Sound + Vision | The Blog

  • Anthony Grant On Music And Growing Up In The '80s.

    Most days I’d play outside until the sun went down. My friends and I would find things to keep ourselves occupied throughout the day. The Bronx in ...
  • Rusell Rogers On Discovering College Radio

    "When I was a teenager in the late 1970’s, FM radio was still a new thing. If you bought a new car people would ask you what kind of radio it had a...
  • Tim Buckwalter On The Perfect Record Store

    I’ve always been a 45s guy.My first memory of records is sitting on my bedroom floor, at age three, endlessly playing Peter Pan Read-A-Long 7” disk...
  • Deirdre White on Bands That Start with B

    People don’t believe me when I tell them that the Bay City Rollers were my first rock concert. It was 1977,  I was still a kid, but my older sister...
  • Mark Taylor on Siouxsie + The Banshee's SPELLBOUND

    A vinyl record can be thought of as more than just a distribution device for music; it is a fetish used in ritualistic fashion, and some effort is ...
  • Catherine Haley Epstein On The Scent of Records

    It’s 95 degrees outside and my son and I are unpacking a surprise '80s set of 45s I bought last month. I ask him what the 80s records smelled like,...
  • Matthew Kelso on I THINK I LOVE YOU

    In 2004, I attended a very rainy Bonnaroo music festival. I was in college and had already been a musician and DJ for years. I was there to see l...
  • Jim Winters on GOT TO BE REAL

    From seventh grade through ninth grade, 1977-1980, we lived at the White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico. The closest town was Las Cruce...
  • Juliette Cook And M On Philadelphia Exurb's Early Hardcore Scene

    "The 80s were a tough time to be a nonconformist teen in rural Pennsylvania. Fortunately, M created an oasis for us. 36 years later, I decided to c...
  • James Lansing On The First Time I Heard A Flock of Seagulls’ I RAN

    The first time I heard I RAN it was live at a club in New Jersey. 

I had read about A Flock of Seagulls in Trouser Press - the early 1980s bible o...
  • Mike Zahn On This Magic Moment

    To my ears, the global pandemic muffled the last echoes of postwar Anglo-American pop music as it’s been heard since the Fifties. My intuition was ...
  • Cliff Hengst on B.T. Express’ EXPRESS

    1. In seventh grade, every Friday would be special, because that was singles day. A teacher would put out her record player on a table and run...