track 1. out here on my own

The first 45 I remember having was Irene Cara performing the theme song to the movie Fame. I had quite a collection of 45s. With my Dad's 1950s or 60s record player (which, I am happy to report is still in perfect order and working condition! I will strive to get a photo), you had to use an insert to play 45s.




It's probably a really familiar image to people born post-vinyl, but maybe they don't know why. Maybe they do, now that vinyl is back in vogue. Anyway, you'd have to stick this into the center of a 45 to play on a regular record player, that is unless you had a record player with a pop-up center. I used to love buying 45s and would play them over and over (again and again) over and over.



This 45 was especially good because as much as I liked the song to Fame, the B-side was a ballad called "Out here on my own" and I fell absolutely in love with it. It would be the beginning of a trend, because for the rest of my life I've always fallen harder for the beautiful and sad ballads. I was around 7 years old in 1980, when Fame came out. About 15 years later I would discover another beautiful and sad song, Joni Mitchell's "River" and it seems like there's an obvious path from point A to B with these two tracks. While "Fame" is all upbeat-pop, something about "Out here on my own" feels like the sort of thing you'd hear from a singer/songwriter, which is where my musical tastes would later gravitate towards. (In fact, it was written by Michael & Leslie Gore) It became one of my favorite songs. I even remember making a trip to Coral Gables where there was a music shop called Allegra Music and getting the sheet music so that I could sing along. If youtube had been around back then, I totally would have been the little 8-year old kid singing along to Irene Cara.

Oddly enough, I have still never actually seen Fame, but here's the music video of Irene Cara singing "Out here on my own" from the movie.