From Turntable to Touchscreen

By Leo Racicot

When I was growing up, the radio was one of the few sources of recreation to be had. Not only did it provide entertainment, it offered us music education; we learned who was popular, who the singers of the day were, what the hits were and helped us develop our musical taste. My parents, aunts and uncles were older than those of my peers so my young ears were exposed early on to the Big Band sounds of Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman, the singers of The Great American Songbook like Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, Peggy Lee. Whether at home or in the car, listening to the radio was the way to pass the time in between meals or on a rainy Saturday.

But wasn’t it exciting then when our mother got Diane and me a record player one Christmas; we finally had the chance to listen to our favorite singers on LP (long playing discs, now called vinyl) or 45 rpm, smaller discs usually containing a hit song on one side, a lesser-known song on the flip (or B) side. To play a 7-inch 45 rpm record with a large center hole on a standard-sized turntable, a small plastic piece called a “45 adapter” or “spider” was snapped directly into the middle of the record to bridge the size difference. With LPs, if I liked a favorite track, I never minded getting up off the bed or floor to lift the needle to that groove, bypassing the less favorite songs. I’d play a record so many times, I’d wear out the grooves and hopefully be able to save up enough of my allowance to buy a replacement. Being uncharacteristically shy and reclusive as a boy, I liked to hide away in my bedroom, door closed, and listen to my records. I’d listen for hours. They were at times the only company I had. If a song, a singer or a band caught my ear, I’d run out and buy their album. Some preferred music was The Beatles, Elton John, Chuck Mangione, All Things Julie Andrews. I really liked the musical remake of Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon, didn’t understand why critics had labelled this Burt Bacharach/Hal David movie a flop; I listened endlessly, singing along. I also sang along at the top of my lungs to the soundtrack albums of my two favorite Broadway musicals, Camelot and My Fair Lady. My poor mother who wasn’t a fan of Broadway musicals would beg me to “Shut that music off!”  I was never what anyone would call musically savvy and a particularly embarrassing moment stands out. We students were in the school lunchroom. The subject of music came up among the boys. John Stewart was asking us to name the latest 45 we’d bought. When it came my turn, my answer was Mellow Yellow by the very mellow folk singer, Donovan. The guys dismissed my answer with a collective scoff and moved on to the next kid. I guess Donovan was never what could be called ‘cutting edge’.

I remember one time riding the train to Boston, I became suddenly, nauseatingly ill. I decided to follow through on my Jordan Marsh record buying trip. In the bins, I spied an all-blue cover of a record by a singer named Joni Mitchell whose face was barely visible on the cover’s artwork. I have no idea what drew me to that album, only that the color of the album mirrored the color of my sick stomach, blue. I took it home, instantly captured by its raw honesty, the poetry of its lyrics, It offered a hiding place for pain. Today, in music history, it’s recognized as a masterpiece of confessional music and turned me into a Joni Mitchell fan for a lifetime.

Recently, yy friend, Dick Howe, made a cogent observation when he called record players a part of every home’s furniture. Indeed, no home I knew in those days was without one, either in the bedroom or living room. I remember going with David McKean into his attic on Edson Street, listening together to Electric Light Orchestra, to Iron Butterfly’s In-a-Gada-Da-Vida with its hypnotic notes, Ron Bushy’s mesmerizing drum solo. And how can I forget the time spent with Anthony Kalil in his basement listening to albums by Moms Mabley, Redd Foxx, Cheech and Chong? We’d discovered comedy albums together downtown at Record Lane; we hadn’t known such a thing existed. Mabley and Foxx were known for what was called blue humor, Cheech and Chong for stoned, bong-fueled laughs. Anthony and I felt very naughty listening/laughing there in the dark, keeping a close eye and ear out for his mom, Doris, to come down with the laundry. This certainly wasn’t Pat Boone music.

Around 1965 or so, the 8-track tape was invented. *8-tracks were large, clunky board-like devices. When placed into the player, they made a noisy, kind of starting kachunk sound, much like a garbage truck. To this day, I don’t know why they were so popular. In fact, they didn’t maintain their popularity long — too big, too ungainly; they didn’t store well and too often they broke after only a couple of plays. Today, they remain the brunt of jokes for being a prime example of old-time faulty technology (I might add here that their movie-watching counterpart, Betamax format, was equally annoying as you felt the whole room would shake when the player sucked them into itself. These, too, went out-of-fashion in short order).

In 1979, a new listening device, the walkman, appeared in the culture. Everybody had to have one. Walkmen were lightweight with lightweight headphones so — easy to manage. They were a private, personal portable way to take music with you wherever you went. Cassette tapes became the rage, replacing record players and 8-tracks. The only glitch became that the fragile, almost thread-like tape could easily break or snap, especially on the rewind. These led eventually to the boombox rage. The boombox caught on because in one machine, it usually contained an AM/FM radio, two cassette tape loaders and powerful sound speakers, enabling the user to carry an entire entertainment center around with him/her. They quickly became status symbols, prestigious in urban areas. I recall photos and footage of the late Jeff Buckley walking New York City with his. No one minded the weight of them because they offered so much in the way of musical amusement and were regarded in the 1980s as the height of cool.

Next up on the market were CDs. A CD was a flat music disc. It could be played either in a small, portable disc-shaped player or a larger compact disc machine. CDs had a pure sound, more pristine than record albums and cassette tapes. They took some getting used to. Even though they eliminated the scratchy sound of record albums, child of The Sixties that I am. I missed the old-timey nostalgia and tones of LPs.

In the rapidly-advancing technological developments of the 21st century, it isn’t easy to keep pace with the many changes in how we listen to music. These days, satellite streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music make it possible for music lovers to access literally millions of songs from an invisible or possibly not so invisible ‘cloud’ over the Internet. The subscriber listens. When she/he is done with the tune, it ‘disappears’, creating more storage space for future music. It’s an impressive, even mind-blowing development, sometimes too mind-blowing for me.

As the song lyric goes, “Everything old is new again”. I’ve dug out my old record player and LPs. As I write this, I’m rediscovering the joys of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. There’s a quartet, The Johanna Quartet, wherein four voices, singing four different songs, culminates in the fusion of all four melodies into an epiphany that takes the listener straight into heaven. When we were young, Joe and I loved this musical. He could actually sing the three-hours long score from start-to-finish, a cappella. Extraordinary.

I’m finding how much I missed the soft, fuzzy whoosh of the playing needle on an album; the static-y scratch brings a nostalgic twinge, summoning the listening habits of my youth.

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A radio from the 1960s

Record player

45 rpm record

Sony Walkman

Jeff Buckley with boom box

“The Cloud”

Sweeney Todd poster