50 Years Ago Today, Everything Changed ... StuckInTheSixties: ... in popular music, with the release of this song: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Me_Do  Corwin: 50 years ago I wasn't even a gleam in my dad's eye yet... but I still love the Beatles. They changed Rock'n'Roll forever. StuckInTheSixties: Fifty years ago today, I was around, but unaware of the Beatles. I wouldn't become aware of them until more than a year later, when I heard "I Want To Hold Your Hand" playing on the radio in my parents' car.  The Beatles  Corwin: I remember as a kid, falling in love with songs like Lucy In The Sky and Come Together before I even knew that those songs were done by the Beatles. Later it came to my attention that there were tons of songs I loved that were all done by the Beatles... so I had been a Beatles fan long before I was even aware of it. StuckInTheSixties: One of my fond teenage memories is the day that Sergeant Peppers was released, in June, 1967, I think. The "top-40" radio station we all listened to talked for days about this new Beatles' album that was going to be played in it's entirety in a few days upon release. I was in summer school, and rode the school bus to and from. I lived (where I still live now) a ways out of town, and near the end of the school bus route, nearly an hour ride for me. The time set for the airing of Sergeant Pepper's coincided with that bus ride. There were several kids carrying transistor radios that day, and while we were riding the bus, at the designated time, it came over the airwaves, and we all listened to it will riding, several little clusters of kids on the bus all grouped around a radio, listening intently. As kids reached their stops, they'd have to get off, and our school bus audience got smaller and smaller. Luckily, living near the end of the route, I got to hear it all. Corwin: Love that album!! And that's a very cool recollection, Six... I can picture being there. My first Beatles record was Revolver... then Sgt.Peppers, then the White Album. I'd been collecting them all on CD (in hopscotch fashion) over the years, and only in recent years have I listened to everything in it's proper order. It's quite incredible that they created so much incredible music over a period of only 7 years... that would be like a band breaking up now that hit the scene in 2005... practically a blink of an eye, really. What I find even more incredible is the production value considering the more primitive recording equipment available at that time compared to today... but the production value still holds it's own against anything recorded today. And with CD it's so nice to hear the recordings the way they were intended to be heard... the CD's they release of the Beatles today aren't "remastered"... they simply bounce the original 1/4" 15 ips magnetic tape master reels onto a digital format (with a little noise reduction). So we are hearing what the Beatles themselves were hearing in the studio during playback. ---------- Footnote --- Vinyl had always been a piss-poor medium... it belonged back in the days of gramophones... it cuts the audio spectrum from what should be 20hz to 20,000hz, to a narrow 120hz to 16,000hz... punchy in the mid-range and lacking in the full dynamic range. True audiophiles in the 60's and 70's listened to their music on a Teac 1/4" reel-to-reel... the same machine that the music was mastered onto in the studios. StuckInTheSixties: Trivial tie-in: Paul McCartney and his group Wings did the theme song for the Bond movie "Live And Let Die." StuckInTheSixties: The Beatles never did a Bond theme song (or any theme song, other than for their own films). Only Paul McCartney & Wings.  jink88: Thanks guys for the blast from the past. Yes, those were the days when music was music...such anticipation for new releases...remembering standing in line at a record store to get a copy...meeting and talking to others about the music. Running home to play it on my little player in a suitcase and when the parents went out, putting on the big stereo with bass turned up so afraid I might blow the speakers...nice walk down memory lane. Corwin: Oh yeah, those little suitcase record players... and those big wooden units with the big heavy lid on top... back in the day when record players and televisions were built like pieces of furniture. Thank goodness for the HiFi revolution... by the time I was in my teens it was all about Heavy Metal, and putting those enormous speakers outside on the deck by the pool, and blasting the entire neighborhood with face-melting guitar-solos and screaming vocals.  But I regained my Beatle appreciation when I got a little older, and realized that Metal is a rather silly form of music. jink88: I think ours was a Fleetwood Delfonic...does that sound right? I remember the diamond needles and trying to put them in.  larryhemeon: One of the finer things I did for my eldest daughter was to buy her the White album for her 11th birthday, Since then she has acquired a good part of the Beatles collection with a fair amount of other 60 and 70s music. My eldest son was lost to hip-hop and rap. sad thing for an old rock and roller StuckInTheSixties: White Album ... I was in tenth grade when that came out, and in a cheezy little garage band. Every day we would walk over to Norm, the drummer's house during lunch hour, and listen to it, look at the big collage poster of various little Beatles' photos that came enclosed in the album, pore over the lyrics, etc. For a fifteen-year-old, a song like "Why Don't We Do It In The Road" was pretty fascinating. That album kind of dominated out lives for several months. | Off Topic Chat Room Similar Conversations |
