The Power Of Platinum
An ode to my favorite boombox
(This one goes out to my friend Steve Gerlach, who noticed something in my recent Bruce Springsteen piece that demanded to be expanded upon.)
In the spring of 1982, a few days before my 16th birthday, my mom alerted me to a sale that was happening at a discount stereo and appliance shop we occasionally patronized on Chicago’s North Side. She knew I’d been wanting a boombox, one of those large-but-portable radio/cassette players that had become recently become popular, and she gave me $150 and told me to go to the shop and pick one out for myself as an early birthday present.
I knew very little about stereo gear at the time; for several years, most of my daily listening had been done through my clock radio, or through the bulky handheld tape recorder that my journalist stepfather had passed along to me. (I made my first “mixtapes” by positioning its built-in microphone against the quarter-sized speaker of my clock radio, and hitting the “Record” button as soon as I heard the first notes of any song I liked.) On the occasions when everyone else was out of the apartment, I’d spin records on my stepfather’s wooden-based BSR turntable; I recognized the brand names on his receiver and speakers (Marantz and JBL, respectively) as reputable ones, but couldn’t have told you which stereo component brands were better than others. It didn’t really matter, though, because I already knew exactly what kind of boombox I wanted:
A Panasonic Platinum.
There was no question about it. Ever since I’d first watched the 1980 TV commercial in which the members of Earth, Wind & Fire emerged from a giant boombox to extol the virtues of Panasonic’s Platinum (“Stereo, AM/FM, Cassette — Platinum is the power to get!”), my heart had been completely set on getting into the power of Platinum.
Panasonic had chosen their Platinum spokesmen wisely. At the time the commercial was filmed, Earth, Wind & Fire were coming off an incredible (and yes, platinum-selling) run of albums and singles that had begun with 1975’s That’s the Way of the World, which topped both the Pop and R&B charts on the strength of the blockbuster hit “Shining Star”. Though none of their singles from Faces, the sprawling double LP released in October 1980, managed to reach in the US Top 40, the band’s fanbase was was nonetheless still massive enough to send the album to #10 on the Billboard 200.
While hugely popular with white audiences (that bargain-basement Scott Baio in the Platinum TV ad spoke for many of us with his totally stoked cry of “Wow! Earth, Wind & Fire!”), EWF were a veritable institution in the Black community by this point — and if it was still too early in the game for corporations to work hip-hop culture into their commercials, having EWF “carry the beat right into the street” was Panasonic’s acknowledgement that urban Black and Latino kids formed a significant part of the boombox-buying demographic. EWF had the mainstream commercial appeal necessary to front a nationwide ad campaign, but they also still had enough street cred to sell boomboxes to the kids — which they continued to do through 1983, when the founder Maurice White put the band on hiatus for several years.
Upon arriving at the stereo shop (I forget the name now, but it was a weird little windowless place on Addison, just a few blocks east of Wrigley Field), it quickly became apparent to this kid that the $150 his mom had given him wasn’t going to be nearly enough to cover one of the high-end Platinum models with all the bells and whistles. But that was okay; I just needed something fairly simple, not to mention something that wouldn’t require a shoulder strap if I chose to walk around with it.
I wound up going with the RX-5030, which was one or two rungs above the bottom of the Platinum line. (I’m pretty sure it’s the one that Philip Bailey is holding in the Panasonic ad above.) There wasn’t anything fancy about it at all, but it sounded great, it only weighed a little over 10 pounds with six D-cell batteries installed, and I had enough money left over from my purchase to buy a pair of Sony Walkman headphones, the kind with the orange foam earpads.
I spent the first few hours after schlepping my new Platinum home listening to various Bruce Springsteen bootleg tapes and a Clash mix I’d recently made at a friend’s house. They sounded better (and louder) on the boombox than they’d done on my stepfather’s monophonic handheld tape recorder, but then audio fidelity wasn’t really my first concern when listening to Springsteen bootlegs or punk rock records. That night, however, I had my first real experience with being absolutely dazzled by stereo sound. (Though hearing “River Deep, Mountain High” on headphones a few years earlier was an even more mind-blowing experience in some ways, that song was, of course, recorded in mono.)
As everyone else in the house had gone to bed and I didn’t want to disturbed them, I plugged my new headphones into my new boom box, switched the function button to FM radio, and tuned the dial to 93.1, WXRT. I’d been a staunch WLUP fan during my first year and a half as a Chicago resident, but my musical tastes were changing and I’d recently transferred my allegiance to XRT, which played a lot more Springsteen and The Clash (and Elvis Costello and Joe Jackson and Graham Parker and Squeeze) than “The Loop” ever did; even if you had to sit through the likes of Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt and Little Feat to get to it, it was still better than sitting through the latest tracks from Styx, Foreigner and REO Speedwagon to hear some AC/DC and Led Zeppelin. Right as I popped my orange ear pads into place and turned up the volume, whichever XRT DJ was on duty that night dropped the needle on “Cynical Girl,” a track from Marshall Crenshaw’s new self-titled debut LP.
I had already heard the song on XRT once or twice before, but not like this — not with headphones on and the stereo cranked LOUD. For the next two and a half minutes, I felt like I was suspended blissfully in outer space, with multicolored guitars and drums and bells and handclaps dancing around me and flickering in and out of view while Crenshaw pined melodically for the totally-over-it girl of his (and my) dreams. It was the very definition of pop heaven.
For the next decade or so, with headphones or without, that Panasonic Platinum was my near-constant companion. I took it with me to high school parties, to the beach, and even occasionally carried the beat right into the street (the English Beat, that is); but mostly it stayed in my various bedrooms, where it served as my primary conduit to musical discovery.
In January 1983, when I’d saved up enough money to buy a turntable of my own (but not enough to purchase a complete stereo system) I simply connected that new turntable to the RCA inputs on the side of the boombox, and amplified the sound with a stereo pre-amp purchased from Radio Shack. It was on this jerry-rigged set-up that I heard so many crucial albums for the first time — The Jam’s Setting Sons, The Kinks Kronikles, The Who Sell Out, REM’s first two albums, The Replacements’ Let It Be, Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, Robert Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues Singers, etc., etc. If the boombox’s closely-bunched speakers didn’t make for much in the way of stereo separation, I didn’t really mind — and I could always put on my headphones if I wanted that kind of experience.
This set-up also produced pretty much all the mixtapes I made for girlfriends, would-be girlfriends, pals, bandmates and myself from 1983 to 1993 — I wouldn’t even bother to buy a dedicated cassette deck until I moved to L.A. in ‘93, because the tapes I made on the boombox were decent-sounding enough that I didn’t really feel the need for one. I taped so many borrowed albums from friends this way, as well; though I never bought into the whole “Home Taping is Killing the Industry” hysteria of the mid-1980s, if that bromide had been true I could have easily been arrested for murder.
The RX-5030 also served as my guitar amp for about a year. After my mom bought me a no-name pawnshop electric for my birthday in 1983, I quickly figured out that I could plug it into the boombox with the help of a “Y” cable adaptor. You had to turn the boombox volume up all the way to get any sort of guitar sound out of it, though — at least until I realized that I could get a much louder and raunchier sound out of it by plugging the Radio Shack pre-amp into the boombox and my guitar into the pre-amp. Boom! Instant early Kinks!
I recorded my very first songs on that Panasonic Platinum, as well, bouncing tracks back and forth to my sister’s single-speaker boombox to create really primitive layers of distorted guitar, and then singing over them into the Platinum’s built-in microphones. (I’m sure they sounded horrific, but I wish I still had those tapes today.) And in 1989, when my dad got me a Tascam Porta-2 as my college graduation present — an immensely generous gesture which said, “Even though I’m not happy that you’ve chosen rock n’ roll instead of graduate school, I want you have a good tool for writing songs” — I used the boombox to mix my four-track demos down to two tracks. That RX-5030 was invaluable to me in so many ways…
So what happened to it? I wish I could say — a trusty friend and helpful companion of that sort certainly deserves a more fitting farewell than I apparently gave it. I have a vague memory of leaving it with my Lava Sutra bandmates when I split Chicago for the California sun in 1993; it may have finally given up the ghost in their care, as I have no recollection of it ever breaking down on me…
In any case, it’s been at least three decades since I last saw my Panasonic Platinum — but I can still totally recall the feel of its bulk, the easy swing of its handle, the tactile ridges of its control knobs, the red lights of its LED readout, the loud “thunk” the “Play” button made when it popped up at the end of a tape, the click and rattle the cassette door made when you pushed “Eject,” and the brief burst of quite-literally-electric excitement I automatically felt every time I turned the radio on. And I still feel an enormous sense of gratitude to Earth, Wind & Fire for bringing us together in the first place.
Did you have a boombox that really rocked your world? If so, go ahead and give it a shout-out in the comments…
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This was awesome Dan, brought back so many memories of my boombox from the early 80s, which was very similar to yours.
Sadly I ended up having to sell mine to pay for a very expensive phone call that a friend and I made from my parents’ phone. We’d met two sisters that were visiting Bermuda on a cruise ship and we thought it would be “romantic” to call them on the ship as they steamed out to sea.
Somehow we managed to get an operator to connect us to the cruise ship and managed to convince whoever was on the ship to connect us to the two young ladies in question. Long story short, a ten minute phone call cost $300!! That was a LOT of money in 1987 and I had to sell my boombox to my next door neighbor to pay my share.
A tough lesson to learn but thankfully I’d get an all in one stereo with tuner, turntable and dual tape deck later that year.
My weapon of choice was the Pioneer SK-31, purchased with part of the life insurance proceeds I received at 16 years old after my Mom passed ( I had the boombox for several years until I basically drunkenly punched it to death in the mid-80's. Have fun with THAT, armchair psychiatrists ). Like you, I had the same pre-amp/turntable setup ( my turntable was a Rotel that I wish I still had, frankly ).
Gawd knows how many mixtapes I made with that thing.