My father, born 1946, told me that before the Beatles, the album itself was not considered that big a deal. He said that musicians made their names almost solely on the quality/success of their singles, and that while albums certainly did exist, and people did play them, they weren’t considered anything people should really get excited about. He told me that nobody would be like “oh, listen to the new Elvis album!” Some would buy the albums, of course, but he says that the Beatles were different in that for the first time, albums were really considered something special. People would line up to get the new Beatles album, whereas they would have never done that for previous musicians.
Simple question: is this true? Perhaps boomers are best able to answer this question. Someone who knows a lot about American popular music and its history might know as well. Just curious.
Your father is correct. The only albums that “mattered” were Broadway shows, classical music, and comedy albums - essentially, stuff that your parents had the money to buy. Singles were released (and priced for) the kids.
In pop music, the idea of albums as more than filler to wrap around the hit single didn’t take off until the '60s.
My wife is a music history professor. Next year she’s teaching a class on the Beatles. She says:
Sgt. Pepper is generally considered to be the first coherent “concept album” in pop music. However, there had been thematically unified albums in art music for decades.
In the olden days you could go into the record store and listen to a single before deciding to buy. I don’t recall anyplace you could listen to an album. Stereos were just catching on also. There were plenty of small record players with tinny sound, and fancy mono hi-fi equipment, but stereo was just catching on. The popular music business had been totally dependent on radio in the past, but TV was catching on rapidly. American Bandstand had been around in the 50’s, along with local music shows, but Shin-Dig and Hullabaloo hit the networks, along with frequent appearances by rock bands on other variety shows. And the real introduction to the Beatles in the US came from their appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. Network TV provided the marketing medium for selling albums to the younger generation. But their was no impetus greater than the success of the Beatles. Their popularity fueled the great cultural change of the 60s (although as often noted, the 60s culture didn’t really mainstream until the 70s, by which time the Beatles had disbanded). The Sgt. Pepper album introduced concept albums. No longer just a collection of songs, there was a theme, unique artwork, lyrics printed on the cover, and some cardboard goodies packed in the album.
Even in the early Beatles the single was still more important. Sgt Pepper was the big shift and FM radio had a lot to do with it. College and alternative (old meaning) radio stations could play the longer album cuts because they weren’t trying to put so many commercials in.
Capitol Records in the '50s was really the first to recognize the potential of LPs to match the sales of 45s. Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole released successful albums of songs with unifying themes without the benefit of any hit singles included on them.
The Ventures are created with recording the first Rock concept albums. Few of the songs on these popular LPs were available on 45s so fans had to buy the whole album. This was very lucrative for their label and eventually became the standard for the whole industry.
Beatles albums were initially popular just because they were the Beatles and after listening to She Loves You a million times, you were looking for more, even if it was* Mr Moonlight*.
With the Beach Boy’s Pet Sounds (not Sgt Pepper) concept albums started to replace compilations of singles and “filler” ( The Beatles had some really GREAT filler)
If you’re calling Pet Sounds a concept album, I think you’re misusing the term. If you’re just talking about albums being seen as entities worthy of putting money down on & getting critical acclaim, The Beatles still beat them to it with Rubber Soul (the album that inspired Brian Wilson to create Pet Sounds) - though you could make the case that The Beatles achieved that even earlier than '65.
But surely Dylan beat them all with Bringing It All Back Home in March '65 and Highway 61 Revisited in August. Dylan fans were album buyers back then when everyone else was still trying for multiple hit singles per album.
To clarify: Sinatra did it a decade earlier, but after the Beatles did it, the LP was regarded as a creative unit in its own right and everybody started doing it.
People point to SP because it was sold as a concept album, part of the Boomer/teen rock rebellion and because it used the studio as it’s own form of musical expression/experimentation.
Didn’t the idea of an album primarily consisting of new/exclusive material also originate in the Beatles era, vs. earlier pop albums mostly being compilations of songs also available on singles?
Sort of. People used to say that in Great Britain fans would be upset if they bought an album that had hit singles on because as a poorer country, they would buy singles more often than albums. In America, fans would be disappointed since they tended to buy the album and would be disappointed if it didn’t contain the hit single(s).
But basically around the time of Sgt Pepper, the album became more important. One factor could be is around 1967, the FCC ordered business that owned an AM and FM station couldn’t simulcast the same program on both. “Community service” meant different programs.Since FM had a better quality signal, that became more of a music format. Also before the mid 70s a number of radios had only AM band. The cars may father owned that were built in the 1960s had AM only. He wasn’t going to spend money on a radio when all he listened to was the all news stations, if he listened at all.So FM had a smaller audience and they could do things like play longer album cuts or whole sides (never understood why AM stayed in the no song over 3 minutes. Must have been a consultant who decided.
One minor thing is after WWII two different formats arose. The 7 inch 45 RPM came from RCA and was suited for one song on each side. The 12 inch 33 RPM was by Columbia (or Capitol) and could hold 20 minutes per side. Certainly both sides made both but I think RCA favored their format. But although RCA got Elvis Presley early, they missed out on the youth explosion in the late 1960s except for Jefferson Airplane. Most people say that they were just old fogeys although Elvis’s biographer/hatchet man said that was Elvis manager Colonel Tom Parker didn’t want any competition to his pigeon and let RCA know.
One interesting thing about the Beatles is that they stopped touring around 1966 and their concerts were only about 35 minutes long. Basically play about 3 songs and give the same stage patter at every city. Elvis may have been the same. I remember NYC disk jockey Scott Muni talking about the first time Elvis played Madison Square Garden in the 1970s. He left the stage after 45 minutes and Muni figured he’d come back and do an hour of encores. Nope, that was it. Rolling Stone once noted that about two weeks after the final Beatle concert at Candlestick Park, the Grateful Dead played there first festival and groups like them, Santana, Jefferson Airplane needed album (s) to reflect their two plus hour shows.
Not arguing by any means, since I believe for Rock music the statement is probably correct or nearly so. But in addition to Sinatra’s “concept albums” there were others in the Pop and Jazz area to have predated the 1960’s albums for “concept.”
Two for example: Brubeck’s Time Out and Miles’s Kind Of Blue.
One could easily argue that Miles’s Birth Of The Cool from a decade earlier (recorded late 40’s – released 1957) might qualify.
I’m just suggesting that The Beatles may have done many new things, but the “concept album” was not their invention.
Sgt. Pepper solidified the trend, but there were already musicians who were creating albums as more than just a collection of a couple of hit songs and filler. It wasn’t concept albums, but the idea that you arranged the songs on an album in order to have a total experience – start with an upbeat song, for instance, then go to something slower, then move to another song that sounded good when listened to as a hole.
As for concept albums, Herb Alpert – who was one of the most popular acts of the time – did Going Places in 1965 with the concept of songs about different places around the world (“Tijuana Taxi,” “A Walk in the Black Forest,” “Zorba the Greek,” “Third Man Theme” (Vienna), “Spanish Flea.”).
In general, you can always find precursors to the Beatles for anything they are credited with doing, BUT their doing it caused it to become common use.
The Bith Shuffle, your father is mostly right. Ignore what people are saying about concept albums. That’s irrelevant to the point he’s making.
In 1948 Columbia Records invented the modern 33 1/3 LP (long playing) album. RCA countered in 1949 with the 45 rpm single. Both had much higher fidelity than the then-standard 78 rpm disk.
Popular music was driven, from top to bottom, by singles. Shows like Your Hit Parade counted down the top hits of the week and was wildly popular. It started in 1935 and went to television in 1950.
Albums were mostly filler to pad out the hit singles. They were often recorded in a day. Some were more important than others but most studios didn’t care about their quality.
And they were expensive. When I was a kid in the 60s, singles were priced at 99 cents, mono albums were $2.98 and stereo albums were $3.98. Who could afford money for albums, especially if you could get a discounted single?
The change happened because artists began to think they were, well, artists. They didn’t want albums filled with low-quality junk. Frank Sinatra was the pioneer in this for popular music, but he was following the success of jazz and classical artists. If you look at the early nominees Grammy Awards for albums, you see soundtracks, live concert albums, comedy albums, classical albums and Frank Sinatra. No rock album is a nominee until The Beatles in 1966 and Help!
Kids wanted everything the Beatles touched, more so than even Presley. Their albums were wanted as albums. As each album got better and they wrote more of it instead of doing cover songs, the albums got better and more important. They weren’t alone. Ray Charles was doing important albums before them. Folk albums started being important before them (although almost all the early Folk Grammys went to singles). And in England, there was a tradition that singles were issued separately, or as part of EPs (four-song extended-play maxi-singles). People felt cheated if they had to pay twice for a song they’d already heard. The Beatles slowly changed that too, but many of their singles weren’t released on albums until the Hey Jude album.
By the end of the 1960s albums became far more important than singles for everyone except a few pure Top 40 radio acts. And concept albums had nothing to do with it.
Listen to your father. He’s a baby boomer. And we know everything.
Yes, Presley didn’t do encores. The announcement “Elvis has left the building” was originally intended as a straight forward means of telling the audience that Presley wasn’t coming back on stage, the concert was over, and they should go home.
The implication, here, is that college and alternative stations were by definition FM. And that’s because FM transmitters are cheaper (lower power), hence less profit-driven to throw in a lot of commercials every three minutes. It’s not because FM technology is somehow intrinsically linked to the aesthetics of an album, right? Or is it?
Because I often hear people use the term “FM radio” metonymically, and I wonder if that is what they mean. If AM broadcasting technology could have been cheap enough for non-profit stations, albums would have just as easily been an AM phenomenon, right?
There is a flip side to this reasoning: if you happened to like at least three of the hits on a Greatest Hits album – and if you actually owned a 33 1/3 player – the economy of the album was a better deal, plus you got exposed to some of the other “hits” that you might not have liked before you bought the album. Elvis and Buddy Holly were two “rock” artists that I bought albums for.
When I was selling hi-fi and stereo gear in the early 60’s it was a main sales point that FM was way better quality sound than AM. Add this consideration to the comments guizot is making. Also, from my own experience in FM radio I can assure you that 100% of our aired music came off albums that ran the gamut from Pop to Big Band to Jazz to Folk to Classical (with Lawrence Welk and Billy Vaughn from whatever genre you feel comfortable with for them). We didn’t play any Rock to speak of, but that was pre-Beatles.
