Recall, reeling, counter-clockwise (with a 2HB)

Right up there with losing one's virginity, getting high, and drinking a two-litre bottle of Crystal Pepsi in one sitting, buying your first record was one of those things you just wanted to get over with so you could start talking about it like it happened years ago. Early adolescence is so fickle: there were mere milliseconds between becoming aware of music culture and then discovering that all your peers have already popped their musical fruit. Even the geeks dug out their parents' Zappa records months ago, and now they're talking like they have gym class with Dweezil (good lord, right now they are probably feeling up the grade seven junior cheerleader in their basements while listening to "Billy the Mountain"...all twenty minutes of it).

Years later, dear reader, all we can do is look back on those fuzzy paranoid moments and dream of all the cool shit we would have done if we knew, then, what we finally learnt last night (or so). But I think the opposite holds, too: I've always held the opinion that most of my post-pubescent life has been performed to the (faint) soundtrack of those early, foolish cassette tapes I played, jammed, pencil-rewound, and forgot in Mordie's walkman. (Mordie--name altered--was that guy who had his nail-bitten finger on the trigger back in, like, grade five. When he belted out approximations of the chorus to "Smells Like Teen Spirit," I thought he was quoting a sketch I had missed from You Can't Do That on Television. I know you knew him too.) Can we still remember all the lyrics? Can the chorus from "Quiet Steam" still conjure up the same dizzying sense of postmodern levity as it did during that brain-frozen summer, speed-drinking Pepsi slurpees on Oak street?



There's only one way to find out. Snowjobbers, your mission, if you can take it, is to Bittorrent the first album you ever bought, listen through it, and blog your thoughts, emotions, and latent childhood regrets.