Memories Are Lies.

As far back as I can remember I’ve told people that the first LP I bought was Jesus Christ Superstar, the movie soundtrack, but this morning I was thinking about the Partridge Family Christmas album and I went to Wikipedia to see when it came out (1971), and I noticed that the first Partridge Family album (called The Partridge Family Album) was released in 1970, the second in 1971. I had and loved and played to death both of those albums, and the JCS film didn’t come out until 1973. I guess it’s possible I didn’t get the Partridge Family records right away, but more than 3 years after they came out?

Another possibility is that my parents bought them for me, and JCS was the first LP I went to the store and bought with my own money, but that’s not really the story I’ve been telling all these years. I think what happened is that at some point — it must have been in my late teens or very early twenties when being regarded as cool was important because by my mid-twenties I was going through a “the more uncool something is, the more cool” phase; I used to say that I wanted the vocal arrangements for my band TV Goodbyes to sound like the Partridge Family — I started answering the question, “What was your first album?” with “the Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack” because the Partridge Family Album would have been an embarrassing answer. And then over time the lie became the memory.

I know this is a thing that happens; I’ve been writing a lot about the past, sometimes before and sometimes after reading my journals and correspondence from any given period.

My brother and I had a conversation at Thanksgiving about how for a while as a kid, I was a terrible liar. It started with lying to try to avoid being punished (deny everything!) but it got to be a habit and soon I was lying all the time often for no reason at all. Maybe I can’t blame this first album story on the slipperiness of memory formation. Maybe it’s just me.

I know for a fact I did not own the Partridge Family Christmas album. Then again, the Partridge Family Christmas album would have been exponentially more uncool than even the regular albums, so maybe I’ve buried the memory of it even deeper.