Peer under the surface of a record collector such as myself and you’re quite likely to find somebody for whom records were a childhood lifeline. All the buying, cataloging, and arranging of adult life has its origins in earlier life, when a beloved record became a constant, reliable companion.
With that in mind, I’d like to offer the story of some of the records that elicit the warmest memories for me, those albums that really cooked my goose, musically speaking. This is likely to be a continuing series of articles, by the way.
Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker Suite & Swan Lake
Roger Desormiere conducting the French National Symphony Orchestra
Capitol Records (EMI)
The illustration is the original jacket cover for "Swan Lake", although as I recall our copy was a "double" — an LP that included two previously-78 RPM albums. Thus the cover offered two pictures on the cover (one of the Nutrcracker album, and the other for Swan Lake) inset over a textured tweedy-looking background.
My folks had a 1955 model RCA "New Orthophonic" Hi-Fi record player, in blondewood veneer with brass tubular legs. Only those of a certain age can envision such a device, but as it turns out, I have a photo. My mother is in the foreground; behind her you can see the RCA, including some of the records. I can even tell you that the record to the immediate left of the RCA is a Hollywood Bowl album, of which we had two or three.
I wasn’t actually allowed to play records on my own in the living room, only with my own kid’s record player in my room—but I was never allowed to put the "good" living-room records on my kiddy-player. (I can only imagine just what that horrid little thing would do to a good record.)
But I got to hear the Tchaikovsky record on a number of occasions, and eventually the folks sacrificed it to my continuing education—i.e., they let me have it for playing in my room. That was probably pretty much the end of the poor thing as far as they were concerned, but in fact I frigging memorized that sucker. I played it over and over and over; it was the most interesting record I had by a mile. (I had rapidly outgrown my kiddie-history records, such as the one about Columbus discovering the new world with music courtesy of the Dvorak Ninth.)
For those who enjoy collecting trivia: the character Midge (Jimmy Stewart’s girlfriend, played by Barbara Bel Geddes) in Alfred Hitchcock’s "Vertigo" has precisely that same model and veneer of RCA Orthophonic Hi-Fi in her San Francisco apartment, although hers is placed on a tabletop (the brass legs unscrewed easily.) That was a good call on the set designer’s part; RCA New Orthophonics were reliable and inexpensive, the iPods of their day, and lots of people had them.
The top of the player is a hinged lid (in my picture, there is a potted plant on it). You lifted the hinged lid (it had a little brace to keep it open) and then you could put the record on the spindle, which was designed to hold a stack of LPs. The automatic record-changer mechanism dropped the LP onto the turntable and positioned the tone arm. The RCA could also play 45 singles, courtesy a clever doohickey that slid over the main spindle and also worked as an automatic changer. Once you stacked up your records on the changer and pressed the circular slider-lever to get the whole thing started, you could then close the lid.
Record changers were ubiquitous during the LP era, so much so that multi-disc sets were manufactured to play sequentially when you stacked them up on the spindle. Thus the first record of a 3-LP set would contain sides 1 & 6; the second LP would be 2 & 5; on the third, sides 3 & 4. Stack them in order on the spindle, and sides 1 – 2 – 3 played one after another, then you flipped the whole stack over and you got 4 – 5 – 6. Audiophiles spoke disparagingly of record changers, hinting darkly that dropping the record down onto the turntable was damaging to the record, not to mention that the records were stacked up one atop the other. However, LPs had raised edges in order that stacked records wouldn’t press down on each other, so there probably wasn’t much to worry about.
Postscript: the RCA became mine, eventually. The folks never got another record player; they just weren’t all that interested. After about 1969 or so I had a new RCA stereo record player, which stayed with me for quite some time. Then came the slow upgrading process…eventually to reach the present state of sonic munificence.
How the West Was Won
Alfred Newman conducts the MGM Studio Orchestra
MGM Records
Baby Boomer childhoods were accompanied mostly by monophonic sound. Stereophonic recording started up in the early 1950s, but stereo records themselves came along later, not until 1957 or so, and at first they were scarcer than hen’s teeth. When I was growing up, record stores had two sections, one for the mono records and the other for the stereo ones. The record companies had worked out a way to use the same jacket cover for both releases; the glossy paper part of the jacket was about an inch of so longer than the record sleeve. The "Stereo" label ran along the top of the graphic, and the "Mono" label along the bottom. That way you could glue it to the sleeve so you either saw the Stereo part on the top, or the Mono part along the bottom.
Take a look at the cover for the original cast album of "Flower Drum Song" and you’ll see what I mean — basically, the mono version is "rolled up" vis à vis the stereo album. You can see that stereo was a major selling point for a new record in those days.
Very few of us were shopping in the "stereo" area at first, but as the 60s rolled on, the "mono" section shrank and disappeared. Everybody got stereo players and they wanted stereo records. After a while, the fancy "Stereo" heading on the albums disappeared as well; any new record was going to be in stereo only.
The big movie theaters in the late 1950s and early 1960s offered the novelty of big-time stereo sound. Nowhere was the sound more resplendent than in the Cinerama movie theaters, they of the gigantic curved screen and, at least until about 1963 or so, three projectors. (After "How the West Was Won", Cinerama started using 70mm film instead.)
The gut-wrenching thrill of high-end stereo is an experience hard to duplicate now, given just how rare it was back then and just how ubiquitous it is now. Of all the Cinerama spectacles, "How the West Was Won" had the best soundtrack—a giant orchestra, chorus, soloists, the works. Thus the LP was one of the most popular albums of its day. My copy was one of my absolute favorite records ever; "How the West Was Won" has probably manifested itself all these years later with my audiophile habit and the recent purchase of Fasolt and Fafner, the B&W 803D speakers.