By Steve Chase

Remember the original Sony Walkman? It was a device that changed not only music, but us—for good or bad, depending on how you view it. The Walkman allowed you to take your music with you, and listen privately. For runners and skiers that was good. But the Walkman, and its many successors over the years, also allowed you to tune out from the situation and environment around you, creating a legion of earbud zombies, ignoring everything but the tunes and, perhaps, creating, according to some, a social fissure that we may never be able to close. When did you get your first Walkman? For me, they definitely had their purpose.

I couldn’t afford to buy a Walkman in the summer of 1981. I worked a four-month stint as a backcountry caretaker in a little cabin called Gray Knob, at treeline on the side of New Hampshire’s Mt. Adams. Getting up to Gray Knob required a three-mile, 3,000-foot ascent with a backpack loaded with groceries, supplies, and fuel. It wasn’t long before you knew every rock and turn in the trail, with the steep areas identified with names like ball-buster stairs and the first, second, and third chutes.

A great hazard back then for caretakers was that the last song you heard before hiking up the mountain was the melody that stuck in your head for the entire trip to the top. If I wasn’t careful, and had the radio tuned to a station playing the annoying pop music of say, Lover Boy, I would be tortured the entire trip up with the refrain of “Everybody’s Working for the Weekend”—a living hell for someone with a progressive music palate. 

For music at the cabin, I had an ancient Sony mono boom box that played AM/FM and eight track tapes. I carefully recorded those eight tracks that would last me the season, and today I still remember some of the tapes: John Coltrane’s Giant Steps; Devadip Carlos Santana’s The Swing of Delight; Pat Metheny Group’s White Album; and Livestock by Brand X (all available on iTunes). I tried to ration those tapes, so I wouldn’t tire of them, by keeping the radio on and tuned to CHOM from Montreal (www.chom.com), which played lots of Foreigner and Tom Petty, and Vermont Public Radio, with its news and a decent jazz show a few evenings a week (www.vpr.net). That was my summer of music: eight track tapes, CHOM, a little jazz, and the potential torture of hearing the same garbage pop music repeating like a broken record in my head as I grunted up Lowe’s Path.

The next spring, as I prepared for another season in the White Mountains, I figured it was time to get a Walkman. I headed to the store and found a Walkman WM-F6 on sale for about $90 (see the Walkman museum at www.pocketcalculatorshow.com/walkman/sony). Unlike the iPods of today, this baby was a solid hunk of metal and plastic, requiring four AA batteries and, for my use on the mountain, another dozen batteries as backup. There was a rather cheesy set of headphones, but they worked pretty well nonetheless—they stayed on my head over my bandana. The difference in hikes up was profound; I could listen to my favorite music, no more trail torment from Lover Boy or Quiet Riot. I would practically float up the trail, listening to Pat Metheny, Jerry Garcia Band, or Return to Forever.

Haul out a Walkman today, 30 years after it was first released, in front of a bunch of Millennials, and the shock and guffaws will be acute. Words like “clunker” and “relic” will be used before you are laughed out of the room. In this age of the iPod, where a complete library of digital music can be carried around in your back pocket, it is easy to forget the roots of portable music and how revolutionary the Walkman was.

The inventor of the Walkman, Andreas Pavel, recalled to the NY Times (www.nytimes.com/2005/12/17/international/americas/17pavel.html) all the reaction to his invention:

“They all said they didn’t think people would be so crazy as to run around with headphones, that this is just a gadget, a useless gadget of a crazy nut.”

History says otherwise, and today portable music devices are ubiquitous around the world. While critics cry out about a population of people walking the streets with their earphones on, all the while blocking out the environment and the need to interact with others, I look at the portable music device—whether the walkman that made my hikes so much more bearable, or the far more advanced iPod—as important tools to enjoy the vast quantities of music available 30 years ago and today.