Heart and Mind

Celebrating the Walkman

So I was chatting via email with Angela at TrippySWELL and decided that it was absolutely necesarry that I post a little essay on my blog about the great-grandaddy of the iPod, the "walkman."

If you view this link (it's from TrippySWELL's sister photo blog over at Flickr) you can see what got me talking about walkmans. ("Walkmen?") Read the comments beneath the picture.

OK, here's the skinny. I'm a blog-having, domain-owning, FTP-using, second-generation-buying-iPod kind of guy who is very steeped in the new technology. But I'm also a guy with big time appreciation for the old school, cause I am, ultimately, a child of the 80s. And there probably was no singular invention of the last 30 years that was of greater import to my formative years than the walkman. It's time we remember it.

Let's start off by making one thing clear. The term "walkman"—much like "Coke," "Q-tip," and "Band-Aid"—is actually a brand name that became a piece of common lingo to describe any similar product and not just the brand name. "Walkman" was a Sony brand. But just like we don't ask for a cola, cotton swab, or adhesive bandage strip, we never referred to our off-brand "walkmans" as Sanyo Portable Personal AM-FM Cassette Players. Any portable stereo system that you listened to through headphones, especially one that played cassettes, was called a "walkman." That's why I've opten to not captalize the word. I'm talking about all "walkmans," not just Walkmans.

In fact, although I've owned several Sony Walkmans, Sony is my most dispised brand of electronics because I think they're over priced and poorly made. Every Sony Product I've owned broke very quickly and cost too much money.

It's worth noting that Sony continued to call their portables "walkmans" even beyond the cassette era. Their were CD Walkmans and, later, MiniDisc Walkmans (the latter of which I owned). Still, "walkman" is basically a term largely reserved for those players that had the cassettes. That's what most people think of when they hear about walkmans. In my experience, anyway.

I truly was part of the first walkman generation. Much like my elders used to tell me old stories about how they could remember when the TV was this new-fangled invention, I can tell you stories about what life was like when this brand new walkman device came out. It allowed you to listen to high-quality stereo sounds on the go and in ear phones so that no one could hear what you were listening to. This was big shit at the time. Before that, portable cassette players tended to be those flat things with the top loading flap that sat on a desktop, had a crappy mono speaker, and were best suited for recording voice notes or for eavesdropping on your siblings like Peter Brady did. (There's another Brady Bunch reference specifically added for Yllek.)

Around 1981-ish, having a walkman was pretty damn cool. "Wow, you've got a walkman! Check it out!" It started, in my neck of the woods, with the rich kids getting 'em first, as a general rule. The early walkmans were about the size of a brick and they weighed quite a bit. But we thought they were portable, chic, small.

My sister begged my parents and got her first walkman as a birthday gift sometime back then, although hers was pretty cheap: AM FM radio only. I knew better that I needed not only the radio, but the cassette player. A friend of mine got his first and I fell in love with the thing. I knew I wanted one before that, but now I knew I HAD to have one. I got my first walkman in 7th grade, probably in very late 1983 or early 1984. It was a beauty. It was about 3-inches thick and longer than my adult-sized hand, and it came with a plastic/canvas case with a loop for your belt and a strap not unlike that of a pocket book. It was fuckin' awesome. I'd tape my vinyl records onto 60 (mostly) or 90 (occasionally) minute TDK cassettes and it was just plain fantastic. The experience of opening the lid and snapping the tape in and out was a magical and sensory one: feeling the cassette in your hand, hearing the lid snap close, anticipating the rich music that was about to flood your ears.

Flood, indeed. We listened to those walkmans loudly back in the day. These days it's largely ignored and taken for granted that people listen to iPods through earphones, but in my day, we heard (whenever our walkmans weren't on) lots of parental warnings about how the earphone experiece was going to make us all deaf when we were older.

That first walkman was one of the more memorable olnes, but it was far from the last. I probably owned near 20 walkmans from 1983 until I switched to MiniDiscs around 1997 or so. (I never got into portable CD players, because they, ironically, weren't that portable!) And I bought every brand, every level of quality. I owned the shitty , cassette-only ones with only a fast forward button (no rewind) and got my cheapest one for $9.99, and I also bought ones that cost around $100 circa 1986 or 87 (that might be the budget iPod Shuffle these days, but back then, that was SERIOUS BREAD for a walkman).

Sometime in the mid 80s, Sony introduced a small Walkman that they bragged was "no bigger than a cassette case itself." I bought a second or so generation of that concept, and that one was probably the most expensive one I had. (What they neglected to tell you was that it may have been the size of the cassette box, but it also was made as cheaply as the box and it was basically a flimsy P.O.S.) For people who are not familiar with that "P.O.S." acronym, think about it for a minute and you'll get the picture. The first word is "Piece."

But that actually brings us to the point of discussing quality. Although I experimented with all different price ranges, I eventually decided to stick to buying the cheapest, and sometimes shittiest, ones I could find because they all broke, anyway! They were pretty mechanical things with lots of moving parts and when you consider the mileage I put on them, they all broke pretty quickly. Some, like Sonys, broke more quickly than others.

And the "mileage" I speak of is key—key to why I went through them so fast and key to discussing why I hold such a treasured spot for the walkman. I was a walkman machine. I knew people who had a walkman, but only used it once in a while. Kind of like how one might use a blender or something. That didn't describe me. It was a fixture for me. With me all the time. I put over 1700 miles on my bicycle from about 10th grade through 12th grade and I probably had my walkman on for 1600 of them. I walked ridiculous amounts in college when I had no car, and I wore a walkman almost 100% of the time I was walking by myself. Also when I took the bus, which I did a lot back then. I even was known to occasionally wear my earphones in class sometimes if I was really bored.

I always had the walkman with me. There's a picture of me floating around somewhere when I was in 10th grade, dressed in a suit and tie, getting ready to go play in the band for the school's graduation ceremony. I'm on my way to play, got my instrument in my hand...and earphones around my neck and wired draping out of my pocket. It was a big part of me.

I used to half-jokingly say the the walkman was the greatest invention next to the wheel. For me, it basically was. And if you were a music lover who grew up during the 80s, you'd probably be singing the praises, too.

Do I miss the walkman? Of course not. We've got iPods and they're a better technology. But you've go to respect the walkman because, back in its time, it ruled the land.

posted by Steve @ 10:00 PM