Put another nickel in...

Speaking of movies and telephones, one of the key suspenseful scenes in Argo requires that a character be present to answer a telephone, and it seems as if half the movie up to that point has people talking on big old honker phones the size of shoe boxes just to set that idea of answering the phone for viewers who don’t know what a landline is. (Everyone in the movie also wore eyeglasses that took up every bit of their facial landscape from cheekbone to widow’s peak, and had bad hair. Ah, the 70s.)

The evolution of music is another technology worth thinking about. (There’s a wonderful word in a collection of critical Disney essays I’ve been reading: technostalgia.) While we have obviously long ago moved into a mainstream where one need not be in the presence of musicians to hear music, there are ramifications to that that are worth considering. Part of the establishment of the Great American Songbook was predicated on the existence of pianos in the average household, and presumably people who could, to some degree, play those pianos. The software (?) for those pianos was sheet music, mostly songs simplified for amateur players (not a lot of tunes in F#, for instance, whereas E flat was coin of the realm, which I have only understood intuitively in that I find it easy to play in E flat, but maybe that’s because so much music is published in that key: chicken or egg?). Sheet music was sold by song pushers in stores who would play the tunes live, and then you’d buy the music and take it home and play it yourself. Some songs were enormous hits (e.g., Gershwin’s “Swanee” was, according to Feinstein, the biggest success of his career) long before there were people playing them on the radio, much less buying them on records. Recorded media stretches back to Edison, but it was live music that ruled at the beginning of the 1900s.

Recorded media changed over time in great leaps, and each leap had its effect. Records, i.e., vinyl, has its various technostalgics today, but listening to LPs beginning in the 50s and into the 60s, when they really took off, was not the high-toned sonic experience one might imagine. Cheap needles quickly turned the most pristine vinyl into a scratchy, pockmarked and occasionally gauged disk, not to mention that a key feature of many players was a record changer that stacked multiple disks for play one at a time, rubbing them up against one another along the way (and, eventually, forcing the needle to navigate not the level flat of a disk but the wavy oooh-aaaah-oooh-aaaah of a stack of disks). The listening experience required the ear to erase all the extraneous noise to pick out the music underneath. Then of course there was the broken record broken record broken record one never hears anymore, or that sound at the interval between songs pre-echoing the song to come (it was some kind of recording leakage), and worst of all, if you had an album you liked and played it often enough, you could never hear a song on that album again without hearing the next song in your mind. Random play of CDs, when it finally arrive, turned a lot of music fans raised on records into raving lunatics. And, of course, there was a physical limit to the amount that could be recorded on one side of a record, not to mention that if you wanted to hear a whole record, you had to get up and flip it over. Many albums were considered one-sided, that is, one really good side and one stinker side. There was no such thing as skipping a song, short of getting up and lifting the needle and putting it down at the next song (which was clearly differentiated).

It was records like these, played this way, that was the medium of the Beatles, and every other musician from the 50s up through digital recording. That and, on the charts, 45 rpm records. These were little disks about seven inches in diameter, the immediate descendants of the 78 rpm records. (Obviously rpms was meaningful in sound reproduction, the fewer being harder to master technically. Some record players had 4 speeds, from 78 down to, if I remember correctly, 16. I never saw a 16 rpm record.) 45s, costing less than a dollar, were the stock in trade of the youngest record buyers, and maybe if you look at Billboard hit songs for, say, 1968, the youth of the buyers will be in evidence. If you had the $3 (when they were on sale), older kids would buy albums. Parties for teenagers were run with stacks of 45s on the turntable; people might bring their own to add to the mix. That was what they were playing at the hop.

Buying and playing one song at a time has its advantages and disadvantages, but it presages modern music buying for a lot of people, i.e., one song at a time. I think that phenomenon is restricted to the very young still, to tell you the truth. I might like a single, but I buy albums because if I like some of your music, I’ll want to hear some more of it. Maybe there’s some other dynamic at work there; I really don’t know, and can only speak for myself.

The late sixties saw the arrival of tape, and a whole new way of listening arose. Reel-to-reel was ultimately too ungainly, although you could have three full albums on one reel. 8-tracks came out then, but I never saw many of them except in cars. And then cassettes came along, and eventually the Walkman. Music had been portable for a long time thanks to transistor radios, but music players? Not so. Cassettes were a real revolution in listening, allowing you to hear your own music wherever you wanted to. In the case of boom boxes, it allowed everyone within a hundred mile radius to also hear your music, want to or not, but the Walkman solved that for everyone but street buskers. So the Walkman introduced private music, but at a cost. Simply put, mass-produced cassettes sucked. We replaced snaps and pops with tape hiss, which was ubiquitous and made everything muddy. Not all cassettes were bad, and if you made one yourself from an LP, it was fine, but it was a cursed medium in general. At the point where a tape got snaggled and you were in there with your pencil trying to straighten it out, or worse, if it outright snapped, combined with its second-rate fidelity, it was doomed. But it did get the idea of personal player into everyone’s mind. By the end of the cassette run, you couldn’t swing a cat without seeing a cheap player on the shelf of every conceivable store. But the clarity of CDs were the fidelity kiss of death on non-digital tape. (Digital tape never really caught on except with professionals, for cost reasons if I recall correctly.)

Audiophiles were up in arms when CDs first arrived, bemoaning the loss of warmth one heard in analog recordings. The first CDs and players were expensive to boot, so it took a little time for the format to catch on. But catch on it did, as more and more catalogs were digitized and the prices became relatively reasonable. The thing is, they sounded (and sound still) perfect. No hiss, no snaps, no skips, no nothing. I’ve gotten maybe three defective disks in my life, after acquiring thousands. Most people hear them and think they sound great. And you could put a lot more music on them than on a record, which meant that performers and producers could think longer form. (Tapes also could go longer, but seldom did unless you made the tape yourself.) There was no more Sides A and B. You could store a lot of them in a small space (unlike records, which are big and weigh a ton).

There was a problem with personal CD players, in that if you jostled them, you got skips, so CDs and cassettes sort of coexisted for a while. But if you taped your CDs, they did sound great, and then you could pop them into your Walkman and go for a run, and you were quite satisfied. I would bet that the CD age was pretty golden for album sales, because everybody had to update their White Album, plus older or less popular stuff could fill the disk up to the brim (I’ve got all sort of compact compilations). And it all sounded great. A disk played over an hour before you had to get up and change it (much less flip it) and then multi-disk players came along. You never had to get up again.

The greatest joy in all of this, for music fans, was the music store. In the evolution we’re discussing, that store or department went from private piano rooms where you could try out the music (I remember doing that) and song pluggers, to layouts of records to, finally, the megastores where there were thousands and thousands of albums for you to look at and think about, and all kinds of listening stations, and interesting music being blasted (in the appropriate genre) while you were browsing. I would figure a minimum of an hour in any Tower Records, back in the day, and that I would exit with a bagful of goodies. The experience was, obviously, analogous to bookstore shopping (although as a general rule the superstores for books were never as satisfying as smaller, more specialized stores with a mind behind the stocking of the shelves).

MP3s changed all this again. Fidelity is fair to middling in that you can only squeeze so much data into that size of a file, but most people don’t care, if they can even hear the difference in the first place. MP3s offer portability and good price, and on top of that, instant availability. Want a song? You can have it on your iPod in a minute, signed, sealed and delivered. Goodbye music stores, welcome back singles.

I started this by comparing the way changes in telephone technology have changed our lives to the way changes in music technology have done likewise. Once, you had to make your own music, and home pianos were ubiquitous. Now they’re rare. Who do you know who buys sheet music? When was the last time you were told you sounded like a broken record? When was the last time there was a music phenomenon that stopped everyone in their tracks because a given performance was the only way to share in it (from Sinatra at the Paramount to the Beatles on Ed Sullivan)? When was the last time you were at somebody’s place and sat thumbing through their record/CD collection? When was the last time you read the liner notes? What’s a liner note? What’s a liner? Have you had the tactile pleasure of removing an LP from its sleeve by the edges, laying it on the turntable, swiping it clean with a special brush and fluid made just for that purpose?

Has the immediate availability of all music had an effect not only on our personal playing but on our pursuit of the playing of others? Do we go to as many live events, not just arena events but local clubs? Is there a pianist in the background of your favorite spot, or just a lite playlist coming over the speakers? Do as many of us really learn to play instruments (aside from the forced playing in schools that is simply the grammar school’s revenge on the parents for all their kids’ misbehavior prior to the annual concert)?

I really don’t know about a lot of the ramifications of what I’ve been outlining here, and I certainly can’t make too many value judgments. In a way, we are probably in what will be an ongoing golden age of music insofar as it’s accessibility (although I could do without social apps that tell me that Joe McDoakes just listened to Lady Gaga: may they both rest in peace, out of range of my hearing, but then again, I have no interest in any social apps that tell me what my friends are doing willynilly). Good music will be made and distributed, and we can all tune into whatever we like pretty easily, and discover new things to like pretty easily as well. I am, personally, enjoying that immensely. This morning, my gypsy music station on Pandora. Tonight, my obscure 60s rock podcast. What’s to complain about? If I’m lucky, I’ll even find some time to play a Gershwin tune or two on my home (digital) piano. I’m only documenting how much it has all changed. You can decide for yourself if it’s teleological.