Classic Rock Musings, Rants & Raves

I recently received a couple of sweet 180 gram vinyl records from my friends at Legacy. One is Billy Joel’s The Stranger, which I never owned. The other is an Iron Maiden two-record compilation. Both sound surprisingly warm and generous on my sturdy and reliable turntable.

It had been a few years since I last spun a new long-player. I have a couple hundred records from the 60s, 70s and 80s, but I rarely pull them out. It’s just too much work. Any dope can slap in a cassette, plop on a CD, or flick the switch on an iPod, but records require special handling and care, placement and synchronization skills. You have to especially pay attention because when the record ends — almost always sooner than you think — you have to be prepared to rescue your stylus and your sanity from the end-of-the record crunch. Whew! That was a close one.

But think about it if you will — while paying attention, one might grow to actually appreciate what lies between the grooves that much more. We are such a hurried society, that we often think we can portabalize anything — physical, mental, whimsical — and take it on the road. MP3s, CDs and cassettes are popular because they lend themselves to these very concepts. You can’t take your records to the beach or on an airplane, but then again it’s questionable as to whether or not these places are ideal environments for music. With records, you simply have to set aside an evening. Not a bad thing at all.

Besides the flipping, cleaning and variances of turntable speed that has to be monitored, there’s the album cover. Some of it is plain and uncomplicated, others make the most of it with extensive art work, allegories, photographs, messages, gateways to other dimensions. There are coffee table books that are full of album cover art. I’ve yet to see any books on CD or cassette art. Cassettes are minuscule no matter how you look at it. They’re just too compact to make the commitment. On the other hand, some record companies and specialty houses have tried to re-invent album cover art within the CD format. DCC goes to such lengths as utilizing original sources who worked on the original albums. In the 90s, Virgin released a nice set of Stones CDs, recreating early 70s gimmicks like the zipper on Sticky Fingers. Aside from such details and flourishes added to re-releases, not much can be said for new releases. Either the creativity has dried up or they’re saving everything for the box set.

When you hold an album in your hands — it takes two if you want to do it properly — you are holding history. Okay, they still make records, and more people are buying vinyl than they have since the beginning of the decade, but there’s still a good 50 years of music on vinyl that will never make it to CD. They may think they have it licked, but it’s an impossible task from the most logical standpoint. There will always be missing pieces. Economically, it probably doesn’t make much sense. That’s why they can’t rebuild Rome either.