Do you ever listen to an album anymore?
I mean the way we used to do it, start at Track 1 on Side A play it through and then (if you’re actually listening to vinyl) flip it over and do the same thing on Side B until it plays out. I know a lot of you don’t have turntables or vinyl anymore, but this story isn’t about that. You can do the same thing with your Spotify account or your Alexa device in this day of streaming. The point of the story is, do you ever ask Alexa to “play the album (enter any name here)” or do you just want to hear the hits off that album?
The reason I started “musing” about this was I recently took my granddaughter to see Stone Temple Pilots and as it was, they were playing the album “Purple” in its entirety. I love the album, loved it when it came out but sitting there listening to it live, I couldn’t remember the last time I listened to the whole album. There were songs hearing them live I totally forgot about. My granddaughter told me when they started into “Interstate Love Song” that it was her favorite STP song and it’s on all of her “playlists”.
There are albums for me that instead of asking “Alexa” to play a song from it I would rather listen to the whole album in order. I’m listening to one now while I write this story, “A Trick Of The Tail” by Genesis. I don’t know how many times I’ve listened to this album since it came out, maybe 1000 times easily. I even remember where I bought it, I picked it up in 1976 at The Shoppe in Berea the week it came out. I went there to pick up “Sandman” by Harry Nilsson and saw the cover of “A Trick Of The Tail” and knowing that Peter Gabriel was gone and as a fan of the group I wondered what this new album was going to be like, so I bought both. Looking back, I wished I would have saved the $3.99 for the Nilsson album as I don’t think I ever listened to it again after that, but I got my money’s worth out of “A Trick Of The Tail”.
If I didn’t listen to the album in its whole, would I ever had discovered the songs “Mad Mad Moon” or “Squonk”? You would hear “Robbery, Assault And Battery” and the title track on WMMS but the deeper tracks, no. “Entangled” wasn’t really played that much on the radio but it became a staple in their live shows including the recent tours, that is because back then you listened to the album and you liked the song.
When I first started buying music, I was buying 45’s which was the Spotify playlist of the 1960’s for most of us. A band would put out an album and the record company would put out two or three 45 rpm records off that album with an A & B side so for each 45 rpm record you would get usually two songs off the album unless they put the “Mono” version on one side and “Stereo” version on the other (remember those!). These were considered the “hits” and those sold so the trend continued until the idea of the “concept” album happened.
No one really can pinpoint when the change occurred, but the idea of a “concept” album was that the album as a whole was based on an “idea” where one song set up the next one and on and on. This changed the listener’s habit of just wanting to hear “the hits”. You wanted to try and understand the journey instead. It also helped if you were a little high while listening but that’s another story.
The first albums for me personally that I heard “differently” were the Beach Boys “Pet Sounds” and The Beatles “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”. I mean there is so much of a difference structurally between “Pet Sounds” and “All Summer Long” in just over a year apart or how about the difference of “Beatles For Sale” and “Sgt. Peppers”? “Beatles For Sale” was just a collection of songs and mostly you just listened to the hits where with “Sgt. Pepper’s” you felt you had to listen to the album start to finish to get the whole meaning as one song built onto the next until the last track, “A Day In The Life” ended with that piano chord that faded out. I remember sitting there just kinda staring at the speakers wanting more, then all of sudden you were shocked back out of that trance by John’s laughter and gibberish on the run-out groove. One of my favorite Beatles songs is “No Reply” off of “Beatles For Sale” but I didn’t really remember that song until in the 1990’s when I actually put the album on and listened to it in its entirety and there it was Track 1 Side A. I just missed or overlooked that song because instead of listening to the album at the time I was listening to the hits on 45’s.
Looking back, some of the albums that are now considered “The Greatest Albums Of All Time” in various magazines and polls are what are considered “concept” albums. It was an album that was meant to be listened to front to back, they had a message they wanted you to get whether it was political, social or mystical, they were screaming at you “PAY ATTENTION” so you rolled a fat one, sat back with the album cover notes in your lap, got your groove going and listened deeply. Some of those concept albums that are considered classics are Marvin Gaye “What’s Going On”, Stevie Wonder “Songs in the Key of Life”, Pink Floyd “The Wall”, The Who “Tommy”, David Bowie “Ziggy Stardust”, Sly and the Family Stone “There’s a Riot Goin’ On”, Genesis “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway”, Elton John “Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy”, Eagles “Hotel California”, Frank Zappa “Joe’s Garage” or how about “Mothership Connection” by Parliament to name just a few. Are they classics now because we listened then and gave it the attention the artist wanted us to and in doing so, they hit a nerve in us that resonated still to this day.
In the 1980’s CD’s were coming on the scene and unlike 8-tracks or cassettes you were able to skip right to the “hit” song and listen to it as many times as you wanted and never hear the song before it or after. When you were finally able to “burn” your own disks, man what a revelation I can put my favorite songs from all my favorite bands together, it was the ultimate “mix tape” as I could even skip over songs, I liked with a click of a button but what hidden gems were we missing from the original album.
It took me 30 something years to come across “No Reply” again and about that time I was wondering “what else was I forgetting or never even listened to” off those thousands of albums lining my shelves. It was about this time I made a conscience effort that when I was home and wanted to listen to music instead of throwing a “burnt” CD into the player I took the time to grab a vinyl off the shelf and drop the needle at Track 1 and go to the end and when that album was over, grab another one. What I found was so many songs that I love and listen to now I probably never heard on the radio. Songs like “Living It Up” Rickie Lee Jones, “Grapefruit Moon” Tom Waits, “Peace Of Mind” Peter Wolf, “Sad And Deep As You” Dave Mason, “The Trader” Beach Boys, “Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town” Pearl Jam, “Water Song” Hot Tuna, “Toulouse Street” Doobie Brothers, “Box Of Rain” Grateful Dead. Even some local bands and their songs I rediscovered by listening to the album again even though I probably heard them live in a bar a hundred times like “Silver Wings” by Alex Bevan.
If you read one my earlier stories about how my granddaughter on one of her visits took a huge chunk of my remaining vinyl collection, there was a caveat, no matter if it was an album she definitely wanted like Queen “Night At The Opera” or one I told her she should take like Tom Waits “Closing Time” she had to promise to listen to it like you should, Track 1 Side A and let it flow………..like I’m sure she is doing now with the copy of “Purple” I sent her.
