The Book of Electro Genesis....In the beginning...There was no Garden of Eden called cable..only antenna telly)...when you wanted to boost a signal you placed a strip of tin foil on the connectors to the antenna to summon the signal gods from local ABC, NBC,CBS network heaven to dismiss the ghosts of double vision that formed on the screen after the tubes warmed up like and electro campfire. Television...we watched the Vietnam war unfold body bags, one by one in our living rooms, along with napalm and B-52's (not the group) We invited Vietnam into our living rooms as an unwitting host invites a vampire into it's home....if we didn't like what we saw we just changed the channel, poof...reality gone in a puff of smoke...never before was the mute button used to silence a war....it was also the first war, with real dead people, that took two minute breaks for commercials...Vietnam...brought to you by General Motors...makers of fine cars and tanks.....GE...better living through chemistry...
The telegraph cables of the Old West were twisted into knots, poles used for pirate planks and fiber was good for optics as well as your digestive tract. So many channels to choose now...too many...it's as grueling as watching one episode of Real Housewives of Toledo, although Cougars rock!.
Three stations, maybe four if you were lucky were on the air. UHF was in the future, VHF ruled the airwaves...(cable hadn't reared it's Borg-like head to feed us intravenously...bundled no less...in complete control of our daily lives..phone-cable-internet...one down, all down)..much as AM ruled the radio roost until FM...Amplitude modulation made room for frequency modulation with a sexy undulation.
Dick Tracy and his gizmo's and gadgets were fantasy...imagine talking into a watch that was a phone and a video at the same time...impossible...not plausible...the stuff of fantasy...Star Trek...beaming and streaming through space the final frontier..preposterous!!
In the ,long ago time of vinyl, in a record galaxy far far away, we all got by with a little help from our friends in our rock and roll record buying days. It was an all out backseat 45 rpm orgasm to "School Days" by Chuck Berry. The spindle held the vinyl disc in place and in turn took it's place in rock and roll heaven as the record in all it's rpm glory got kicked in the balls and replace by the compact disc, the CD, and yes, it also stands for cross dresser!
There was reel to reel when reelin' and a rockin' and cassette tapes and eight tracks, and quad, and then, today, now, the i-Pod. A disease parasite that eats away at the sound quality of the final product and the poof! there goes the disappearing album cover art work. Vinyl produced a sound quality still unmatched today, but the album cover art, damn Louvre stuff if you ask me...Led Zeppelin albums, the Janis Joplin Cheap Thrills album and of course, the Holy Grail of album cover art...Sergeant Pepper! Then again, there is also the White Album...
Before jukeboxes, in the Jurassic period of player piano's, rolls were the first automated music machines and eventually Mr. Edison came up with the music rolls for home listening that rolled off his assembly line in Menlo Park, New Jersey in 1887, based on an idea that a Frenchman developed in 1857! Edison took out patents on his "talking machine" and "sound writers" which eventually became the Phonograph!
Records appeared from the techno-Ice Age as 78 rpm behemoth records and were as large and heavy as a 57 Buick. Along with records a new industry was created..the public needed something to play the records back on. The Victrola was one of many type machines for recorded playback! You had to had to hand crank it, like firing up a Model T, for enough juice to hear the recordings of the “rock stars” of the Enrico Caruso, Al Jolson, Uncle Dave Macon, Vernon Dahlhart and the like.
Today we complain about the technological changes in our lives, new tech replacing old tech faster than tossing away a used condom. Remember MTV and the song, Video Killed the Radio Star? Well, radio itself reared it's amplitude modulated head in 1923, and now the public could hear recorded music on the box..for free!
Record sales started to take a nose dive, but did re-emerge eventually. Other recording innovations surfaced in 1934 with the introduction of recordable tape, not quite replacing records yet. Glenn Miller and his band received the first gold record in 1942 for their recording of Chattanooga Choo Choo. By the 1950's 78's were tossed into the landfill of nostalgia, it was the age of the 33 1/3 and the 45 rpm.
The next phase as the music world was a fornication of sounds, rockabilly emerged, rock and roll, race music, country western, and all of sudden there was music for every taste and pocket book and there was gold in them thar gold record hills. The 45 rpm was the compact disc of it's day hops hoping to not only dance with the new girl in school but enjoying her many gifts under the bleachers after the dance!
The 33 1/3 album. More than one song, more than on hit, holy shit, 12 songs for the price. Surfing albums, the British Invasion and that mop top fab four group from Liverpool who managed hit after hit on one album at a time. They also introduced us to the "concept album" in the guise of Sergeant Pepper...the whole album a novel, a story line, interesting characters from Billy Spears to Mr. Kite, Lovely Rita the Meter Maid to Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.
The cassette tape was introduced to the music buying masses in 1963 and the first 8-track developed in 1965. The first CD was rushed off the assembly line in 1978 but not introduced to the masses until 1983, by 1988 the CD was spelling the doom of the vinyl era. By 1998..MP3 technology was introduced and today we have the i-pod. I refer to it as I-pos for Internet-Piece of Shit! They lack the clarity and punch of vinyl.
The sound systems were towers of power, along with turntables and amps, it was the age of the Rock and Roll Borg. .RCA plugs everywhere in and out of every electronic orifice. Today, vinyl is making a comeback for a whole new generation that haven't experienced the almost Houses of the Holy Wall of Sound that was played by Sergeant Pepper and The Lonely Hearts Club Band. Marantz, TEAC, all the biggies can be found refurbished in repair shops in many major cities. "Record Stores" dealing in actual "records" are everywhere, especially college towns, which to me is encouraging as a new generation discovers the art and magic of sound of "My Generation"
Player pianos rippin' out with 78 rpm honky tonk wimmen to Victorious Victoria's Victrola and into the valley of 8-tracks to the planet MP3, where a full scale invasion of the body snatching I-Pods was carefully underway. 3-D is making a comeback but it was obnoxious when it first came out and we sat google eyed in theaters. Does anything spell geek more than 3-D glasses? But to a certain degree the glasses were cool..from a geek perspective...kind of made us look like psychedelic Mr. Magoo's. Lava Lamps are back with a vengeance and so is the Mini Cooper. Vinyl is trying to comeback from the sewer of nostalgia that it fell into in favor of CD's which are waning due to MP3's...cries of "get a horse" didn't stem the automobile tide and of course "if man were meant to fly, God would have given him wings.." Screw that...we made our own “wingless” flights.
Cable, cell phones, i-pods, wireless computers, wired computers, radio, the internet, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, blah, blah, blog...LOL, LMAO, and text lobotomizing the English language...any language...all language..how do you text in Chinese anyway..it's all symbols.
Today we are bundled...and coddled by technology....it's an overdose of information. It's all about self today..thank god in the Sixties these channels of information weren't available. We would never have gotten out of the house or on the road or marched or enjoyed live rock and roll and some dive club.
The lava lamp was about as high tech as we got...we just got high, not high tech...we got stoned in Technicolor...not technical...freaks...not geeks ...better living through chemistry...outer space? The light show at the Fillmore was our space shuttle to our star ship on Jefferson Airlines riding on the back of a white rabbit....the music? Amplified!, not computerized wimp pop Beyonce crap either. Our imaginations ran rampant....we read Ramparts...we were Fugged, not fucked...and Tinfoil? Yes...it was the Mother of Invention. Fuck GPS...give me a ratty old randy Rand McNally with creases and food greases from diners and dives. Toss that fucking i-pod away and grab some black assed vinyl..put headphones on, crank it up...real headphones with real music, real loud, real clear, real rock and real roll!