Prisoners of Rock N Roll

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I found this strange, dusty-old circular thingy in my dad’s garage the other day. At first I thought it was a Frisbee, but there was nowhere to grab hold of it. If you tried catching it, it might just slice your fingers off. Needless to say, it wasn’t a Frisbee.

“That’s a Record,” said my dad.

“A Record?” I said.

“Yes,” said my dad. “An Album. An LP. It plays music.”

I had no idea what he was talking about.

“It has music on it. See here? In the grooves.”

Poor dad. He’s seeing things again. My dad was getting old.

“They used to play these on radio stations, by people known as Disc Jockeys.”

Disk Jockeys? Now I knew he’d lost his mind.

“Songs used to be played over the air. For free. By one man who sat in a room full of records, sometimes called the Bullpen, or the Cage.”

“How many records?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a thousand. Maybe more.”

Now, I got it. It must have been some kind of state-sanctioned punishment. Back in the old days, prisons were busting at the seems. There were all types of pet programs designed to alleviate overcrowding. This must have been one of them.

Think about it: forced to sit in a room for who knows how long, having to work with these big, clumsy circular objects they called Records. Records. Get it? Moving them around like convicts used to move rocks? Confined in a small room they called a cage. Makes perfect sense.

Why music? To calm them down, of course. And with just a thousand songs to choose from, well, there was the punishment aspect of the program,

So how did my dad wind up with all these Records? I don’t know. Maybe he did time. Who knows what one’s parents were up to way back when. Whatever he might have done, by the size of the Record collection, I’d say he paid his debt to society. Watching him as he leafed through all his Records, I’d say he left a little bit of his mind back there as well.

“Come on dad,” I said, “let’s go get you something to eat.”

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Before trying his hand at fiction, Philip Loyd spent a lifetime as a financial and insurance writer, contributing to Forbes, McGraw Hill, and Jim Kramer’s The Street, among others. Loyd now writes fiction and reference books exclusively.. Titles available at Amazon.com.