I think twickster has touched on the real answer to the OP. CDs are, at their core, an interim medium in changing the way we listen to music.
I grew up with vinyl, briefly had collections of 8 tracks and cassettes (while never relinquishing the vinyl) and then moved on to owning far, far too many cds. There are several albums (the Beatles, The Who, Jethro Tull) that I’ve owned in all these formats.
But now, what I have is over 300 GB of mp3s. Basically every song I ever owned, in any format, I’ve dumped to harddrive.
So when twickster and others talk about the order of songs, or liking most but not all the tracks on new albums or whatever, I see a resurgence of the single with the added bonus of interactivity.
With services like iTunes and the like, the DIY album idea that we toyed with during the early days of home cassette recording is in full bloom.
So you want “Pure And Easy” to kick off “Who’s Next”? Burn it that way yourself. Then follow it up with “Boris The Spider” and, what the heck, “Oops I Did It Again.” You’re in charge, pal.
When I went to college I went with a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and no changer. I hooked it up to my friends systems to record albums on big tapes that allowed me to record 5 albums on them. So even 30 years later I sometimes hear the first song of the next album after the last song of one that went before - so Strange Brew will always come after At the Zoo for me.
When I moved stuff to cassettes, I sometimes had to rearrange the order to make them fit - Highway 61 is one example. And Tubular Bells was a bit too long, and only two tracks, so I did a cut of the second to last “track” (before the hornpipe) for space - and I’m still convinced my cut sounds better. It took me a while to get used to not having the cut.
I don’t have any second side first albums, but my car CD player automatically repeats the CD, so there I’d be able to advance to the first song of the second side and let it rip.
It is interesting to listen to CDs of albums too long for one side, where you can still tell it was edited to allow the flip. Live Dead is an example, just before Turn on Your Love Light.
I think that any number of albums were made to fit onto separate sides, and with deliberate progressions and endings.
Just off the top of my head, the CSN album ends side A with “Cathedral,” a powerfully moving song that shouldn’t be bled into the next track, which would be the catchy but lightweight “Dark Star” in this case.
The first side of Van Morrison’s Moondance is essentially a suite of songs that work perfectly together: “And It Stoned Me,” “Moondance,” “Crazy Love,” “Caravan,” and “Into the Mystic.” Side 2 has a different feel.
Joe Jackson split his Night and Day album into a “night” side and a “day” side, with different moods.
Of course, the first time I put a whole album onto a single cassette side for playing in the car the side A/side B dichotomy went out the window, so this long precedes CDs. And I’ve found that the best part about doing this was that it allowed me to skip that one really awful annoying song that otherwise would clog up the middle of a side.
When I had a turntable, I played Pink Floyd’s Animals almost continuously for a year. When the turnable bit the dust, I bought it on cassette and just about lost my mind when I realized that one song is split halfway through, to continue on the other side. I was elated to get the album on CD for that reason.
Contrariwise, I had a J. Geils live album that ended on side one with Peter Wolf shouting, “LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVE…” and then the first sound on the other side was “STINKS!” This was perpetuated on the cassette. On CD, it just … continues. It was more fun when I had to run over and flip the album or cassette.
This is what I’m running into with transferring full albums to Hi-MD…almost eight hours of high-quality audio on a blank 1 GB disc is creating a few strange, though not unpleasant, bedfellows.
That’s exactly what I think I’m missing on a lot of reissue CDs…it feels as if the extra length is rendering an original vinyl concept irrelevant. You get the great audio quality, but the trade-off is that the art of it gets a little lost in the translation.
This is a great example. Moondance is a great album, but to me it feels greater taken as two discrete halves, the first side being the torchier/jazzier/more introspective side that makes sense coming after Astral Weeks, and the second side setting up what would ultimately happen on the next album, His Band And The Street Choir.
Which is also why his Night and Day II album doesn’t quite work for me. Conceptually, he does seem to grasp that CD should be treated differently…the latter album has a drum track winding through the entire album which connects the songs, but it’s almost too much to get through in one sitting.
This made me think of Tom Petty’s Full Moon Fever, where he divides the CD with that “Hello CD Listeners” thing in the middle to remind everyone how the album really ought to be experienced.
When I conjured my sequence for the album using the Hi-MD, I hard-edited the electric take of “Love Ain’t For Keeping” from Odds And Sods to the end of the acoustic version. It ends up giving the album version the feeling of a softer, acoustic prelude with Daltrey doing the vocal, followed immediately by the rocked-up jam take and Townshend’s edgier approach. The final result sounds really good to me. (Oddly, the edit is reminiscent of what Pure Prairie League did with “Falling In And Out Of Love” going into “Amie.” Go figure…)
Showing a total lack of imagination, I also slotted “Pure And Easy” immediately ahead of “The Song Is Over” and after “My Wife.” I like your version better.
Additional albums that work better as vinyl, for me:
Bob Dylan And The Band Planet Waves - primarily because I still need time to turn around the album, leaving the ballad version of “Forever Young” and getting into the more country-rock version. It doesn’t work as well following quickly, and is a lot like listening to back-to-back alternate takes as bonuses on any random reissue CD…the pause really helps.
U2 The Unforgettable Fire - I like that the epic title track is followed by a nice, brief coda in “Promenade,” then there’s the flip, and a nice instrumental prelude to the meat of Side Two. On the CD, it feels like two insubstantial songs inexplicably wedged between BIG pieces, with no real rhyme or reason.
Jackson Browne The Pretender - I think of Paul Nelson’s essay on the album in Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island, where he points out that the woman who inspired the album dies in the gap in between the two sides. One leads up to Phyllis Major’s suicide, the other is the aftermath. Of course, this may also explain why I have a hard time listening to the album. too.
To me, CDs really ended the era of active listening, that is listening to music as an activity in itself. You can go 74 minutes without having to do anything! Listening to vinyl, you have to get up and turn the record over. At the extreme, punk rock 45s need to be flipped every two minutes. When the record is over you are digging thru the milkcrates, looking at the jacket artwork, etc. With CDs you have time to pick up a magazine, flip thru the mail, cook dinner, etc.
Now I listen to music almost all the time, because it’s so easy to push play on the CD player when I get home or start winamp when I go online, but I can’t remember the last time I actually actively listened to a CD. Yet I still actively listen to vinyl whenever I take the trouble to get everything together. I have a lot of the same music on CD, because generally I’ll try and buy a compilation album rather than the original albums, but it’s not the same listening to a thirty or forty track CD compilation of a band when all you want is a short burst of the rock.
Another problem with CDs vs. vinyl are the bonus tracks. The extra stuff on the CD of Who’s Next does nothing for me. I know I can turn it off, and usually do, but it just should end with the last chords of Won’t Get Fooled Again - I’m okay with the original ordering myself.
I haven’t gone iPod yet, so I can’t comment on that – but Stan Doubt reminds me of another difference in listening. With vinyl, the active play list was usually around a dozen albums, with stuff moving fluidly on and off the list. With CDs, I load five into the player and they remain there for months at a time. I might skip to this disk or that, but the order is fixed. This leads to the segue thing the reel-to-reel folks mention: Momo Wandel Soumah leads to Either Orchestra leads to Habib Koite… and I often listen to them in this order at work, on the boom box where I load them in one at a time, even though they came out of the player at home at three different times as I acquired other albums.
Another example of an album with two extremely distinct sides: *Aqualung.[i/]
The other day I ripped “The Who Sell Out” from LP to WAV (I’m cheap, my LP is in good shape, I’ve already paid for it once, I’ve got my rig set up so it does a pretty good job while sounding like an LP and not a sterile CD, and I’m cheap). I was going to break up the two long WAV files into discreet songs before burning but the songs and “ads” are so completely melded together that I can’t do it without at least a momentary gap and I’m not likely to suddenly start listening to individual songs instead of sides after thirty some years so I just dumped the two sides onto one CD. Saved me oodles of time, too (editing WAVs on my poor antique computer is much slower than editing MP3s).
Yeah, it’s not like you’ll suddenly decide you want to hear one of the ads in The Who Sell Out all by its lonesome, and the context for that album is everything. Probably if I were really wanting to just hear a couple songs on their own, I’d create separate duplicate files of “Armenia City In The Sky” and “I Can See For Miles” on my Hi-MD.
twickster and Stan Doubt also both touch on the “active listening” thing, and that’s really what it’s about to me…it’s relatively easy to name a “perfect album side” but not so easy to say that there’s an entire CD I’d want to sit through. It’s a little harder to be engaged for 40 to 75 nonstop minutes, but easier to take 20-ish and have a moment to digest everything.
I remember driving in a car with a friend of mine, a fellow DJ, and hearing him talk about how he only bought CDs for the hits, and he was upset because he really liked the new Soundgarden song and didn’t want to go buy the new CD for it since he’d already bought Superunknown for “Black Hole Sun.” We were listening to it ad nauseam at that moment, because he kept repeating the song over and over. So I ask him about this new song he’d heard, thinking it was on a soundtrack or fundraiser, and he quoted the lyrics to “My Wave.” I suggested he scan back to track 2.
Amazingly, he hadn’t realized he’d been carrying around the song with him for the preceding few months.
I hesitate to say this WOULDN’T happen with vinyl - the LP of Superunknown does have the songs on two different sides - but I do think there’s a less of a tendency to go cue up the hit and more of a tendency to just let a whole side roll at once and see what soaks in.
For what it’s worth, he was also surprised to find out he was in possession of “The Day I Tried To Live” as well…
I could lose “Going Mobile”, but “My Wife” HAS to go: definitely the weakest song on the album - sorry, John Entwistle, I’ll give you “Boris The Spider”, but apart from that you weren’t no songwriter. Hell of a bass player, though.
The “active listening” thing is a good point. I’ll add to it. My turntable is so sensitive to vibration that I have no other choice but to sit still and actually listen to the record for its entire length (making sure the dogs are asleep before hand, too).
I STILL listen to my vinyl. And Pink Floyd “Animals”, which someone mentioned, remains in my rotation to this day.
Don’t forget, folks, you can still get vinyl. A lot of hip-hop guys put their albums out on vinyl. I have Eminem, Mos Def, De La Soul. Although, all of that (AFAIK) is digitally recorded and mastered, so you’re losing something.
And of course, there’s TONS of old vinyl on Ebay and hopefully you still have some good places near where you live to pick some up. I know I do.
I grew up on vinyl but was a radio dj for 5 years. I’ve been mixing and matching and IMHO improving on the limitations of picking one particular order for so long I don’t care about the “original” Abbey Road order.
Take Led Zeppelin 4. Side one does not flow in the least
Interesting, too, because as I understand it “My Wife” is also the one song that doesn’t fit the Lifehouse storyline either. I like it alright…but I think I’d like it better on Odds And Sods.
I assume you don’t mean laid horizontally and end to end…
For what it’s worth, the compact discs for all three will be digitally remixed. Generally, they sound fine, but there are things that aren’t quite the same from the analog two-track mix from the first-run vinyl editions. “I’m One” will probably be the most obvious…the end of (what I assume is) Townshend’s countoff is missing in the digital remix (that little mumbled “bom” with the guitar note before the song properly starts). They’re definitely worth the investment, but don’t pitch the vinyl!
I can tell you that if you can find the Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab CD of Quad (which was a cutout a few years ago when the company filed bankruptcy, IIRC), that version will have the original mix. Likewise with the initial MCA issue on CD, though there’s a lot of other artifacts I wouldn’t want to pay for in that case…
Trunk, loved your first link! I haven’t seen one of those in ages!
Actually, I cut out one of the Radio London jingles (“You’re a pussycat & you’re where it’s at…”) to use as an intro to the Who playlist on my iPod. It goes straight from that into Tommy in its entirety.
In the case of Who’s Next, I believe both remixed and original versions are in print. The “Deluxe Edition” (double CD) uses the original mix. The single CD version is remixed, although the difference from the original is not that big.
An album that benefits greatly is Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. It is a much more enjoyable experience on CD with no “flip” before Money starts in, makes the album feels like one long coherent piece.
On the other hand, The Wall hurts a bit going from 4 records to 2 CD’s. The records had a definite begin/end chapteresque theme to them. I would always take a “wow, man” breather between each side of the records. I kind of miss that when it’s a continuous piece.
