Pearl Jam "History Never Repeats"

I really came of age in music during a period where vinyl fell out of favor.

By the late 80s, hardly any bands were putting out "records."  Everything was on CD or cassette.

But by the early 90s, some underground bands, who's members DID grow up valuing vinyl, were emerging from the underground and into the mainstream.

Michael Stipe and Peter Buck of R.E.M. famously started their friendship in a record store, and were among the first major artists of the early 90s to insist to their record labels that their albums be released on vinyl, as well as CD and cassette.

Being record collectors themselves, they appreciated the fabulous 45 too.

So continuing a tradition started by The Beatles, they released an exclusive 45 at Christmastime, sent to all members of their fan club.

Back in the early 90s, I was single and employed and, no, not rich, but I could put 10 bucks into a membership to a fan club or two.  So I have a nice, small collection of 45s from R.E.M. and from Pearl Jam.

I LOVED getting this disc from Pearl Jam, because I discovered that Eddie Vedder was also a fan of Split Enz.


Hear the song on Youtube.

Carl Carlton "She's A Bad Mama Jama"

I was rooting around for good Mom songs for Mother's Day, and, well, maybe this one applies to some mothers.

Anyway, seeing the song title reminded me of some fun trips to Nashville.  We'd head there from Virginia, for one show or another, and we'd always leave a little extra time to get out of the downtown area to go to this great record store called Phonoluxe.

They had a big selection of vinyl, even in the mid-90s when vinyl was at a pretty low point.

I remember picking up "She's A Bad Mama Jama" for 25 cents in a bargain bin of used 45s.  Score!


Hear the song on Youtube.

Buddy Holly "Every Day"

Before I had my own Fisher-Price Record Player, there was Dad's record player.

Honestly, I don't remember him using it that much. I mean, I remember listening to the Red Sox on the big cabinets, but I don't really recall him putting on a lot of records. Except at Christmas. Then the Mitch Miller LPs came out.

But somewhere early on, I developed a fascination with the turntable.

And let's face it, even if a record player didn't play records, it's a pretty fascinating mechanism. The spinning, the lights, the needle following the tiny, tiny groove from the outer edge to the middle of the disc. Neat.

I wanted to use the record player, so Dad let me have one of his 45s.

Again, I don't really remember him having 45s. We had a nice chunk of LPs. Beatles. Beach Boys. Show tunes. But (at least in the box that I salvaged from when they moved out of our house, a few years ago) no 45s.

He had a 45 of Buddy Holly's "Every Day."

And I'd play that over and over and over.

Now, of course, I know who Buddy Holly is and what his significance is and where his music fits in the big context of things.

But coming out of my Dad's 1970s stereo, on an old 45, it just sounded like the coolest Music Box song I'd ever heard.

I played it again and again and again.

I was little. I didn't have a steady hand. I didn't understand vinyl. Or needles. I scratched up that record. I scratched it to the point it was unplayable.

Dad explained that he couldn't fix it. It was no good any more.

Forty-odd years later, how irritated am I, at my pre-school self? I could've had an original Buddy Holly 45!


Hear the song on Youtube.

DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince "Nightmare On My Street"

I used to host a program call Request Radio on my old Virginia station.

Every night, for two hours, we would play only requests. And because we were independent, we didn't really have any restrictions on what we could, or would play.

Basically, if we had it, and someone asked for it, we would play it.

Spice Girls? Of course. Followed by Ozzy Osbourne? You bet.

One of the strangest phenomenons of Request Radio, is that within this little universe of fans who listened to the show every night, certain songs would become "hits." Maybe new songs, maybe old songs, but suddenly, something would catch on, and we'd play it every single night, night after night, over and over until the madness set it.

"Nightmare On My Street" was a silly novelty hit in 1988. WHY did it suddenly become hugely popular on Request Radio nearly a decade later?

Sure, it made sense to play it around Halloween. But people kept requesting it, night after night, into November, past Thanksgiving, for Christmas, and through months of winter into the Spring.

Now this was the old, pre-digital days of radio, when we had CDs, but we were just as likely to have a song on 45.

And one night, I just lost it.

I went on the air and said, "I am sick of this song, and I'm never playing it again. Listen closely."

Listeners heard a loud crack.

"That was the sound of me snapping the record in half. We don't have any more copies and we will never play that song again."

It was very satisfying. Even if it did mean that the kids would just get obsessed with something else stupid.

I'm smiling, thinking about the anachronism, feeling sorry for today's DJ.

Today, the DJ would have to say that he deleted the MP3 and could never play the song again. And before that sentence was over, some kid would have emailed a new copy of the song.

Hooray for analog technology!


Hear the song on Youtube.

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.

Tift Merritt “Mixtape”

You can find lots of nostalgic love for vinyl. Audiophiles love to go on and on about the superior quality of sounds found on records. And Album-ophiles lament the loss of LPs, claiming the art of the cover and the weight of the wax are as essential to the experience, as the music itself.

But you don’t find the same kind of romance for cassettes, do you?

Certainly, the same nostalgic reasoning doesn’t hold up. The audio quality on a cassette is poor, and degrades quickly. And cassettes are actually blamed for the death/dearth of the album cover as an art form.

But Tift Merritt and I are of like minds.

On “Mixtape” she brings back the romance to cassettes. For all the limitations of these little reel to reels, they have one true, head-and-shoulders-above-the-rest advantage:

Mix tapes with homemade covers.

You can’t make your own vinyl compilation. It’s just not technically feasible for the average person.

And sure, you can make an iTunes playlist, but you can’t lovingly craft an iTunes playlist and then physically present it to someone. It’s not a thing---it’s just files. And playlists, even burned CDs, are made to be randomized, to have tracks skipped over, to be embellished or deleted.

A mixed cassette is a collage that can tell a story, based on the songs and the song order. A track listing matters.

Then there's the sides. A Side and B Side. You can’t have sides on an iTunes playlist, for crying out loud.

And yes, some vinyl enthusiasts sniff at the idea of cassette album art. But when you make a mixtape with a homemade cover, you tap into a charm that’s not a part of vinyl or disc or MP3 or 8-Track.

I have dozens of cassettes, made by me or given to me as gifts, in the basement. I’ve probably made hundreds in my day. But since the world went digital, the practice has fallen by the wayside of my life.

Thanks for the reminder, Tift: Time to press rewind, rewind.