T Rex "Bang A Gong"

This Week: Excerpts From That Novel I'm Never Going To Write.

Here's the last excerpt I'll share. I remember when the light in my head went on, and I connected dinosaurs and vinyl . . . I just couldn't believe my brain came up with it.

Thanks for indulging me this week!


Vinyl was as doomed as the dinosaur.

Pea-brained and lumbering, the analogy is apt. Like the dinosaur, an LP’s brain could only contain a limited amount of information. And the dark discs were not portable.

With James Russell’s creation in the hands of the marketers, modifications were made to make the perfect beast.

And the perfect beast was determined to be 74 minutes long.

Why 74 minutes? That seems like an arbitrary number, doesn’t it? But somebody must’ve picked it, right? But who?

Well, depending on whom you ask, it was either Herbert von Karajan, Akio Morita or Norio Ohga.

Don’t know who the Polygram conductor, the Sony chairman, and the Sony president are? Doesn’t matter. Each would tell you that the real determination came from a man who died 50 years before Edison scraped his Reynolds Wrap.

Beethoven didn’t write his Ninth Symphony with the intention of you getting out of your chair in the middle of the piece to flip the record over. No, Ludwig Von meant his movement to be heard without your movement.

The CD prototype developed by Phillips was 11.5 centimeters in diameter---large enough to hold 60 minutes of music. Which was not quite long enough to hold a popular symphony.

So Sony’s prototype, at the suggestion of Karajan, Morita or Ohga, depending on what you read, was created slightly larger and therefore longer, to accommodate Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. And it became the industry standard.

With this lengthy advantage over vinyl, as well as the advantage of greater durability, there was only one more step to take to make CDs the consumer standard.

And that was to lower the price.

In the mid-eighties, record companies brought down the price of CDs, and raised the price of vinyl. Soon, they began printing fewer copies of an album on vinyl, and more on CD. Record buyers were more likely to find a new release on CD than record. CD sales skyrocketed, record sales plummeted.

But this was a trend manufactured from behind the scenes by corporations. It was not a natural evolution.

What killed off the dinosaurs?

Was it natural evolution? A comet? Smoking? A corporate committee? Sentient pond scum? War or disease or ennui? Was it destiny? Did the butler do it?

I suppose we’ll never know.

But we do know that dinosaurs lived on after death, if only to head toward a second extinction.

As their dying bodies sank into the sea and the mud, as millions of years of pressure and heat converted their remains into hydrocarbons, as hydrocarbons became petroleum, the dinosaurs came back to us.

Processed petroleum, when combined with chlorine, becomes vinyl.

Put on your old recording of “Bang A Gong,” and you’re spinning T Rex, literally.

Vinyl, a byproduct of extinction, was destined to be doomed as the dinosaur.