My Beatles Collection!

The Beatles’ USB. Two Hundred plus dollars for a little green thing that you could easily lose down the storm drain, with every Beatles song on it. It’s sort of a foreign concept to people my age and older. Invisible music! I know it’s in/on there somewhere but I see no physical evidence to prove it. All I know is that I can plug it in and hear all 250 or so, songs in very good quality mp3  sound. But where is the music? Where but WHERE?

In the past I could walk into a room and think “ah, there’s my music collection” and gaze admiringly at my few hundred vinyl music artifacts and could just look at the art work, all big and 12″ by 12″ like, and imagine what the music sounds like in my head and it was a whole inclusive experience.

But now I walk in a room and see a little silvery passport sized plastic thing and think “oh, there’s my music collection” and I have to guess and remember what’s on it because it holds 5 times as much music as my record racks did and I can’t decide what to listen to and I don’t know if I feel like it anyway because it’s invisible and emanates from an ugly silver thing!

It’s an inescapable fact that music has been tied to a visual of some sort (album art) for the past 100 years up until, maybe 10 or 15 years ago. And a lot of us passionate music lovers of a certain age can’t quite get the concept of music without it. I mean, really, what’s more intriguing? Simply telling you that you must listen to Atom Heart Mother by Pink Floyd or showing it to you and saying “check this out”?

But really, the whole idea of music in a material form with accompanying art work and in the form of a prepared album of songs is in itself an unnatural form that only exists because someone invented recording 120 years ago. The idea of a 37 minute album of songs only exists because in 1948 when the LP was invented, that was what you could comfortably fit on a record without compromising the sound quality.

You know that’s true because if you remember when CDs began, all of a sudden there was 20 years of albums 70 to 80 minutes long because that’s what would fit! (20 years of insufferable extra long albums)

But before all of that, millenniums into the past, music only existed in the air! It was invisible. It didn’t even fit on a little plastic thingy! It resided in the brain. And it only became a reality if the person who could play the piano, or accordion, decided to sit down (or stand) and play the music he kept in his head and convert it into wiggling air molecules to be decoded by the listener’s earhole. And when he got tired and stopped playing, the music was gone again. Disappeared into the great invisible. And you could only get to hear it again if you could get the guy to agree to come over again next week. And then you still might not get the same tune because he’ll play it wrong!

Sometimes, to create a permanent record of a piece of music, people wrote down dots and sticks on a piece of paper to represent the music and how it should be played but it didn’t actually become a musical reality until someone looked at the paper and moved their fingers around on their musical instrument and sculpted the static air into sound shapes.

So basically, your music collection, such as it was, was stored in the head of the guy on your street who could play an instrument and totally depended on how many songs he knew, and your visual accompaniment was down to the vision of the guy sitting at the piano or that insane big plant in the corner or the blue haired lady who smelled like corned beef and her naughty dog who sat beside you during the performance.

And that’s the way it had been for millenniums. In fact, lots of people NEVER got to hear music unless they went to Church. (Not the puritans though. Music was evil). But the end of the 19th century brought about an earth shaking change in the way music was consumed.

Recorded Music – Disc and Cylinder

Of course like the battle between HD? and Bluray, and VHS and Betamax, we know who won the earliest format battle. The Disc guy.

In those days you could only get 1 song per side or 1 song per cylinder. So for decades, the parlance in music bizz was all about “sides”.  Robert Johnson cut 30 or so sides for his label. For 78 disc. Miles Davis cut about 24 sides for his label in 1949 and 1950. And he appears on a few Charlie Parker sides from 1947-8.

The First recording superstar in the early part of the century was opera singer Enrico Caruso. Someone convinced him that he would be doing himself a favour if he lowered himself to record his popular, in demand voice onto the vulgar format of recorded music. So he recorded a number of arias from popular Operas and put them out and he became the first recording superstar, especially with young and older ladies. When he would come to your town on tour, he was swarmed by females and his shows could’ve been the beginning of the strange phenomenon of throwing panties onto the stage as love offerings. It may not have happened that far back but it should’ve!

The sound of these recordings was, in comparison to the live experience, dire! This is truly a case of; put your iPod earbuds on the table and turn the music up full and you get what early records sounded like. This was mainly because, record players weren’t electric but were wind up. And when the spring wound down, the music would get slower and lower…. With the lack of an electric amp, the bass frequencies couldn’t be reproduced and therefore you get the earbud effect!

Now the artwork. Just a plain brown paper sleeve or a brown sleeve with ads for other exciting artists also on this label. I have a few of those for some of my 78s. So when I listen to The Mills Brothers “sides” in my collection, my visual for that is a brown paper bag! Or you could eventually buy a record “album”. Like a photo album but you put records into it.

The L.P., Cassette, Reel to reel, 8-track album!

So let’s skip a bit brother. In 1948, the Long Player 33 and a 3rd was invented. In 1958, stereo was invented. Both mainly for classical recordings. While pop music and the new rock’n'roll had albums of their own, it was still basically a “single side” type of music. It wasn’t art! But here is where it starts to affect me personally.

My earliest music memories include this classic rock and roll album cover.

Now this is where I stop making logical sense and I lose my focus and let emotion take over! Now tell me honestly! Doesn’t listening to “Blue Suede Shoes” have a different effect on you if you know that this is the album artwork for that song? This album cover depicts pure rock and roll sweat! This album cover, more so than even the music, represents everything that rock and roll is! You can almost feel the heat! Somebody else was obviously impressed too.

So all through my life, music was inextricably entwined with the visual packaging that came with it. Examples:

This is obviously the most popular format for the longest time. The LP album. Frank Zappa called it a fetish, but when dad finally got a proper stereo, I loved holding the big cardboard cover while listening to the album over and over and over and over again and poring over the picture (ultra-cool) and re-reading the liner notes (almost as cool). It was a full enveloping experience.

Flipping through the records on the record rack in the living room. Picking one out to hear. Dusting it off. Handling only by the edges of course. Blowing the dust off the stylus. Taking good care of these precious things. Especially the stereo ones and the Quad ones.

And of course a whole “culture of the record album” came along with it. Snobby stereo geeks everywhere had a living room full of stuff like this: Special cloths for dusting it. And straight from the T.V. ad:

I never had one of these, but I’m informed that instead of cleaning out grounded in dirt, it just grounded it in further!

And This!:

It was a whole culture that is hard to explain to some one who is  young now, what it was like! And waiting for a new album release, it was a special occasion. You had to GO TO the record store. Select the album. Maybe the first issue has a limited edition poster or a bonus 7″ 45. And you’d be sure to grab it because when it sold out, it would be out of print and only available as a standard issue without the poster or 7″. Or maybe it came in ltd. edition coloured vinyl. It was great!

Of course then, the 8-track was handy for taking in the car.

The thing about 8-track though, was the tape would often get so tight that it would break! Or the player would eat it! And if you tried to open it to do a home repair, in invariably wound up all over the floor!  And there was no YouTube to look at to find out how to fix it properly.

And for some reason ( I thought so anyway) the sound was very compressed so there was very little dynamic range! And because each channel is a specific length, songs would fade out half way through and continue on in the next channel. In retrospect, it’s quite funny and there’s a kitschy nostalgia for this format and some of the Beatles ones go for good money if you have a good condition one.

Or they would mess with the album running order or completely change certain things. On the Sgt. Pepper’s 8-track, the reprise has a 10 second section repeated and edited in to make the song long enough so there wasn’t a too long of a gap after A day In The Life ended and the album went back to channel one and started over.

On Pink Floyd‘s Animals, Pigs On The Wing isn’t divided into part 1 and 2. It’s a continuous recording with a guitar solo piece in the middle.

Reel To Reel was a popular format too and usually quite good sound quality too if you bought one of the Higher Speed tapes.

I think the second most popular format after vinyl, and certainly the most popular among my friends at high school was the cassette.

For the most part, I didn’t like them. Home taping was fine but I found that most pre-recorded tapes just didn’t sound near as good as the record. Plus, just look at the piddlin’ little picture that adorns the front! The music isn’t half as exciting as it is with the 12″ by 12″ cardboard cover!

I’m not going to discuss CDs. For at least the first 10 years of their existence, they sounded awful. At least when the 90s and the early noughties came, it seemed that they were able to press a good sounding CD finally but those wretched jewel cases!!! The plastic teeth in the middle that holds the disc in, they all break off and the disc flops around in there. And every time you open it, the disc falls on the floor and some more of those broken teeth bits come flying out too!

Even though we were all impatient with EMI for neglecting the Beatles legacy on those cheap CDs with the non artwork we ARE glad that they waited 22 years before they did something about it and the quality of the re-issues almost legitimises the existence of the CD.

The fact of the matter is that a huge chunk of humanity consumed music in the 12″ vinyl form with the concept of the album cover and the fetish of the actual record! And it REALLY does contribute to the way we (or Maybe only me, what do I know!) experience the music in our minds.

One example: Radiohead – Amnesiac

This album psychologically “feels” different when played on double 10″ vinyl than it does on a silly little shiny disc. Trying to look at the 5″ square paper book when you could be holding the 10″ gatefold sleeve of the vinyl version. Why is that? Not only is it on vinyl, it’s in an odd size vinyl that makes it seem even more special!

But here we are in the present with the advent of the internet and downloading individual songs, and short attention spans! Has the idea of an album of music, which is a relatively new idea in the history of music, passed it’s sell by date? Is it, in another generation or two going to become an historic curiosity like the shellac cylinder and Betamax?

Because the direction that music consumption is going in now is more the way of the song rather than the way of the album like in the past. And you can’t see any physical evidence of the song, like in the past. Invisible music is on the rise.

Is any form actually better than the other? To the audience of all the formats in the past, their way was pretty bitchen.

I’d have to say that I do appreciate the invention of recorded music for likely sentimental reasons connected to the Album Cover. But I appreciate the convenience of “invisible” music for it’s portability.

And the argument about which format sounds the best, Who Can Say! The way the music is meant to sound is hearing it from the original master reel in the recording studio where it was recorded. After that, it’s personal taste. Does vinyl sound best. Doesn’t sound anything like the tape did in the studio. AND, your precious vinyl record is getting destroyed little by little every time you drag that diamond stylus across it on your precious stereo! Cassettes? The sound signal is slowly being eroded by the magnet each time you play it! Digital formats? Depending on the bit-rate, it might be the most accurate to the master reel but if your hard drive crashes… or you drop the USB down the drain…

So here’s what I’m gonna do. While there’s still time, I’m going to wallow in my own nostalgia at home with my vinyl and cardboard, with secret little inserts, and a logical progression of songs in a certain order that came from the artist’s head. And keep enjoying my albums in my fetishistic way until it all ends. I do believe that the physical album in one form or another will continue to exist for some time yet. And vinyl sales are on the rise which brings the “special occasion” back into music purchasing and listening.

And when I have to wait for my wife at the shopping centre, I’ll have my 80GB of invisible music to save me from the tedium and set the iPod in the dock in my car for unlimited travel music. But I’m still gonna listen to the Album in order!

WELL… What’s your excuse? Let me know what your story is. Do you have a fetish for 8-track? Or maybe you don’t even care about the “object” that holds the music. There must be numerous different answers. Maybe you only like music videos.

The world awaits your thoughts!!

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