When
this came out in 1974, on the “Buddha and the Chocolate Box” album, I was
working at Accutronics. As I’ve written before, I was going to night school at
Elgin Community College and my parents had required that I find a day job. At
$2.63 per hour I was hired as the shear operator. The shear operator took 3 ft.
x 4 ft. or 3 ft. x 6 ft. sheets of copper clad printed circuit board laminate,
heated them under a quartz lamp, and cut them down into 12 in x 15 in (or other
custom size) process panels.
I also
had to load and unload 55 gallon drums of waste water and ferric chloride
(copper etchant) onto trucks, and unload skids of laminate. At the time, the
shear operation had two people, one to heat the laminate and feed it into the
shear to a second person who grabbed the laminate and held it against the stop
until I stepped on the foot pedal to activate the shear.
When
“Buddha…” came out, it played in its entirety on the Elgin FM station and I
taped it and brought it to work. (When side one ended, the station segued
seamlessly to the synthesizer noodling from “Dark Side of the Moon”. I didn’t
think it sounded like Cat Stevens, knowing little of Pink Floyd at the time. I
was surprised when I bought the album and found it didn’t have that music).
(Speaking
of surprises, I have a copy of Monty Python’s Matching Tie and Handkerchief
Album, which is the only 3 sided, 2 sided album in my collection. For the first
couple times I played it, I thought I was going nuts. I usually bought an album,
and then taped it immediately, playing the tape at work and in my car. But this
was weird! When I tried to tape it I found that one side had a whole different
set of sketches that I had never heard before, they definitely were not the
sketches I heard the first time! It turns out there are two parallel grooves
on one side and depending on how you drop the needle, you get one or the other
set of sketches. It doesn’t say anything about this on the liner notes.)
So
anyway, Accutronics, being owned by Hammond Organ at the time, had a sample
organ in our break room (6 broken office chairs circled around a short garbage
can). This organ had one of the newfangled cassette players built into it. I
came in with my “Buddha…” bootleg tape and made everyone listen.
“Hey
guys, it’s the new Cat Stevens album!”
No comments:
Post a Comment