First "old" record you bought

Because I went through a phase of buying Billy Joel's entire back catalogue on cassette when I was about 12. Which, for me, was "new" because before then I'd listened to very little except Classical music and my dad's Beatles records.

Thanks, Mr. C.

(ok so 'old' records in a sense....)

first one i remember getting for myself is cassette of Sgt Pepper, at approx 12 yrs old

(mind you that album was only about 5 yrs old then)

either that or zeppelin iv.

i'm feeling much better now.

White Light/White Heat bought on cassette in 1989, the year when I started reading the NME. The VU would often get mentioned in articles about the likes of the Jesus and Mary Chain.

I think it was actually the first Bachman Turner Overdrive album. It was released in 73, I bought it in . . . 75?

Although, I think "Blue Collar" was the only song to chart outside of Canada.

Other than that, it was probably The Man Who Sold the World, which I found in a Radio Shack cutout bin in about 77. Again, I am not sure anything from that album would qualify as a hit.

Rock the House by DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince, in 1991.

I was going to say The Beach Boys' Made in USA compilation, but I guess their cover of "California Dreamin'" would've been a fairly recent hit at the time. A little before that, though, one of the things you could buy from the Kool-Aid Wacky Warehouse with your Kool-Aid points was a custom cassette tape with four songs of your choosing (made possible by the Personics System), and an I got one with "I Get Around" on it, because I'd heard it in Flight of the Navigator and loved it. I have no idea what my other three songs were. Probably at least one recent hit.

I bought the compilation album 'Jimi Hendrix: The Ultimate Experience' when it was released in 1992, although obviously all the songs on it were over 20 years old at the time so it was still old. Up until then I'd only bought recently released albums and prior to that - as a kid growing up in the 80s - taping stuff off the radio.

I got a late start on buying music because my parents were very hardcore xtian when I was young, but I got into U2 when The Joshua Tree blew up and I guess buying all the albums on cassette leading up to that one counts as "old." Not sure what the oldest thing was I would have bought with no tether to the present around that time would be...I remember getting Blondie's Parallel Lines around that time because I heard "Hangin' On The Telephone" on the radio and loved it.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - I was 12 and it was in 2009, not long after the remaster came out. It was the first album I ever bought too, and while that's nice, I wish I'd got "into" music a bit earlier.

Good question. (Not meaning "I don't know"; meaning "good question.") Got to be The Worst of the Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix's Smash Hits, and the Doors' Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine, all bought around 1975 when I decided to start collecting records and take care of them.

"Meet The Beatles" for a quarter or a dollar or something in 1979

I've been thinking about this and I reckon it was a cassette of This Nation's Saving Grace with a weird alternate tracklisting.

mecca and the soul brother on a used cassette. summer 1994? idk, it was around when the main ingredient was fairly recent. i was 13.

I got into Gary Numan/Tubeway Army at the time of Replicas so that would have been one of the first albums I bought. I was sufficiently taken with it to buy the Tubeway Army début album soon after, and picked up Kraftwerk's The Man Machine at around the same time.

In my meager early collection I had some older stuff on vinyl (swiped from my father) and cassette (dubbed from other people's vinyl) but I didn't start buying "old" material until I got a CD player c. 1990. One of the first things I bought was Bitches Brew.

I never bought albums because they "featured recent hits." Early on that's what singles were for. My first albums (Grand Funk Live, Court of the Crimson King, and EL&P's debut) were purchased because I had heard tracks on what was then progressive FM radio.

The first album I bought which predated those was probably a thrift store copy of The Ventures Walk Don't Run, released in 1960 and which I bought in maybe 1979.

The first few records I bought were contemporary releases, but pretty soon after that, I started identifying bands that I liked, and then I would often go back and buy "older" examples of their work. I'm not sure the first time I did this. Maybe Oingo Boingo. I got into them around the time of "Boi-ngo" (1987), and then went in roughly reverse order and bought their back catalog of albums, eventually getting to their first album, "Only a Lad" (1981).

I'm not sure the first time I bought an album from more than a decade ago. Probably when I bought some Beatles albums in the late '80s.

I never bought albums because they "featured recent hits." Early on that's what singles were for.

I guess I'm on the same tip... that's what the radio/MTV were also for, right? The first albums (tapes) I remember buying / asking for were in the classic rock vein... stuff I was exposed to via counselors at summer camp, etc.

I don't remember "owning" even a stuffed-with-hits album like INXS's Kick – though glancing at the track list, even the non-single album tracks are v familiar to me (I think I probably had dubbed tapes of albums like that at some point).

That said, in the early '80s, my parents bought stuff like Thriller, Like a Virgin, 1999, She's So Unusual, Brothers in Arms... so I listened to those a lot without "buying" them myself.

I don't remember any of my friends in high school being into classic rock. It was mostly KROQ type stuff or skate punk. It wasn't really until my freshman year of college, when suddenly I was surrounded by people who were very into lots of old bands.

Pink Floyd’s Animals

The computer mag Zzap64 had a “get to know our reviewers” questionnaire in their Christmas 1986 issue and one of them chose Animals in their favourite music (singling out Dogs for especial praise). When I was in my v.early teens I thought these spiky-haired joystick dudes were really cool! So I bought Animals when I saw it as a mid-price cassette.

Before that I had only bought a handful of contemporary/hit things - I would say Thriller, Brothers in Arms and a couple of VA soundtracks - Beverly Hills Cop, Back to the Future? So it was definitely some sort of gateway moment!

It may have been Who's Next, which was definitely the first "old" CD I checked out of the library.

Feels funny to say that because so many years later it doesn't seem that old anymore, but anything before any non-adult I knew was born seemed really old. I only got it because a song had been used in one of my classes, and I remember all the cooler/hip kids knowing it, so I decided to check it out myself. Loved the whole album and bought it, but it wasn't until the Beatles a few years later that I really dove into anything that was old.

Also special mention to Louis Armstrong's Hot 5's and 7's. That was my introduction to stuff that was REALLY old. I mentioned this elsewhere but I had a Xerox copy of an ad from Entertainment Weekly that listed the "100 Greatest CD's" or something like that, and I think I had heard only three of them. Most of them were names I recognized but knew nothing of - like who doesn't know Louis Armstrong? But I honestly had no idea why he was so important, just that he played trumpet and sung some popular oldies (albeit later in his career). When I looked up that record, it was full of surprises. I don't think I ever saw a photo of Louis prior to the '60s, and it's possible I only knew a few records pre-dating the '50s, mainly perennials like Bing Crosby's "White Christmas." And here was Louis Armstrong in some group I never heard of that apparently revolutionized all music as we know it - in 1925! The whole concept of pre-tape recordings was new to me. I got it from the library first and I remember my Dad thinking it was weird that I was listening to something older than his parents. (He doesn't listen to jazz so he knew nothing about it either.) Eventually I bought the JSP box set after reading about how much better the sound quality was compared to Sony/Columbia's CD's, and fortuitously it was on sale for a ridiculous price from some UK vendor that closed up a long time ago. (The first time I ever bought an import too.) I still have that set, and it's still the best way to hear this music.