My generation - as the countless generations before - lived almost our entire lives with buying, collecting and treasuring albums as certain ritual. In the long-gone, pre-digital days you would hear something on the radio than walk to a shop to purchase a specific piece of music you liked - the format didn't matter, this was all down to the specific time you happened to be, it could have been a vinyl, a cassette tape or CD. I even remember an occasional encounter with reel-to-reel tape that worked very much like a bigger relative of the smaller cassette and needed a clumsy big recorder. We collected, treasured and loved our collections - just like books, it was who you were, reflection of your interests, tastes and perspectives. I have managed to built, lose and re-built several collections of my favourite music trough the years, but recently I started to really focus on music that was around when I first started discovering it, looking out for what was there when I was still very young and impressionable brings back the memories and sometimes even the excitement that was there.
Digital music online changed everything - the fact that almost everything that was ever recorded is now available on the top of our fingers makes music listening almost a daunting task. Along with some old favourites and whatever Spotify recommends to you, there is always a mountain of new releases and re-mixes of known recordings. Even a voracious music omnivore as I am gets tired and confused sometimes so its no wonder that recently I started to research what exactly were my very first recordings, what was the music that left a deep impression on a little me. When I didn't know anything about the charts, producers, the industry, advertising, controversies, etc - I listened, glued to the speakers and often the very same LP played day after day, as kids do.
One of these LPs was beautiful, sunny, funny and poignant "The Muppet Show Album" released in 1977 as companion to a famous TV show. Unlike many other popular albums that waited years to be released behind the Iron Curtain, this beauty was released by Belgrade's PGP RTB the very next year and kids like me were treated with simultaneous double treat of having The Muppets both on TV and on the gatefold sleeve album. With a distance of more than four decades, today I have re-discovered this album on youtube - it was never officially released on either CD or digitally, probably because of some copyright issues - I listened the whole thing with greatest joy and delight, to find not only that music was indeed marvellous, imaginative and even better than I remember, but also that somehow every note here is carved in my DNA - even though I was too young to understand English lyrics completely, I remember almost everything of it. I chuckled when I heard wonderfully zany version of "Mississippi Mud", sung along with "Mahna Mahna", "Mr. Bassman" and "Lydia the Tattooed Lady" ("Lydia, oh! Lydia, that "Encyclopedia") and cried when I heard "Halfway Down the Stairs".
"Halfway Down the Stairs" is a genuine beauty - placed as a little breather between two manic Muppet songs, it is a gentle little lullaby sung from a point of view of Kermit's little frog cousin Robin and its basically a kid singing his little song to himself. It is a lovely diamond of a song that any lonely kid might sing in his own little bubble - you know when you were small and everything was big and your little world is limited by warm comfort and safety of your home. It moved me unexpectedly to tears and I am listening it the whole day today.
"Halfway down the stairs
Is a stair
Where I sit.
There isn't any
Other stair
Quite like
It.
I'm not at the bottom,
I'm not at the top;
So this is the stair
Where
I always
Stop."
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