I must have been about 12 or 13, in 1978 or 79, when my cousin started playing me his record collection when my family. Isited his on a Saturday evening.
he introduced me to Sabbath, Zep, Purple, Floyd, Genesis and any others that I don’t recall now. I couldn’t afford to buy records then, or for almost the next ten years, so I started by taping his Zep and Sabbath.
Later I discovered Rainbow then AC/DC, Van Halen, Saxon, etc, but still had to tape record my friends albums. Eventually I even had to decide what had to be sacrificed and recorded over when something new came out that I wanted a copy of.
i never listened to radio (it winds me up that someone else is deciding what gets played, and I still hate listening to it), and all my music discoveries were word of mouth, until I started buying guitar magazines in the late 80’s.