A Matter of Record (part 3): “Staying Alive”

How vividly I can recall, as a young boy back in 1957, returning home from school a little after 3:00 pm to find a large envelope addressed to:

Jerry Ghinelli
104-55 39th Ave
Corona, Zone 68, New York
(Zip codes had not been yet invented)

I remember being so excited to receive this package, and I knew by the mailing label exactly what the mailman had delivered.

I tore open the envelope and it was the “most beautiful thing I had ever seen," a yellow record featuring songs about Popeye.

Immediately I pulled out our small record player , turned it on and put the disc onto the spindle. My childlike enthusiasm suddenly collapsed, however, when my hero, Popeye the Sailor Man, came on sounding more like Alvin the Chipmunk.

Something had to be wrong, I thought. Brokenhearted, I began fiddling with knobs.

One knob said “78/45/33.” I turned it to 45. Popeye must have started eating his spinach, because like "magic," it did the trick. How well I remember the relief I felt as the distinctive, scratchy voice of Popeye—my hero—came to life.

That moment remains as vivid today as it was almost 50 years ago, when thus began a love affair, for me, with the record that remains to this very day. For those of you familiar with the movie Citizen Kane, that Popeye record is my “Rosebud.” For those of you not familiar with the movie, "Rosebud'' was a sled and for Kane an emblem of the innocence of childhood.

And for those of you 35 and older, I’d say, perhaps the record also still conjures up fond memories. Jukeboxes in ice cream parlors. Old Beatles albums— “Rubber Soul” always comes to my mind. Dancing in discos as the DJ played tracks from “Saturday Night Fever” on dual turntables. Or perhaps just a romantic Saturday night, when you put a favorite record on the turntable, lifted the arm gently, removed the dust from the needle, dropped the stylus on the disc and sat back on the sofa in a dimly lit room, and maybe fell in love for the first time.

Sorry, you youngsters, but CDs, DVDs, MP3s, iPods and hard drives just can't compare. Trust me!

Over the years, since it was invented by Emil Berliner in 1895 (see Part 2), the record has undergone significant changes. And analog audio recording onto a disc was the main technology used for storing recorded sound throughout most of the 20th century.

The first discs for gramophones or phonographs, as they came to be called in the United States, were marketed commercially back in 1895. By the early 20th century, they had gradually overtaken the phonograph cylinder (see Part 1) as the dominant medium of recorded sound.

The first disc records were made from various materials, including hard rubber. By the 1920s, however, the hard rubber records had been replaced by a substance called “shellac.”

Shellac records were extremely brittle and as fragile as glass. Perhaps you remember Donna Reed in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life , smashing the record over the phonograph? Or perhaps Moe breaking a record over Curly's head in the Three Stooges Micro-Phonies ? Pretty tough to do with hard rubber, and even harder do with the material that replaced the shellac record and that is familiar to most of us—the vinyl record.

Vinyl is a tough and flexible plastic, originally used in floor coverings. While the shellac record was brittle and broke relatively easily, the vinyl record, made from this plastic substance, was flexible and unbreakable under normal use. Vinyl also had a much lower playback noise level than shellac.

The size of the record evolved, as well. In the 1890s, those early discs were usually 7”. By 1910, they had increased to 10”. By far the most popular size ever was the 12” record.

The earliest speeds of rotation varied widely, but by 1910, records were typically rotating at or about 78 times in one minute. This gave such records the common name of “78s” (or “seventy-eights”).

In the late 1930s, a new format began to emerge, and gradually replaced the standard 78.

In 1939, Columbia Records began extensive research into recording and playing back narrow grooves, and developing an inexpensive, reliable consumer long-playing record. Interrupted by World War II, the research was finally completed in 1948, when the 12" Long Play (LP) microgroove record was introduced by Columbia Records at a dramatic New York press conference.

The bitter commercial rivalry between RCA Victor and Columbia Records, which dated back to the legal battles over who owned the rights to the gramophone (see Part 2), led to RCA Victor introducing a vinyl format intended to be competition: the 7”, 45-rpm Extended Play (EP) record.

For a two-year period, from 1948 to 1950, record companies and consumers faced uncertainty over which of these formats would ultimately prevail in what became known as the “War of the Speeds”—not all that different from the Beta vs. VHS video format wars that would follow 25 years later (click here).

But unlike the VHS vs. Beta format wars, the 45s and 33 LP battle ended in a compromise, because each format found a separate marketing niche, and record players were redesigned to use either type.

The 7” 45-rpm EP, or “single,” established a significant niche for shorter-duration discs that usually contained one song on each side. The 45-rpm discs typically mirrored the playing time of the former 78-rpm discs. The 45s became famous for those old singles—you remember, with the large center hole —that became an icon for the record industry in the 50s and 60s.

The 12” 33-rpm LP prevailed as the dominant format for musical albums, and offered up to one half-hour of music per side.

Although they have now been overtaken by digital media such as the Compact Disc (CD)—and now iPods —as a mass-market music medium, surprisingly, vinyl records continue to be manufactured and sold. And those of you who think the record is dead: think again. To paraphrase Mark Twain : “the reports of the death of the record have been grossly exaggerated”… but more on that next time.