33 at 45 pt 2

I went a little further into my 'collection' (I hate that word) and found a few more bits and pieces, some of which I had referred to in the previous post but I can't be fucked doing a rewrite for something so mundane and not worth reading. You read right, NOT WORTH READING. The weirdest thing about this text, on the back of Elvis Costello's (twenty, count 'em, twenty-track) Get Happy, is the insane smallness of it, which is appropriate but insanely appropriately insane. 

I don't quite get the bit about 'people who've never bought a record made before 1967' but I assume it's tech talk - was there a change in practice after 1967 or is it about the kind of records, conceptually speaking, that were being made after 1967? Should probably investigate, there's probably someone much more nerdy than I somewhere on the internet who has a theory. 

(* update: not exactly but there is this discussion from which I learnt apparently there is a double album version of Get Happy with all sides playing at 45rpm and that the Imperial Bedroom album which came a couple of LPs later is apparently longer than Get Happy ffs!). 

Here's an interesting thing re: Utopia (phase II - the pop Utopia not the prog Utopia). My copy of what I believe is actually the second Utopia album to be called Utopia has this sticker on the front:

Note firstly it is not a 5-track EP but a 5-track LP (looking at the Wikipedia page I gather it was described as an EP in most territories and indeed in the UK and Europe the five tracks were pressed on a 7" 33rpm disc - !!!). But it's weirder than that. It's actually, once you get inside the cover, Side 3 of the album: you'd have to assume, the five tracks that no-one thought were good enough to go on the real album, so they're 'bonus tracks' for a limited time only. But the inner sleeve designs suggest this is a legit side 3, if it wasn't for the sticker on the front, you'd just think, yeah this is how it always was and always will be.

BUT it is stranger than that. Because flip that baby over (as the maternal and child health nurse says) and:

All the same tracks, on Side 4 as well. So I guess if you particularly love Utopia and particularly love side 3, you're in luck because it will wear out half as fast as the main (side 1 & 2) part of the LP, as long as you assiduously flip the extra disc when you're playing that side. Maybe I should compare side 3 & 4, maybe they're whole different versions or completely different songs with the same title or something. I mean it's kind of a waste of space, isn't it, but then again, it's not a waste of vinyl to press something into the vinyl... personally if I was in charge I'd be like 'let's turn the kids on to other things Utopia have done, by sticking a half-LP 'best of' on there' but I think they'd actually just signed to a new label so there probably wasn't much of a back catalogue. They could have given Todd a day in the studio to make a Mr Partridge style dub album... but oh yeah, Todd hates mixing. Damn it!!!

OK so I've milked that one, let's get back to Rip Rig and Panic just to finish off. Here are some selected labels, just in case you were in slack-jawed awe at the notion that those discs went at 45:

Wow they totally do. As you can see (? actually maybe you can't, but it is) my copy of I am Cold is a Japanese pressing, and I did that near-impossible thing of using the google translate camera to try and get some sense out of the text on the insert. I was surprised to glean that there is a whole 'user's guide to understanding who the fuck Rip Rig and Panic are' in there, explaining the group members' origins and the scene they came from. There's something in there about David Bowie being 'chesterish' which is a bit exciting and I also love that 'ring music is ringing now'. Anyway, I didn't get too much from this and all it really did was confuse me, all I can say with reasonable certainty is that nowhere does anyone say 'the reason the group chose to release their albums as two 12" 45s is...'

But also there is an ad for the God album on the insert of I Am Cold which describes it, in translation obviously, as '30 cm 45 rotation two sheets', which I get more out of than I really should. Note that below, the track which is somehow translated as 'Knee Dive in Sit' is actually called 'Knee Deep in Shit'. 

Bye! See ya later

33 at 45

I have nothing to say about this Elton John album (it's the one with the 'White Powder, White Lady' song on it LOL and also 'Little Jeannie' or whatever it's called). I just thought I could launch into a post ruminating on the increasing obsolescence of references to gramophone record speeds in the 21st century when music  is no longer seen as a tangible item that goes at a speed. I actually misremembered this album title as '33 at 45' (I remembered the reasoning behind the actual title though: 'I've made this many albums at this age'). 

You know I understand the idea mastering 12" records, even albums, at 45 for sound quality but it also slightly annoys me, selfishly, because sometimes my turntable belt slips off and I think it's more likely to happen if I go back and forth between 33 and 45 too much, or indeed, at all. So various great records like the Waterfall Person album or my Rip Rig and Panic albums don't get much play. 

The first two Rip Rig and Panic albums were released as 2 x 12" 45s (the third was a standard 12" 33). I am not entirely sure what the rationale was, but I'd bet there was an element of Virgin records saying to the band, 'this is how much we love you, we're not going to invest in videos or anything (I wonder if they did? The only video I have seen of them is not really video, it's their appearance in The Young Ones) but we will double the manufacturing/shipping cost of your albums'. I assume the cost was not substantially passed on to the consumer - you can't really call these double albums. I do remember a time, incidentally, when quality was generally assumed and quantity was most important (hence all those budget-priced 'Golden Hour of...' albums, I guess) and I know The Numbers, oddly enough, bore the brunt of this when it was revealed that their first self-titled album was under 30 minutes long (which is why the second album's title sardonically references the playing time). I also recall people saying in 1979 when Lipps Inc's album Mouth to Mouth came out that it was only 28 minutes long (though Wikipedia says it's just over half an hour) and this was more scandalous than the fact that it only had four songs on it. Half an hour seemed to be the magic number for album length, despite the fact that you could feasibly fit 30 minutes a side on an album - well, just - but it would be quiet and of course the grooves would not be as deep. Nevertheless, the music industry profited for a long time from the weird scenario whereby too much music on a record was regarded negatively by 'serious' consumers (if the Lipps Inc album had gone over 45 minutes, it would have been seen as a different kind of scam, although that's a bad example of something 'serious' consumers would be interested in). Todd Rundgren, as always, is an interesting case though an outlier, once again as always. The first Utopia album, if I remember correctly, has a song that goes just over 30 minutes and takes up one side of the album. (yes I do remember correctly and here it is to look at not listen to:)

You can well imagine Todd working backwards from the knowledge of how much time he has to play with. Healing, which came out a few years later, came with a 33 rpm 7" single which was a case of 'uh oh, there was too much stuff to fit on one 12" record, had to give you this as well'. I bet the 7" went at 33 because there were enough snobs in the world who never used the 45 speed on their turntable - for all I know, there were turntables made that just went at 33, because people were such adherents to the snobbery of 33-dom. It's still messing with the form/expectations though because of the way Todd is toying with audiophile expectations (over 30 minutes a side?! does it sound tinny?) or that snob aspect ('ugh, a single'). Since you can't set and forget a single, and it has to be pretty fuckin' special for you to play it that often, there are certain expectations around it aren't there. That makes me want to play that single now - 'Time Heals' - sounds like Hall and Oates, a lot. Well, H&O and TR have shared geographical/generational heritage so that's not surprising. I played the other side and have already forgotten it, I'm sure that says more about me.

The other group who regularly turned to 45 as a speed of choice is Pere Ubu.

Song of the Bailing Man (above - I just noticed, some clever clogs trimmed off the first numerals in '10' and '11') was the first of their records to be mastered at 45, then David Thomas' Sound of the Sand and Winter Comes Home, the famous 'disappeared' album. 

After that it was back to 33s for Thomas/Pere Ubu material (or more commonly since then, CDs) but I do have a copy of Lady from Shanghai which is two 45 12"s. 

There are some other anomalies. I wonder what the reasoning was behind the way this Albert Ayler album was put together? I mean it's possible that someone figured the two variations on 'Ghost' should sit together so if you put an LP on, you don't have to listen to the 'same' track twice, although to be fair, if you're that into Ayler you're probably not going to grizzle too much about that. Looking at those timings - three tracks over 10 minutes, and only one track under 4 minutes - it possibly made sense to have one long disc and one shorter one (I'm not even sure you could have three sides at 33 - I could be wrong). I'd have to imagine that the 'EP' is not an 'EP' for audiophile reasons and the decision to master it at 45 was probably arbitrary. 

I'm going to assume that it was Public Image Ltd and Metal Box which started this schemozzle, and while I don't really know I am also going to guess that the idea of releasing an hour-long album as a three 12" 45s with one or two songs on each side was a statement in itself. The packaging was of course in part about getting away from convention in all kinds of ways, including the way in which you were expected/ the way you expected to play a record and how it would be 'sequenced' (though there were sides A-F, and 'Careering' was always going to come after 'Poptones'), unless you yanked your needle off or plopped it on in particular places). Of course once CDs came along with a random/programming function, that was all swept away

What is probably more/most interesting is the seriousness/ephemerality associations with formats. 45s were for kids/girls, and albums were for men/proper people. It's just incredible that people were unable or unwilling to view these prescriptive restrictions for what they were. But Nancy's trying to tell me something... what is it Nancy?

'Shut the fuck up'