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Greg_L
Banned
Yeah side 2 can go either way. Those songs are for the true fans.
Seeker of Rock
Proud fucking American
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Greg_L
Banned
Ooooh yeah, my dad had a bunch of Marantz stuff. Good shit. He had a quadrophonic setup when I was a kid and he'd sit me in the middle of the room and I'd listen to that shit swirl around.
Seeker of Rock
Proud fucking American
The quads look pretty awesome, especially the 4400 with the scope.
kip4
Well-known member
Too right this is a cool thread.
Grim i never really got 8 track either and it just didnt take off did it. Its a bit like betamax videos
I hate to admit this but i was a rollers fan too. My old man and my wife just love to take the piss about this.
Dad always shouts "we love the rollers" because of a news clip back in the day when girls mobbed them.
They love to remind me i had a tartan scarf i used to wear round my waste and those oxford bags.
I say keep it in perspective dad i was 12 years old.
He didnt like my later tastes either The clash and the pistols.
is it any wonder it was so fresh after the jazz wankery that was prog rock.
Who wants a 11 minute guitar solo.
Grim i never really got 8 track either and it just didnt take off did it. Its a bit like betamax videos
I hate to admit this but i was a rollers fan too. My old man and my wife just love to take the piss about this.
Dad always shouts "we love the rollers" because of a news clip back in the day when girls mobbed them.
They love to remind me i had a tartan scarf i used to wear round my waste and those oxford bags.
I say keep it in perspective dad i was 12 years old.
He didnt like my later tastes either The clash and the pistols.
is it any wonder it was so fresh after the jazz wankery that was prog rock.
Who wants a 11 minute guitar solo.
Illsidgus
Desiccated Member
Changing the Needls and Teddy Bears Picnic
The earliest I can remember is back around 1954/55 as a little tot and sitting on the floor with my own little record player and listening to the 45 of Teddy Bears Picnic over and over. Eventually the needle would wear down and I would take a little screw driver, loosen the needle (not a cartridge, just the needle) take it out and put a new one in. A few years latter I graduated to 78's. I can still clearly remember my favorite 78 at the time was "Ghost Riders in the Sky" by the Sons of the Pioneers.
I don't miss the sound of the needle when it hits the vinyl. I was just listening to an album, The Last Waltz, just about an hour ago and am getting ready to put on 'Netherlands' by Dan Fogelber while I do some house keeping around my studio work station.
One thing I always liked about albums were the hidden gems. I almost always found songs on the albums that I liked better than the singles/hits that came from the albums.
The earliest I can remember is back around 1954/55 as a little tot and sitting on the floor with my own little record player and listening to the 45 of Teddy Bears Picnic over and over. Eventually the needle would wear down and I would take a little screw driver, loosen the needle (not a cartridge, just the needle) take it out and put a new one in. A few years latter I graduated to 78's. I can still clearly remember my favorite 78 at the time was "Ghost Riders in the Sky" by the Sons of the Pioneers.
I don't miss the sound of the needle when it hits the vinyl. I was just listening to an album, The Last Waltz, just about an hour ago and am getting ready to put on 'Netherlands' by Dan Fogelber while I do some house keeping around my studio work station.
One thing I always liked about albums were the hidden gems. I almost always found songs on the albums that I liked better than the singles/hits that came from the albums.
fat_fleet
Swollen Member
Not if you have 800 of them.
Rimshot
New member
I think that touches on where the recording labels (read releasing labels) completely lost the market. The packaging of the music was an integral part of the buyer's experience (cover art, liner notes, etc.). Yes it is slightly more expensive, but it would attract and boost sales.
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Greg_L
Banned
Not anymore. Kids don't give one single fuck about looking at cover art or reading liner notes. They don't care about the concept of an album. They don't care how the songs flow from one to the next. They don't care about the hidden gems on side two. Today's music is all about the single, and having your MP3 player on shuffle.
WhiteStrat
Don't stare at the eye.
This is sad. Sad, but true.
I was just at a concert last night--triple bill, but one of 'em was my favorite band from the late 70's, early 80's--so I know every song, had every album (on vinyl). Anyway, it was kind of funny--cause they talked about just this topic. How the whole industry is now about the single, but "back in the day" they saw the entire album as a single piece of work: the flow of the songs, the contrast and variety of the songs, the mood that the combined songs created, side one vs. side two, and of course, the artwork and the liner notes.
Just to prove the point, they had dusted off and practiced song 3, side 2, from their biggest album. Most folks in the crowd sang along with most of it! I knew every word and guitar part! I had a younger friend with me, and he had never heard it--but he couldn't believe it was a "minor" song; he thought it was awesome. I just told him, "Yeah, that's how it was was with good albums. They were good albums."
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Greg_L
Banned
Yeah. I get it. I generally dislike nostalgia and people looking back to the good ol days and shunning all things current, but you just can't help it when it comes to music. It's mostly a fucking joke now.
Illsidgus
Desiccated Member
You are right, the packaging was important. I don't know how many times I went into a record store to browse the racks and end up buying an album solely based on the cover art. Most of the time I discovered some truly remarkable music.
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Greg_L
Banned
Totally. Yall ever hear of The Donnas? They're pretty hot and popular now, but I remember seeing one of their early LP's on vinyl at a used record store. I saw the cover of these 4 ugly girls standing there like they were the Ramones in drag, and I had to have it. I had nop idea what they sounded like. I got home and put it on, and as I suspected, they sounded like the Ramones in drag. Lol. I still like them to this day.
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Greg_L
Banned
Lol. This is it. Like 1996 or something?
Check em now. Pretty hot, excpept for the fatty bass player.
Check em now. Pretty hot, excpept for the fatty bass player.
rayc
retroreprobate
I still have about 1200 LPs, a new Thorens T'table (there're Bowie and a Laughing Clowns album covers sitting on the top from the last session), good speakers and amp (NAD). I enjoy LPs - for all the reasons stated. I bought a new LP about 6 months ago. Album art has been lost to the world - there's only so much you can do with a CD insert. I still sit with that tiny little booklet and reead every word during the 1st listening but it's hard yakka.
The convenience of, to a lesser extent, CDs & now, to a greater extent, MP3s etc seems to have brought with it less concern for sound quality. Hey, not that that was an issue when I was buying 45s. Fewer people have quality sound systems - I know I have a very good Quad system for the 40 or so quad recordings I have that've been transferred to disc and an even better stereo system but the surround sound system in the living room is part of a package and pretty insubstantial. I used to have the VHS & DVD players hooked up to the stereo but 5.1 is just too hard to get sorted in a quality way.
If they made decent album art that could be looked at on a tablet/pad/laptop - something that didn't require a magnifying glass to read - that'd go some way towards making me happier.
Ah, nostalgia - tapes! I was one of those nerd, when living at my parent's place, who would tape record the 1st playing of the LP - then pop the LP away until the tape began to wear out. Once I had muy own place that wasn't an issue because I could play the discs, loudly in the living room. I still have a couple of hundred cassette tapes - very, very few prerecorded ones - that WAS a rip off in terms of quality.
It is good that UTUB has upped the audio quality a bit - makes nostalgia online a little better an experience.
The convenience of, to a lesser extent, CDs & now, to a greater extent, MP3s etc seems to have brought with it less concern for sound quality. Hey, not that that was an issue when I was buying 45s. Fewer people have quality sound systems - I know I have a very good Quad system for the 40 or so quad recordings I have that've been transferred to disc and an even better stereo system but the surround sound system in the living room is part of a package and pretty insubstantial. I used to have the VHS & DVD players hooked up to the stereo but 5.1 is just too hard to get sorted in a quality way.
If they made decent album art that could be looked at on a tablet/pad/laptop - something that didn't require a magnifying glass to read - that'd go some way towards making me happier.
Ah, nostalgia - tapes! I was one of those nerd, when living at my parent's place, who would tape record the 1st playing of the LP - then pop the LP away until the tape began to wear out. Once I had muy own place that wasn't an issue because I could play the discs, loudly in the living room. I still have a couple of hundred cassette tapes - very, very few prerecorded ones - that WAS a rip off in terms of quality.
It is good that UTUB has upped the audio quality a bit - makes nostalgia online a little better an experience.
fat_fleet
Swollen Member
Lol. This is it. Like 1996 or something?
lol, I got the one right after... American Teenage Rock n Roll Machine. Still got it, almost never put it on.
Rimshot
New member
You're probably right about that. Then all I can say is that they are getting the garbage that they deserve.
grimtraveller
If only for a moment.....
Back in '84, a year before I actually bought my first video, I was looking to buy a betamax video. My mate's brother was a bit of a coke dealer and philanderer and he had one. I never thought about the quality until the late 90s/early noughties when I would do deliveries to post production studios. Sometimes, the guys would be at work and I'd peek in and I was amazed by the clarity of betamax. Perhaps I'm exaggerating, but it looked much better than HD and stands up to blue ray.
The Rollers !
I remember the first time my sisters and I came across them. It was sometime in 1974 on "Top of the pops". It was either "Summerlove sensation", "Shang a lang" or "Remember" that they did. We thought it was the funniest thing and their short trousers were a scream. We used to have this weird cousin that used to say "Your trousers are up to your jacks !" in this really funny accent. The Rollers were like that to us. Trousers up to their jacks, whatever jacks were. I never did find out ! But they were just one of dozens of pop bands at the time.
That all changed a year later when rollermania hit England when "Bye bye baby" went to number one. I can actually remember the day, it was a tuesday. I remember that because tuesdays were when the charts for that week were announced.
Almost overnight, every girl I knew of my younger sister's age and those in my class went mad. It was so debilitating. Suddenly, all those girls I secretly fancied who were already out of my league zoomed even further out !
And I was left floundering.........Like I said, I only bought that first Rollers album when my Dad gave me a cassette because I'd never actually bought an album before and they were the only band I recognized. It was in Woolworths, after all. But a few months later in '76 my younger sister bought two of their albums, "Once upon a star" and "Wouldn't you like it ?" and she played them incessantly. And over a three year period, I grew to love those two albums. Long after my sis stopped listening to them. Thirty five years on, I still love those two albums. The Rollers unfortunately suffer from having been the Rollers ~ the name and teenybop rep always precedes them. Eric Faulkner told a hilarious story of how he saw a guy drowning and dived in to save him. When he got the guy out, he asked him why he tried to kill himself and the guy span his tale of woe to which Faulkner replied "You think your life is bad ? I was in the Bay city rollers !"
Along with those two albums, the single "Money honey" and an obscure B side "Mama Li" make up some of the best pop/rock of the 70s.
It kind of depends. For the most part, 11 minute solos of any kind are wrist slitters.
But there are a few exceptions that I have. Very few !
Three albums that spring to mind are "Outlandos d'amour" and "Ghost in the machine" by the Police and "Hunky Dory" by David Bowie. I was looking for "So Lonely" and "Every little thing she does is magic" by the Police and "Life on Mars" by Bowie. In the second hand record shops, the albums were only £2, which, by '84, was cheaper than the cost of a single so I bought the albums. When I got round to checking out the songs, I thought I'd give the albums a whirl just to see if there might be "one or two others" that I might like. Dang and durn, Billybob ! All three were jam packed with brilliance, songs as good as if not better than what I'd originally been looking for. I still love them now.
You know, at the risk of incurring our collective ire, even in the days of great album covers, I think it was actually a minority of record buyers that poured over the covers like us. Very few of the people I knew were particularly interested in album covers.
The labels began to really lose people when downloading entered the picture.
I'm not so sure the majority of "kids" of yesteryear are really that different.
In a way, things have simply come full circle. Although we lament the passing of the album, Up until 1968, it was primarilly a singles dominated industry. Relatively few artists made consistently good albums prior to then. Often you'd get a couple of singles or killer songs and 10 or 12 fillers including an effort by some group members, that weren't taken too seriously but which fans unexpectedly grew to love.
"Rubber Soul" in 1965 was possibly the first time an album was actually conceived in it's totality as a singular entity with ebbs, flows and contrast and a deliberate policy of no hit single {the "We can work it out/Day tripper" double A side came from the same sessions but wasn't considered for the LP}.
And even through the 70s, 80s and 90s when the album was the kingpin and you had definite "albums bands", the single was still big business. To get a hit single was still a big thing.
What's changed now is that you can buy specific album tracks without having to buy the whole album, which, I would say is the logical conclusion of that line of singles ~ albums~..........
My whole musical headspace changed because of album covers. At 16, I dug the Beatles, Stones, Jackson 5, the Monkees, soul, pop and bits of classical. I was at a friend's house and he shared a room with his older brother and I was going through his record collection {I'd already borrowed a Stones cassette because I dug the cover ~ "Through the past, darkly"} and I came across this EMI repackaging of the first two Pink Floyd albums called "A nice pair". I thought the cover was the most incredible I'd seen, all four sides and the inner sleeves. I just had to listen to the music ! And I did. And it blew me away so far that I never truly came back ! But it took me down a road that I was ever keen to keep exploring. Which led down other roads.
I've lost count of the times that I bought an album because of the cover and just knew it would be good and it was. Also, when I was getting into jazz, early jazz fusion, Irish folk and Irish folk rock, the info on the sleeves was crucial. I'd make most of my buys based on the instrumental line ups.
grimtraveller
If only for a moment.....
Sheesh kebab ! That was long. Even for me. 
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Greg_L
Banned
This whole thread is full of kids of yesteryear that never listened to music the way kids of today do.