The Written Word
for June 21, 2000

Last time I told of my struggle to survive my children’s music. What my kids will find harder to understand than my music is how I listened to it on the equipment we had. As I write this I’m listening to the brilliant teenage Welsh soprano Charlotte Church on my stereo that’s attached to the computer. Not a brilliant sound I agree – real music buffs would say that I’m not giving her a decent chance on such inadequate equipment and they’d be right. Except unless these critics are of a certain age they’ll not remember the equipment extant when I grew up when listening to records. Yes, there were electric “gramophones” and they weren’t all the wind-up variety that’s been the logo for RCA for so many years. But the quality was atrocious by today’s standards. I daresay that anyone about to be sent into solitary confinement with only a “gramophone” and wax records to fill the time would say to hell with it and spend his time playing tic tac toe, or with himself.

As kids at summer camp, where there was no electricity we did have wind-up gramophones and I happen to have one left over in my house and every once in awhile put a record on it, wind it up and let ‘er rip for my kids. They look at me in utter amazement especially when I tell them that we used that stuff as the eternal come-on for future sexual pleasures. The records when brand new were scratchy as hell on their own – with continuous play they became almost unhearable.

The most modern Gramophones had mechanical devices that permitted you to stack about 8 of them which could give you, perhaps, 20 minutes of sort of continuous music if you didn’t count the time it took for the record to drop and the needle to hit the first groove of the next record – and the times the record didn’t fully drop and you had to fix it. Some fancy machines even flipped records over – even the big 12 inch as opposed to standard 10 inch variety. And the records broke – and were flammable. And the needles always seemed to need changing. I remember when the big deal was needles made of cactus – they were supposed to last longer and sound better. They didn’t.

In the mid forties there was a breakthrough, so to speak. The records became unbreakable – unless they were dropped the wrong way.

But in the late forties there was a real breakthrough – Columbia came out with the long play record. You could get up to half an hour from each side. Columbia started at 33 1/3 revolutions a minute, down from the old 78 and Victor, refusing to conform, came out with 45’s which came in records with big donut holes and required a different machine from the one that played 33s. Then manufacturers made machines that played all three speeds and you had to stick little plastic things in the middle of the 45s so they could play on the same turntable, then set it at the right speed.

Tape had been around for a long time but for some reason didn’t catch on until the late 60s and here we really did have an improvement in sound. Tape simply didn’t have the scratches and you could get up to 45 minutes on each side – indeed today 120 minute tapes are available and acceptable. The trouble was people had a hell of an investment in hardware that they were unwilling to toss out and to this day there are still some old record players in use.

Originally tapes came in enormous boxes, and cars in the mid seventies were all equipped with these ghastly 8 tracks as they were called which, in a few years were replaced by the cassettes with which we’re so familiar.

But the sound of the CD has been the big revolution. And new stuff is coming along as we speak. But – trust me – nothing you will hear from now on will be in any way contrasted to what you hear today as what you hear today is contrasted to what my generation started out listening to.

And if you ever need to test this proposition, come on over and I’ll put on a Frank Sinatra love song, wind up the old victrola – and watch you die laughing.