates, who loved LA-107 FM, and didn’t like 1090 CHEC its equivalent on AM. Mat, on the other hand, did listen to CHEC a lot, and soon I came around to listening to both.

One day, when I was listening to LA-107, they were promoting their year-end countdown. LA-107 was an album-oriented rock station, meaning they focused on albums more than singles. That meant they would play more than one song from an album.

It also meant their year-end countdown was the top 100 albums of 1984, not singles.

I planned on checking it out.

New Year’s Day
Back then, more than now, New Year’s Day meant college football bowl games. We didn’t get much college football on peasant vision, just bowl games. It was limited. The Cotton Bowl was on CBC Channel 9, while on CTV Channel 13 were the Rose Bowl in the afternoon and the Orange Bowl in primetime.

I tuned in to the top 100 when it started and discovered something I had never really contemplated. The countdown would take the better part of the day. In fact, I think it was set to conclude at midnight.

Initially, I had thought I could get every song I really wanted by listening to the countdown, but that was only possible if I sat by the radio for the next eight or nine hours.

I started to do that, taping songs that I liked.

After awhile though, I wanted to watch the Orange Bowl because the team I liked then, the Oklahoma Sooners, were playing the Washington Huskies.

I still wanted to monitor the countdown. In our farm house, we had this room off the side of the house we called the veranda. It wasn’t very big, and served mostly as a greenhouse for my Mom’s plants. It also had the best view to watch for the school bus in the morning.

So, I set up my ghetto blaster on the floor of the veranda and periodically popped in there to check on the top 100, and if a song I liked was playing so I could record it. Usually, that was in the commercial breaks of the football game.

The songs
Some of the songs I taped are still pretty vivid in my mind and I believe I still have that tape sitting in a case in my garage.

The ones I recall are “Meet Me in the Middle” by the Arrows; and “Don’t Stop” by Chilliwack.

There was also “Dear Darling” by Dennis DeYoung. He was best known as the lead singer of Styx, but had put out a solo album that year called “Desert Moon”. The single of the same name was awesome. I had hoped to tape it when I heard “Desert Moon” was the next album on the countdown. However, this was the thing about album-oriented rock. LA-107 did not play “Desert Moon”, but opted for another song. It was called “Dear Darling”. I had hit record in anticipation of “Desert Moon”, but let it keep recording because “Dear Darling” was a great song too.

Of course, the other song I recall recording was, “Break My Stride” by Matthew Wilder.

I don’t recall where his album charted on the LA-107 top 100, but “Break My Stride” went all the way to number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming a hit for him in late 1983 and the Spring of 1984.

Parting thoughts
That ghetto blaster was a game changer for me. It opened up the music world to me, not only providing access to music, but the chance to record it for posterity – and I have.

That all began really, with that top 100 on New Year’s Eve of 1984.

For whatever reason, “Break My Stride” is the song that sticks out among all the songs I recorded.

Every time I hear it, as I did on that YouTube compilation from 1984, it reminds me of that moment in time.

It’s fitting that a top 100 in 2023 reminds me of a top 100 in 1984.