Reassembling the music room and testing out the reconnected stereo, I was fascinated by this 55-year-old record sleeve. It's pleading, so excessively, for appreciation. What was so threatening back in 1968? 8-tracks? We took a break from our seemingly endless painting project and luxuriated in the beautiful sound of a record.
Posts
38 comments:
"With records it's easy to pick out the songs you want to play, or to play again a particular song or side. All you have to do is lift the tone arm and place it where you want it. You can't do this as easily with anything but a phonograph record."
Maybe Columbia was worried about TV?
My 13 year daughter old loves records. She has spotify for everything, but still wants to listen to a record.
I suppose the "It happens first on Records" means it comes out as an LP and then as tape.
And no it was NOT easy to move the needle to the correct song. I remember as a kid, trying to ge the needle to the exact song I wanted. And it was HARD. First, you needed to know where it was on the record, and even if you knew it was say the 4th song, the needle might miss the exact starting point.
But compared to tape, yeah maybe.
We have a big box of old records up in the attic. Never bothered to take them out and play them, even though LP's just sound better for some reason. The singing voices seem "warmer" or whatever. Maybe someone can explain.
My 2014 Yaris comes with a CD player (never used) but no USB port or audio input capability for MP3s.
Was pleasantly surprised to find that turntable belts are available and affordable.
That Lovin Spoonful LP with the goofy drawing on the cover was in the cut out bins for years. I bought it for $1.99 at Free Being on 8th Street and after my girl friend took it, I got it for 49 cents at Korvettes a couple years later. Picks to click: "6 O'clock," "She Is Still a Mystery," and "Money."
"With records it's easy to pick out the songs you want to play, or to play again a particular song or side. All you have to do is lift the tone arm and place it where you want it. You can't do this as easily with anything but a phonograph record."
Yeah, and won't get tangled up in 4 track player causing you to attempt removing tape while driving and crash into incoming bus full of senior citizens , killing yourself due to no seatbelts or airbags.
I remember that sleeve. I think it was the eight track that spooked them. Cassette tapes were out there too, but in my telling it was the eight track was on the rise. I agreed then and now that the album art and liner notes were valuable to the purchase.
It's just better in its own way. I have a wall full of it. Analog and mechanical technology is still powerful stuff, and most people have been too distracted by the new to be able to appreciate its power. The power is still there, like a steam engine. The immediacy will knock you down.
Plus - God bless liner notes.
Vinyl never left. See also Japan.
My My...
https://youtu.be/zcATbEugHJg
What have we here?
"I must have been mad
I never knew what I had
Until I threw it all away"
FullMoon said...
Ima go out in the garage, find the ZiGZags and my ten year old stash and spark a doobie.
Rastaman Vibration” was released in 1976.
"This album jacket is great for cleaning herb” it advises on the inner gatefold.
@jeff gee
Don’t forget Younger Generation:
"Hey pop can I go ride my Zoom?
It goes two hundred miles per hour suspended on balloons
And can I put a droplet of this new stuff on my tongue
And imagine frothing dragons while you sit and wreck your lungs?"
And I must be permissive, understanding of the younger generation…
"Hey pop, my girlfriend's only 3
She's got her own videophone and she's a taking LSD
And now that we're best friends she wants to give a bit to me
And what's the matter Daddy, how come you're turning green
Can it be that you can't live up to your dreams?"”
Some things I don't miss ... Records ... Reel-to-Reel Tapes ... Cassette Tapes ... Eight Track Tapes ... CDs ... AM Radio ... FM Radio ... Short Wave Radio ... Broadcast TV ... Steam Locomotives ...
Is trans-gender the new tattoo?
You know......tomorrow's regret today!!
8-tracks? those are just a flash in the pan! i doubt they'll last as long as CDs
I admire the breezy incoherence of those advantages.
If It's In Recorded Form, You Know It'll Be Available On Records
We have books and photographs. We also have cassette tape recorders.
They Make A Great Gift True enough, but it's a bold assertion that "Everybody you know loves music"
As if that list was written with the assumption that no one would ever read it.
Over the course of years, I had 45 singles, LP albums, 8-tracks, cassettes and CDs. Then I got an iPod and ripped all of my CDs onto it and carried around my entire music collection in my pocket. Nowadays, I stream music to my iPhone and plug it into my car's USB port when I'm driving. No more need for radio; I listen to what I like, commercial free.
8-tracks were the worst, because there usually would be at least one song where the player would switch from one track to the next in the middle of the song. Cassettes had a tendency to get eaten or stretched. CDs were great but bulky; I have boxes and boxes full of them in storage. The only fly in the ointment with streaming music is that sometimes you can't find an artist due to rights issues, or a particular song may be unavailable or BECOME unavailable. There was a concert album of George Strait, Alan Jackson and Jimmy Buffett live at Texas Stadium, and one song that had been available about "Murder On Music Row" suddenly became unavailable one day. That annoyed me. Evidently the criticism of the country music industry was enough to get the song deleted.
And since we're talking about music, one interesting album I recently discovered is Off The Beatle Track by Apple Jam, a Beatles tribute band from Seattle. The album came out in 2009 and features 15 songs written by the Beatles (all but one by Lennon-McCartney, the other by George Harrison) but never released by them during their career. The album sounds like a lost Beatles album from 1963-65. Several of the songs were released by other artists, including "A World Without Love" by Chad and Jeremy, and a number of songs by Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, who were also managed by Brian Epstein. Here are a couple of them:
Apple Jam - I'll Keep You Satisfied
Apple Jam - Bad To Me
I really enjoyed this album. You can find the whole thing on YouTube.
Before he was an electric sell out:
"Bob Dylan: A Distinctive Folk-Song Stylist"
From the "New York Times," Friday, September 29, 1961
by Robert Shelton
A bright new face in folk music is appearing at Gerde's Folk City. Although only 20 years old, Bob Dylan is one of the most distinctive stylists to play in a Manhattan cabaret in months.
Resembling a cross between a choir boy and a beatnik, Mr. Dylan has a cherubic look and a mop of tousled hair he partly covers with a Huck Finn black corduroy cap. His clothes may need a bit of tailoring, but when he works his guitar, harmonica or piano and composes new songs faster than he can remember them, there is no doubt that he is bursting at the seams with talent.
Mr. Dylan's voice is anything but pretty. He is consciously trying to recapture the rude beauty of a Southern field hand musing in melody on his porch. All the "husk and bark" are left on his notes and searing intensities pervades his songs.
Mr. Dylan is both comedian and tragedian. Like a vaudeville actor on the rural circuit, he offers a variety of droll musical monologues: "Talking Bear Mountain" lampoons the overcrowding of an excursion boat, "Talkin' New York" satirizes his troubles in gaining recognition and "Talking Havah Nageilah" burlesques the folk-music craze and the singer himself.
In his serious vein, Mr. Dylan seems to be performing in a slow-motion film. Elasticized phrases are drawn out until you think they may snap. He rocks his head and body, closes his eyes in reverie and seems to be groping for a word or a mood, then resolves the tension benevolently by finding the word and the mood.
Mr. Dylan's highly personalized approach toward folk song is still evolving. He has been sopping up influences like a sponge. At times, the drama he aims at is off-target melodrama and his stylization threatens to topple over as a mannered excess.
But if not for every taste, his music-making has the mask of originality and inspiration, all the more noteworthy for his youth. Mr., Dylan is the more noteworthy for his youth. Mr. Dylan is vague about his antecedents and birthplace, but it matters less where he has been than where he is going, and that would seem to be straight up.
I was a big Spoonful fan
Per a recent Billboard article:
“In 2022, for the second year in a row vinyl albums outsold CD albums in the U.S. Vinyl continues to be the leading format for album purchases for the second straight year, according to figures announced in the U.S. 2022 Luminate Year-End Music Report.”
“Vinyl album sales comprised 43.4% of all album purchases in the U.S. in 2022 (43.46 million of 100.09 million total sales across all formats — both digital and physical). Vinyl LPs accounted for 54.4% of all physical albums sold last year (43.46 million of 79.89 million; physical albums include CDs, vinyl LPs, cassette tapes and other niche physical formats).”
Columbia's inner sleeves weren't as hip as Warner Bros., but they started experimenting more around 1970. (one of their unintentionally funny hipster lines, around 1970, was "...because the man can't take our music.").
"With records it's easy to pick out the songs you want to play, or to play again a particular song or side. All you have to do is lift the tone arm and place it where you want it. You can't do this as easily with anything but a phonograph record."
CD players let you pick a specific track if you so choose (at least, all the ones I've owned have). It's easier and usually more precise than lifting/dropping a turntable tone arm. And you don't have to flip the disc over to get to the other side.
Just sayin'. :)
I recall trying to date that inner-sleeve in a discussion online elsewhere. It is not unheard of for a record-inner-sleeves to be switched between albums, so the presence of it in a cover protecting a record is not necessarily an indication that it originated with that record.
I had a music history professor who could reliably drop the needle very close to the start of whichever section of a piece he was discussing. Not merely counting tracks to find the movement, but memory of exactly where to drop within the movement to get, for example, the 'recapitulation'.
Did you like "Nashville Skyline"? Not one of my favorites from him.
I framed that inner sleeve and put it on the wall in my basement, where I have a bunch of music posters and album covers.
I don't know why Columbia used that sleeve in some releases. The LP was king in 70 or 71. It would be a while before cassettes began to outsell LPs, and record companies manufactured and marketed those, too. At the time the sleeve was printed, the claims it made were true.
What's the LP on the right?
Full Moon--that was one hell of a review. Spot on. In 1961.
Records are terrible for the environment, difficult to make, expensive to make and only sound good if they're properly made.
And yet people keep buying them! Why?
"Did you like "Nashville Skyline"? Not one of my favorites from him."
I pulled it out randomly from the section of the shelf I knew was Bob Dylan. I love whole first decade of Bob Dylan, all of which, except the first album, I've listened to 100s of times and have embedded in my head.
"Nashville Skyline" felt like a later album when it came out, but it was only 1968, amazingly.
My favorite is the place where I started, "Bringing It All Back Home." I went backwards from there and the incredibly great new stuff was also coming out quickly: "Highway 61" and "Blonde on Blonde." Those 3 — Bringing, Highway, Blonde — plus "Another Side" and "Freewheelin'" are my favorites.
It was hard for me when his voice changed, but I think I accepted it at the time: "John Wesley Harding" was endlessly interesting, and "Nashville Skyline" felt easier and lighthearted. I've always thought "Lay Lady Lay" was kind of embarrassing. You can have your cake and eat it too. But I must say, the music sounded great on the old stereo. The percussion was quite different and felt more "real."
"Highway 61", Prof did you ever get a Triumph Motorcycle tee? ;-)
Vinyl sounds "warmer" largely due to the dynamic constraints of the medium: it tends to rely heavily on the mid-range frequencies, less on bass and high frequencies.
I have nostalgic feelings towards my old vinyl and sometimes take it out and play it just to relive those halcyon days of my youth when buying an LP was exciting. But it's got too many flaws, including the usual pops, crackles, etc., not to mention that every interior track is more garbled than the outer ones, which I always noticed and made them almost unlistenable in my book. CDs got kind of a bad rap initially because a lot of record companies just copied the old (vinyl) masters to CD, and on CD they sounded awful because you could finally hear all the limitations of vinyl.
If I really want to hear an old recording, I'll get the remastered CD.
Also note: The mastering process has a profound effect on the final product regardless of the medium.
My parents had a box of old 78 rpm records in the basement. On hot summer days (before we had AC), we kids would go down to the cooler basement, play the records, and try to dance. I remember that the sound quality of the recordings was not that great.
"But it's got too many flaws, including the usual pops, crackles, etc." A tired argument against vinyl. Well cared for LPs do not have those flaws. I have LPs in my collection that are 50 years old and play back just fine.
" every interior track is more garbled than the outer ones" Only audible if you have a bad turntable.
"CDs got kind of a bad rap initially because a lot of record companies just copied the old (vinyl) masters to CD, and on CD they sounded awful because you could finally hear all the limitations of vinyl." Not even remotely true. CD reissues came from digital remasters, and at first people were still learning how to do the transfers. CD playback was the culprit, and only started to improve about 10 years after the format was introduced. At this point, about 35 years after the CD dominated the market, digital to analog converters on players, even affordable ones, is very good.
"Nashville Skyline" felt like a later album when it came out, but it was only 1968, amazingly.
I think I might well have described it exactly the same way. Unlike you, though, I came to all those albums long after they had been recorded and released- like decades after. "Nashville Skyline" definitely sounds more like the albums from the late 1970s on than it does like the albums immediately before it and after it chronologically. It is literally my least favorite album from him made before 1972, and low on the list of all them put together.
Post a Comment