When amazon.com announced last week that they are selling one-third more electronic books that they are paper versions it started a flurry of concern about the death of the book. Now it’s true that an online book store may attract people more inclined to electronic wizardry, but if you’ve still got one foot in the old fart department (despite your best efforts to maintain a high cool quotient) your anaphylactic shock and luddite push back is totally understandable.
I haven’t got my head around electronic books – but then, hey, I still haven’t recovered from compact discs being introduced in the 1980s. No more gate fold sleeves and dust sleeve inserts, or gazing at the members of the band while conjuring up wonderful fantasies.... remember all those shots of the band members with their girl friends, dogs and kids in a paddock? Lead guitarist with all his instruments in a circle on the front lawn of his castle? Photo montages of the tour, the studio sessions, the Johnny Walker bottles and an ashtray full of joints?
Those old albums and their covers (hauled from share house to share house in a filchered milk crate) were like a journal and personality test all in one. At 15 if you owned the first Kate Bush album – a classic ‘girls’ album if ever there was one – it was a subtle but important indicator that you were smarter than that girl who liked Stevie Nicks.
And look at dear old Nick Drake – why so sad? (Try doing that with a Sparklehorse CD and the recently passed Mark Linkous).
Television, Patti Smith and Nick Cave albums tell another story. Like the pencil marks next to the kitchen door to show how much you’ve grown – the album covers at the front on your pile indicated a progression from those - long unplayed - at the back.
So much was in the package and design, but the written content was often a gold mine. Lyrics on the back to pore over. For the real snobs, a list of session musicians held many opportunities for showing off: “Oh look Jimmy Cobb on drums! Good choice man, good choice.” Those inner sleeves and liner notes could be read with the naked eyed - you didn’t need a magnifying class and the light from a nearby window to kind of work out that the artist might seemingly be giving thanks to “Jimmy Bob and his mum”.
Unless you lived in a vacuum, all records eventually developed pops and scratches at certain points; those flaws becoming so much a part of the music itself that if you heard the LP at someone else’s place, it didn’t feel right if it didn’t skip on the third track.
And have you heard anyone going bananas about ‘mint copy’ CDs like those record collection weirdos, who always uncannily looked like Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs in Almost Famous? They never actually played any of their albums “they might get damaged” – but lined them up lovingly in a complicated and highly indexed order. Where are the weirdos now? (Actually, I don’t mourn the loss of those bores at all. There is a statute of limitations on being a sad record collector).
You may indeed be thinking that there should also be a statute of limitations on people mourning the loss of vinyl. I mean seriously, it happened a long time ago. Todd Rundgren is not the only one who has sung that time heals.... but when he did, he sang it on vinyl and it was so much better then.
This article first appeared in Salon on 3 August 2010.
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