“That’s when I absorbed the entirety of the musical artist’s vision for the first time in years. And that vision, my friends, is delivered in the space between the songs, a pause that has no place in a sea of discreet digital files. On an album though, that white space focuses the mind on the picture formed by songs collectively, allowing the listener an opportunity to rest the brain and ears after the last cut and prepare for the next one.”
– Claude Iosso
With that familiar burst of crackle, the needle hits the vinyl. After a pause, an announcer says, “It’s been a wild, hectic weekend. Lots of great music. Here he is again, David Bromberg.” The guitar maestro, who cast a long shadow across the folk music landscape in the ‘70s, comes on.
With a drumbeat racing up behind him, Bromberg says, “Wanna welcome you all here to the soul revue.” The audience laughs. A harmonica warbles for just a moment before the music stops abruptly. “Oops, that’s the wrong song,” Bromberg says. “Wouldn’t it have been great if it were the right one?” He bursts into laughter.
Thus begins Bromberg’s self-titled first album from 1971. “Introduction” is 27 seconds of frivolity immediately followed by the mournful “Last Song of Shelby Jean.” On a journey to the Golden Age of LPs, I came to treasure that little track and others like it. I also came to recognize the value of that long pause between the songs on all my records. If music is the space between the notes, as Claude Debussy declared, then music from LPs is the space between the songs.
Let me explain.
Under pressure from my wife to clear the living room shelves of unnecessary clutter, I pledged to do something about my record collection, that hefty bunch of antiquated vinyl stashed underneath the antiquated tape player and phonograph. Unlike most people, I still have a bunch of LPs – more than 80. Like most people though, I find digital files, whether from an iPod or on CDs, the only viable way to access music these days. Who has the space to store records or even CDs? Who but a vacuum-tube purist has the time to haul out a record, delicately extricate it from the sleeve and put it on a phonograph?
So, instead of buying digital versions of that motley collection of LPs, bought and “borrowed” from friends and siblings between 1977 and 1990, I have taken on the somewhat quixotic mission of converting all of the music on my records to digital files myself. With a special pre-amp that translates those analog sounds popping off the record into digital signals flowing into my computer over a USB cord, I’ve converted about 20 LPs so far.
As you would expect, ripping a record is a time-consuming process, about 40 minutes of forced idleness, as the same artist serves up eight to 12 songs in a precise order. I’ve unearthed some buried gems – rom the dB’s “The Sound of Music” to Fleetwood Mac’s “Mystery to Me” – reclaiming music I’d thought lost to oblivion. But I also discovered something unexpected.
Taking in the moody majesty of Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde” and the catchy fervor of Blondie’s “Parallel Lines,” I remembered that many albums added up to more than the sum of their parts. “Hanging on the Telephone” totally rocks by itself, but also builds an urgency for “One Way or Another,” “11:59” and “Will Anything Happen.” On Dylan’s 1966 double-LP opus, there’s about a half-dozen of his finest songs. But as strong as “Absolutely Sweet Marie” and “4th Time Around” are individually, they’re even more powerful together, in concert with all those other harmonica-driven tracks in the hypnotic chamber of “Blonde on Blonde.”
“Black Market Clash,” the Grateful Dead’s “Steal Your Face” and Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks” all have songs I can’t listen to on their own. However on these records, the artists’ ramblings become an essential part of the genius. The record cover, a square foot of cardboard, sometimes augmented with a custom sleeve and maybe a foldout section, holds one’s attention the way CD jewel cases never could.
Artists are still producing great albums today, but the time when most people would listen to songs primarily in the context of the artist’s album has passed. With thousands of songs all conveniently accessible on your iPod, ready to come up on shuffle, as well as services that cue up all the songs out there that fit your subtle preferences, the average music fan misses out on artists’ efforts to evoke an idea or mood with a suite of songs. Hey ya, it’s a singles world!
I was just getting teary-eyed about albums when I remembered that it was a singles world until the Beatles started rolling out complex collections of songs in the mid-‘60s. Albums ruled for about 25 years until about 1990, when the compact disc emerged. The crudest CD player had a “shuffle” setting that people started using quickly.
It’s a better world for music fans, right? We have instant access to all kinds of music. No need to scour the import bins at the funky record store for those crazy rhythims you heard on the college radio station. That band is coming up on Pandora in five minutes. I didn’t realize what I was missing or that I was even missing anything until I had to sit on my couch for hours at a time listening to vinyl records.
That’s when I absorbed the entirety of the musical artist’s vision for the first time in years. And that vision, my friends, is delivered in the space between the songs, a pause that has no place in a sea of discreet digital files. On an album though, that white space focuses the mind on the picture formed by songs collectively, allowing the listener an opportunity to rest the brain and ears after the last cut and prepare for the next one.
More importantly, of course, is the selection and ordering of songs. “Introduction,” that little track on the David Bromberg album, would never survive in the digital world. It’s a chair leg without a chair. However, as part of the record, it’s brilliant, capturing the wry humor and spontaneity that is an essential part of Bromberg’s performances and songs while serving as a perfect counter-balance to the heavy “Shelby Jean.”
It’s been a wild, hectic weekend. Lots of great music. Here’s one of your favorite artists again, performing an entire album.
– Claude Iosso
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