Something really basic to all us oldies is now totally meaningless to young people, and probably has been for several generations. It raises a question about the increasing disposability of music which now often AI, we learn with songs topping some stateside charts that were created by people who don’t exist.
But when we were kids in the 70s, 80s and even the early 90s going to school with an album under your arm was an important ritual. It was an indicator of your taste and even your position in the hierarchy of your pals.
I still remember the frisson of excitement at acquiring a record and knowing you’d be taking it to school the next day to play it at lunchtime. I’m not alone in this am I? It was a big thing.
Perhaps it gets forgotten now just what an important ritual it was, especially for us rock kids as our burgeoning album culture was so important to us. And some records were more revered than others. For example, if you had a copy of Yessongs it was held in its triple disc awesomeness and everyone poured over the foldout artwork . Other triples and gatefold doubles were greatly desired. I remember seeing someone bringing in Mountain’s Twin Peaks. The first time I’d actually seen it. It was a Japanese import. The excitement was off the scale
When I brought in Ten Years After’s Recorded Live, it was so admired that it was stolen. I can still feel the pain of the loss. This speaks to the importance of records as artefacts at the time. It wasn’t just the music, it was the whole thing from vinyl to sleeve, label and inner sleeve. It all added up to a cultural thing that had real importance to us kids.
We even hid Roxy Music’s Country Life from the eyes of teachers and parents. Along with the blurred photo of Stacia, on In Search Of Space by Hawkwind, it was my first glimpse of pubic hair aged 14, similarly Cochise’s 1970 debut was to be hidden, Boxer’s Below The Belt was risque and even the Virgin label was embarrassing. Seems bizarre now, but I was once told off for carrying Flash’s In The Can, as though it was a pornographic item. And Ohio Players records were a no no.
We used to delight in showing innocent schoolgirls the cover of Sticky Fingers. It was all part of our gauche awakenings. Kids today, satiated with porn by 15, wouldn’t understand neither how transgressive nor thrilling these records were. Where’s the thrill of showing someone your playlist on your phone? That offers so little compared to carrying a copy of Demons And Wizards to school. When record companies created a world without vinyl, we lost so much, even down to the structure of society. Everything seemed to become personal and not communal. Less generous too.
And it wasn’t just taking records to school, it was also giving friends and girlfriends records for Christmas or birthdays, That was a special thing. I recall buying Earth Wind and Fire’s I Am for a girl when I was 17 and it opened my mind to a different kind of music. Even if it was just a single, it was special, in a way forwarding someone a wav file just can’t be.
If I close my eyes I can still recall the feeling of setting off to school with a copy of Deep Purple’s Made In Japan under my arm. It was a prize possession. Nothing meant more to my 15-year-old self than that gold, laminated double album. Do you go to school excited because of a stream on your phone? It doesn’t seem likely.
Yet I still hear people complaining about clicks and scratches being the downside of vinyl. Did you worry about that in 1975? I certainly didn’t. I accepted it as all part of the experience. I didn’t encourage them but wasn’t bothered by them. Because if you reflect records for that reason, you deprive yourself of so much else. What you might gain in sound quality (which is in itself debatable) you lose in every other way. To take Yessongs as an example, even a CD is a poor initiation of the extravagant fold-out sleeve.
People are rediscovering what all collectors have never forgotten and are buying vinyl in still small numbers but bigger numbers than since the early 90s, though the news stories are more hyperbolic than the reality. Obviously the 70s will never be recreated but I hope one day, people will reconnect with what was an everyday truth and once again, kids will go to school with records, even if they’re not progressive rock triples.
