I still remember trying to see Walkman for the first at a local department store (Karstadt). They were on display - but all chained to the counter. Bastards. Compared to today’s iPods or discmans they were pretty bulky and heavy. Most of all VERY expensive.
A few weeks later some privileged kids and youngsters had one of these. You could simply spot them by those glowing orange ‘rubber ears’ and their almost absent style of walking. These days it was VERY unusual for anyone to run around with headphones on.
I also liked the Walkman speech phenomena - people who talked while listening to their precious music always screamed - just like some people do today with their cell phones. Oh, what joy - made them always behave like idiots.
Similar the Walkman gaze - some people seemed to dream or stare at distant realms while listening to their music. Somewhere, some other sound planet …
With the Walkman also arrived the tape mixing frenzy. It was not enough to record any old record and just listen to it. You needed special remixes for special moments: one cool mix for jogging (another 80’s craze), one for video gaming (rush tapes) and of course for waking up in the morning on your way to work or school. Some of these tapes are burned so deeply into my memories that I still expect certain song combinations - just the way I banned them once on tape and listened to them a thousand times.
And the shitloads of batteries we consumed to keep those little buggers running. Plus the never ending quest how to transport it. The early ones were to big and heavy for your jacket - so you needed a special belt case, which was uncool. If you put your Walkman in your rucksack you might entangle yourself somewhere. Today we are used to have cables and electronic devices all around us - but in the 80’s hardly anyone carried anything ‘cable’ with them.
Also the world was a much quieter place then. The music anywhere revolution was just about to begin: MTV had to be invented yet and most stores didn’t feature roaring TV sets with ads or fast music videos. Hey, even McDonalds was a quiet place to crunch your burgers!
One thing I very much enjoyed was tape swapping with friends. You listen to mine and I check out yours dude. A few models had two headphone plugins - wow - that was cool to listen to great music together. Especially for couples …
Another rather uncool thing was reliability. I literally glued and taped some of these machines until they fell apart. And there was no way of fixing these broken jukeboxes. It was always cheaper to buy a new and smaller one.
Walkmans really made the phrase ‘My life is a Soundtrack’ possible and I still can remember certain moments in my life plus the tracks that I played that very instant. Crazy?!
What are your Walkman memories … drop a comment please …
