Celebrating the Long Groove

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”― Cormac McCarthy

75 years ago today, Inventor Dr. Peter Goldmark stood in front of an invited audience at the Waldorf Astoria with two piles of records on either side of him. One pile was eight feet high: a tower of shellack, a stack of 10 inch 78 RPM audio discs. The pile to the other side of him was just over a foot high, made up of a brand-new carrier of recorded sound, the 12 inch record. Goldmark was making the point that he had invented a new, possibly improved way of listening to music. Wah-lah! The long-playing record had arrived. Columbia Records head honcho Edward Wallerstein was there to help introduce his newest invention…threw the record on for a listen…let it be known that Columbia was ready to produce these new records for commercial sales (what he didn’t say: getting people to rebuy songs that they owned on now-outdated past formats).

Dr. Peter Goldmark

Any record collector out there knows the impact: Goldmark had figured out how to swap the short 2-4+ minute playing time of the 78 with the 23-minute playing time of the “long player.” And he did it without significant sound loss; he made the grooves of the record smaller and shallower, he created a process in which the vinyl was used to make these new platters was much cleaner…devoid of dirt particles and other alien artifacts that caused pops, crackles, distortions…and he even created a whole new turntable and needle that would accommodate the records he was cutting¹.

The first record he played? It was a classical one: Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra led by Bruno Walter with soloist Nathan Milstein in for tow. It made sense that a classical record would be the first to be pressed. Classical Music, with its often long-running compositions, fit much more easily on a 23-minute side. Goldmark himself had been driven by the irritation of having to switch 78 sides multiple times to hear an entire classical piece!

Label paperwork for the first LP from the Library of Congress

While Classical releases were the first to be focused upon during this new era, labels were also compiling singles they had put out before. Slowly, groups started recording albums directed by the vinyl format, like the Dave Brubeck Quartet, which resulted in their classic release, Take Five. The new format led to longer improvisations…longer solos…rock operas…Metal Machine Musics…drone dreams and krautrock journeys. It led to beginning tracks on Side A and ending tracks on Side B. What is the best Side B opener? Is it My God from Jethro Tull’s Aqualung? Stir It Up from the Wailer’s Catch A Fire? Back in Black from AC/DC’s record of the same name? When Doves Cry from Purple Rain? The question would never be asked if the format remained as a song a side. This new format gave a new stage to artists to compose a full-on show.

Vinyl is a medium that has been somewhat bullet proof against the advances of technology. Sure, the LP title no longer sells the millions of copies it used to have the capacity to do, but after its decline with the advent of CDs, it has risen again in the age of people wanting a physical, analog object in which to listen to….to celebrate the art they cherish. David Sax talks about the need and beauty of vinyl in both of his books, The Future Is Analog and The Revenge of Analog. He starts his thesis here:

All digital music listeners are equal. Acquisition is painless. Taste is irrelevant. It is pointless to boast about your iTunes collection, or the quality of your playlists on a streaming service. Music became data, one more set of 1's and 0's lurking in your hard drive, invisible to see and impossible to touch. Nothing is less cool than data.

And he goes on to say that research has shown that the rise in vinyl has been propelled by people in their late teens through twenties and that it is less a hipster thing and more of a preferred lifestyle. Kevin Smokler takes a deep dive into this reality as well in his film Vinyl Nation (which I make an appearance in): records bring people together, create experiences. The vinyl format that Goldmark introduced 75 years ago has an importance beyond the long playing: he created an opportunity for people to have a tactile connection to the art they love…a place for liner notes and album covers and yes, for music appreciation. And we have not even begun to discuss how the vinyl format adds a warmth to the music locked inside the grooves…especially when the original analog sources are used when the initial mastering is done.

Thank you Dr. Peter Goldmark. Thank you vinyl for all the memories and for the ones to come. Thank you for helping give rise to the age of the record collector! Happy 75th.

And now, time to make coffee and throw on a record.

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Organs Of Ecstasy: Ben Chasny’s Favourite Albums

Ben Chasny’s social media comment about this list: “No hidden gems here, pretty much all classics. Aka ‘everything I know about music I learned from ordering from the Forced Exposure catalogue 95-99’”. The truth is: there are some amazing records here that I had never listen to. A great portal to discovery

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Barbara Kingsolver wins the Women’s prize for fiction for second time

“Kingsolver was chosen as the winner for her Pulitzer prize-winning novel Demon Copperhead, which is set in the Appalachian mountains in Virginia in the US, and is a reimagining of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield…The shortlist included debut novelists Jacqueline Crooks for Fire Rush, Louise Kennedy for Trespasses and Priscilla Morris for Black Butterflies, as well as former winner Maggie O’Farrell, shortlisted for The Marriage Portrait.”

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Sauna and a show? ‘Wellness theater’ makes its sweaty debut in Las Vegas

Thank you Mike McGonigal for sending this beauty over to me. I think Wellness Theater has been going on, in one way or another, in bath houses San Francisco since the 60s! More improvised.

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Vic Trolla's Podcast: History through the lens of Edison Music

Marc Hildebrant aka Vic Trolla is an audio engineer specializing in cleaning up and transcribing old Edison records. This is the podcast he has created to “provide some historical background to the Edison Music” he works with.

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Captain Beefheart's 10 commandments of guitar playing

Thank you Ted Gioia for turning me on to this beauty. Long live the philosophies of Captain Beefheart.

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‘Completely Unique’ 2,700-Year-Old Rock Carvings Discovered in Sweden

“Two millennia or so ago, sailing ships, grazing animals, and people—hunting, gathering, dancing—were carved into cave walls, then obscured, slowly, by layers of moss. Ultimately, they were lost to time. Or lost until last month, when a team of researchers surveying the western Swedish province of Bohuslän uncovered the ancient artwork. The carvings, or petroglyphs, were made around 2,700 years ago”

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Art and Life

By: Henry Taylor

In the Portland Museum of Art’s snack bar
one July morning, a young woman worked
at the board that lists the specials of the day.
From her little stepladder she leaned in

with various colored chalks, using both point
and edge, adjusting with her fingertips,
experimenting with size and color, print
and script, once or twice stepping down and back,

then homing in on what was to be solved.
The whole thing might have taken her ten minutes.
At last she moved a little farther back
to see how what she’d done had changed the room,

while we, who had the good luck to be there
at the beginning of her day, beheld
the change she couldn’t know that she had wrought
merely by how her red hair caught the light.

A Durango & Silverton 2-8-2 rounds the curve on the legendary “High Line” near Rockwood, Colo (photo by Anthony D’Amato)

“Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever…You might want to think about that. You forget some things, dont you? Yes. You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”
― Cormac McCarthy

1. Besides the comments below from Chris Owen, there has been a lot of debate on some of the music lists I am on regarding what was actually new being presented on this day. Microgrooves had been experimented with earlier by Bell Labs…and patented…but it WAS with the long player that they were truly embraced. The term “long player” had been used before for broadcast transcriptions…patented…but again, not used commercially and not with as good sound quality. The only thing Columbia could actually patent was the brand “Lp”-capital L, lowercase p: Long player. and if you think about it, that Lp appeared everywhere on Columbia record covers for years.