My first CD, my first Aerosmith

When I was around 14 years old, my mom gave my dad a shiny new CD player. His old one, you see, while just a few years old, was already pretty outdated... It played just one CD at a time, and it was a pretty big machine, about the size of some of the other components on my dad's stereo shelf (I think it was right up there with the 8-track player for sheer bulk). So clearly, the old CD player needed to be replaced with something spiffy and updated, so my mom bought my dad another machine, one that was even bigger than the last one, but that held FIVE discs at once. It was amazing. We oohed and ahhed over it. And the best part? The old single-disc CD player came to me.

I hooked it up to my tiny dual-cassette stereo, but then I realized I needed some CDs. To get a bunch of CDs quickly, I did what any stupid teenager did back then: I joined a mail-order music service (ten CDs for the price of one, with all of my personal information kept and stored and sold to third-party spammers until the end of time? Sign me up!). 

The hard part was picking which CDs to order, since my music taste up to that point was pretty much limited to late-80s pop and show tunes. Most of the music I liked already graced my shelf in cassette form, and I didn't see the point of ordering the same album in a new format (see "stupid teenager," above). I scanned the amazingly limited music catalog offered to me, and something jumped out: Aerosmith. I had heard of Aerosmith! I hadn't really listened to them before, but I knew they'd been around a while and lots of people liked them. Maybe I would, too!

So this greatest-hits CD was the very first CD I purchased for my collection. It arrived, looking very rock-and-roll, and I really enjoyed putting it into my player for the first time and listening to it through the tiny speakers of my stereo. I actually liked the music, which made me feel downright cool. Aerosmith? Yeah, I dig Aerosmith. I play it on my OWN CD player.

Of course, the second CD I owned was Vanilla Ice, so there goes my street cred.