![]() And the fact that each side of such a disc could hold about three minutes or so of music was just fine. Yet, in the age of bathtub gin, the disc was a revelation, because it meant that more people could play whatever music they pleased. If smashed against someone’s head, it would shatter into hundreds of pieces. It was made of shellac, which came from a bug resin. It was 10 inches in circumference and played at 78 revolutions per minute-and it was heavy. It wasn’t really sonically superior to the cylinder, but it was cheaper to mass-produce. Then came the 1920s, and the dominance of the disc. The first delivery method was the cylinder, through which opera fans could hear the great Enrico Caruso sing “I, Pagliacci,” or Thomas Edison recite “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” ![]() Then, in the late 19th century, Thomas Edison and others developed recorded music. In the beginning, of course, there was only live music. The story of the album-how it was designed for fans of classical music, then hijacked by the hippies, who then delivered it into eager young hands like mine in forms it was never meant to assume-is the story of a marriage of consumerism, technology, and culture that could only have happened when it did, and it’s one that too few people know. It’s a story worth telling now because the album, when it was invented, was supposed to be something entirely else. ![]() Pepper at the time transformed what the album was, which everybody knows. This history, of the record album, is salient on this anniversary not only because Sgt. It was only after The Beatles hit-after the British Invasion, after Dylan went electric-that the youth album market really took off. When I was 14, 15, 16, there was nothing better, and I mean nothing, than going to a record store and fondling these objects, lingering over them, studying the little visual signals they were sending, finally settling on the one in which I’d invest that $4 I’d gathered by shoddily cutting the neighbor’s grass, getting it home, ripping off that cellophane, plopping it down on the turntable, and praying that for the next 40 minutes, Mom wasn’t going to bay at me to clean the basement. This was the record album-the 12-inch, 33 1/3-rpm vinyl disc that, adorned in the increasingly baroque jacketry of the times, turned a black-and-white world into bursting technicolor. But to many young American males in the 1960s and 1970s, one artifact of this cultural-capitalist marriage towered over all others. I was born in 1960, and as such I witnessed a lot as I sprouted toward puberty: the first war brought into American living rooms every night via television those first post-Kennedy shared cultural moments, everyone watching Archie Bunker, Olga Korbut, and the moon landing in real time and the primordial expansion of the commercial and cultural ganglia that bound Americans together as a nation of ravenous consumers, from cable television to the proliferation of the chain stores that seemed so novel then but are so inescapably banal now. What I think the world may need, however, at this point in history, is a tribute to the form-to the physical thing itself. In any case, land it did, and, as the cliché goes, everything changed.Ī hundred thousand paeans-and one famous pan, by Richard Goldstein in The New York Times, back before the paper of record was in the habit of regularly reviewing rock records-have been written about the album. Maybe that’s just how trans-Atlantic shipping worked in those days, or maybe the lads wanted to give the mother country a wee head start. It landed, for reasons that remain mysterious to me, on Jin England, and June 3 in the United States. ![]() This week brings another Beatles-related 50th anniversary, and arguably the grooviest of them all: The release of Sgt.
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