The days of the “album” are really over now unless you are a fanatic. It’s so easy to download tracks individually though iTunes or the many peer-to-peer sites. Years ago you actually went to a shop that just sold records and tapes and bought a physical piece of vinyl. It was a gamble as you weren’t quite sure what you were in for. Usually you were buying the album on the strength of the hit track released for radio. Bands generally recorded one or two fantastic songs and filled the rest up with dross. This was always a disappointment and until the CD came along, the cause of many damaged vinyl records as you were always trying to put the needle on the correct track you wanted to listen to and usually missing the spot…
It sounds so archaic when I read this back to myself – it makes me realise how quickly we have gone from vinyl to digital…
When I was young we had a Radiogram which took pride of place in the lounge-room. This exotic piece of furniture was de rigueur in the 60’s & 70’s and I think every household probably had one. There was a turntable which played old 78 records as well as 331/3 – Long Play records and 45’s which were singles. There was also a radio and the speakers ran along the front. It was the equivalent of the old valve radio in the 1930’s.
We used to sit together on a Saturday night and listen to music – taking it in turns to flip the record over. When you had a radiogram though, you could stack up about 6 records and they would automatically drop down when the previous record had come to an end. How sophisticated! Never mind that the dropping of one record on top of another with usually a fine coating of dust on it meant that all your records eventually became scratched. That wasn’t even considered by most people. This was technology at it’s finest in our eyes…
Mum and Dad had a big collection of records ranging from Country to Western with a bit of jazz (Mum) and a bit of opera (surprisingly Dad) thrown in for good measure. We also had inherited a heap of old 78’s which were made of bakelite and could be broken over a knee if found to be scratched or warped. Only people of a certain age will remember the wavy sounds of a warped record…
My contribution was a collection of all the Beatles singles of which I variously begged, cajoled or sulked my way into getting over the years. Singles were a drag as you were up and down every three minutes turning them over or putting on a new one. Hence the handy feature of stacking them up on top of each other as mentioned previously…
When I was 13 years old I was given a portable record player for Christmas so I could play music in my bedroom. Joy of joys – I could walk from room to room and have music whenever and wherever I wanted it! Just by plugging it into the wall! This was seriously groovy and I received my first ever long play album along with the record player. “My Kinda Country” (see earlier note regarding my parents taste in music). This was a compilation which contained, amongst other tunes to thrill a 13-year-old girls heart, “Please Release Me” by Engelbert Humperdinck and “Pub With No Beer” by Slim Dusty! Still it was my album and I could play it incessantly to my heart’s content anywhere and everywhere I chose to go…
This also led to a serious interest in collecting new vinyl. I remember vividly my first album which I bought with saved up pocket-money. Bizarrely it was “Tommy” by The Who. I don’t know why I bought it except I loved it at first listen. I was 13 years old and fairly obsessed with The Monkees but “Tommy” cast a spell over me at that time and created a life long love of Pete, Roger, Keith and John.
These were also the days of shutting yourself and your best friend in your bedroom and, using hair brushes for microphones in front of the mirror, trying to dance and sing at the same time. We rocked! Among the many songs we mastered “Fire” by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown was a memorable favourite. The other quaint trend was to lug a whole pile of your records to a friend’s house and listen to them on their record players. We even had little boxes with plastic sleeves to store all our singles….
Years went by and the family upgraded the radiogram to a stereogram! This meant stereo speakers at the sides and we stopped buying singles and only bought albums. There was always music playing in our house and apart from the usual Country albums on high rotation, my brother and I contributed artists such as James Taylor, Joan Baez, Gordon Lightfoot and America (me) and Led Zeppelin, David Bowie and Suzi Quatro and Slade (him). That old stereogram went for years it seems – I don’t really recall anything else until much later on.
When I turned 21 I was given a 3-in-1 Stereo for my birthday. This was quite a jump in status! A 3-in-1 had a stereo, a radio and a cassette tape all in one unit. I had also collected a lot of music by now. Everything from The Moody Blues to Pink Floyd, Leonard Cohen to Ravi Shankar, Neil Young to Joan Armatrading. My musical tastes are quite eclectic and I love a bit of everything. The beauty of the 3-in-1 was you could play a record AND record it on a tape at the same time! How exciting was this! Then you could take your cassette tapes with you and listen to them in the car – if it had a player of course – a lot didn’t… The stereo generally sat on a stand with a space underneath to stack your albums… Boy – growing up in a technological world was brilliant…
When I was 23 I got married and my new husband was what used to be called an “audiophile” He sneered at my lowly 3-in-1 because he only ever bought COMPONENTS! That’s right – you bought each piece separately – tuner, amplifier, turntable, speakers, pre-amp etcetera – oh and you had to spend a small fortune on the head and the needle – I think ours had a moon-rock needle and dodecaphonic speakers (tip of the hat to Steve Martin there…)
The albums he brought into the marriage were pristine and he wouldn’t allow me to touch them. We were listening to bands like Boston, Supertramp, Tim Buckley, Vinegar Joe and Thin Lizzy. Aussie bands were on the rise like Men At Work, Split Enz and Mental As Anything. It was a heady time for new music. Slowly over the years we gathered a very large collection of music and I became as high-tech as my husband was and our favourite set up was our Technics system. We had this system in different configurations for many years and it was our pride and joy…
Then came the early 80’s and I was working for National Panasonic and I remember rushing home from work one day babbling hysterically about this wonderful new thing I had just seen demonstrated. You could frisbee it across the room – you could stand on it! It was little and it had no scratches or hisses, you didn’t have to turn it over – it was sexy – the Compact Disc had arrived! The first one I ever heard was “Oxygen” by Jean Michel Jarre. This was a wonderful introduction to the pristine sounds of a CD and I was entranced.
Of course by this stage we were now “early adopters” – always up for the latest technological thing going so we bought one. Now we had to start replacing all our vinyl records which wasn’t that easy. In the early days of CD only the latest albums were released and it was very hard to get older recordings. Of course over the years this improved until we were able to sell off all our old vinyl records and completely devote ourselves to CD. On CD music was just wonderful – Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins, The Verve, Pink Floyd – all played loud and clear – fantastic!
We started off with a single CD unit. Then we graduated to one that rotated three. Ultimately we had one that could store five CDs and play them randomly. This was very high-tech and we loved it. We could sit on the couch with the remote control unit and choose different songs spread over five different albums – how cool was that! And we had CD players in our cars as well… Music wherever we went – it didn’t get much better…
At the same time thoughout all these years portable music had become all the norm – we started off with a portable Cassette player which took a tape. We then graduated to a portable CD player. To walk around with any of these required a bag slung over your shoulder, batteries, actual tapes or CDs depending which one you had, and big headphones. We thought we were so cool… All sitting on the train clutching our portable music machines as well as trying to juggle handbags and brief cases! You could walk around outside or be on public transport and still listen to music or the radio – this was incredibly cool!
I remember having to stay in hospital for a spell and I would have gone mad if my husband hadn’t brought in my little CD player – all the nurses though it was a terrific thing and warned me I had better lock it away in case it got stolen when I wasn’t in the room!
Then one day our niece came to visit and she had this peculiar little device with her! This was my first peep at an iPod. As she let me pop on her headphones and spin round the little wheel at the front my senses went into overdrive! What was this? I had to have one – immediately. Plus it was 40 gigabytes. Oh my goodness – my computer network at work wasn’t even 40gb! I could carry around thousands of songs!. My lovely husband bought me one the following weekend and haven’t ever looked back. We eventually ripped all of our CD’s onto iTunes over time. I still have my old white iPod and I store classical music on it.
So this brings us up to the present. Between us we now have iPhones, iPads, an iPod Classic, a Nano and a Shuffle. I use each of these for different purposes – the Shuffle has my audio-books on it so I can walk around listening to Stephen Fry reading me Harry Potter. The iPhone has podcasts so I can listen to radio shows when and where it suits me. The Nano has my favourite songs on it and the Classic plugs into my car so we have music wherever we go! We use the iPad as the remote for our Apple TV…
I have now managed to collect an enormous library of media from music to movies, TV show and books. My iTunes library has around 85,000 songs in it so I am a somewhat serious collector. We can now sit listening to any song we like from our iTunes library from David Gray to Stevie Ray Vaughan, Band of Horses to Sigur Ros, Bon Iver to Gotye. We use one of our iPads as the remote control. We have playlists and genres and favourites – we are out of control!
When I look back over the years to when I first put my little single on a turntable I can’t believe the leaps forward that have happened in my lifetime. I wonder what is ahead for us – I can’t even imagine what it will be like in the next 50 years. All I do know is that it has been a blast discovering, learning and experiencing all that technology has to offer.
🙂
Dead Flies and Oose! 