It was 60 years ago this month when a country crooner from the South released the first-ever single to spin at 45 rpm.The main body of the article is about how vinyl record collecting is becoming very popular--especially in Japan, and about how some artists and companies are going back to vinyl.
Issued in green vinyl on the RCA label, the 7-inch "Texarkana Baby" by Eddy "The Tennessee Plowboy" Arnold became a No. 1 hit and enjoyed the sort of sales that today's artists can only dream of.
It's mostly about 7" singles, which I personally was never very interested in. I was always more album-oriented.
This part is just stupid, stated by "Seez Records President Chikara Yoshida":
Because vinyl is something that'll never die," he says. "I think the way people listen to analog and digital forms of music is different. On one side of a 45, you've only got room for one song. If you want to listen to the flip side, you've got to physically get up, turn the record over and put the needle on again. I think that's really important. There's no fun in listening to CDs or whatever, where you're just pushing a button.When I want to listen to music, I want to listen to music. I don't want to have to get up and flip a record every 3 minutes. This is one reason why I always used to put my favorite albums on tape: so I wouldn't have to get up and flip a record every 20 minutes. I wanted to sit there undisturbed and listen to music. I even had a dual-cassette deck that would automatically play both sides of two tapes in a row before I had to get up and change anything.
Everyone I know who had some 45s also had one of those stacker things that would automatically drop a new record after each one finished. I still have one myself, and my 45 collection is tiny. And that's because getting up and flipping a record constantly is freakin' annoying.
People are getting back into collecting 45s because they are quaint and nostalgic, and some old 45s have proven to be valuable--some more than others--but if you take care of them they can be worth some money someday because they are naturally fragile and don't preserve well. That's all it is.
I have a collection of a few thousand 45's in cases in my garage. I collected them during high school and into my early twenties. I had a fairly impressive LP collection but was persuaded to sell them all at a garage sale when my wife pointed out what a hassle it was to store them.
ReplyDeleteBig mistake.
The only turntable I own now is sitting up in the attack. I bought one of those USB capable set-ups so I could start the process of converting my singles into MP3's. Then, after about the first week of recording them, I realized there was this Napster thing out there. So much for that project.
Someday when I have the time, I may set up two turn tables and a mixer and make myself a really cool mixed tape.
For me, the enjoyment was never about sitting there and listening to the songs undisturbed, it was always about finding the right song to play next, getting it cued up and ready to play within the 3 minutes. Sometimes, it was done in 20 seconds, other times, the needle was dropping as the last song faded.
Great memories.