What got lost when records stopped having two sides?

this was deliberate but nice marketing -- the thing won't work over a whole lp, you've got that backup career of coverds, -- but essentially a prog rock /canterbury/ guild style jibberish country and western as sung by Frank Sinatra Jr. -- mr america

this was a challenge to the whole format
each side had a different length
because sometimes you are forced to get up and flip the record over
to get back to the mangnificant a-side -- all the songs are about war or dirty deal aor post-hippie -- with this record you're meant to take the needle off after the second song on side two, perhaps

the b-side is consumerism -- 15 minutes of commercial material -- plus two songs that seque into each other

but yeah, the only record lp i know of with three different lengths and again that london scheme of making lps not '45s

laurie uses it to move her voice down a scale so she can sing and using a vocoder satarise Dolly Parton, that's "Walk the Dog", the b-side -- sick and sped up and dolly parton at 45, same but different at 33\1/3 -- and o superman would work better as music when sped up (so as not to get monotonous, but to propel the words at a real rappers wollop of politics

just one 20 minute jab of "Sandanista" every so often is enough for a while, but i might change the side

buying "Sandanista" the big cardboard and vinyl 3lp set (never done before except by Yes when in decline,) so yes to Escalator over the Hill, and no to the science fiction prog rock drips, no to yes

"Sandanista" is the first record set which imposed a semi random sequence of moods on the listener, ie the format ensured that enough different sides meant a different engagement would ensue, that you would get lost in the middle of this music thing, 6 sides on random play, thier would be enough permutations and just not too many to ensure a quite different broad geo-political perspective

so it's an early example of random play you can only just do with cds -- selecting the next side to play was throwing the coin/lp

the format theoretically ensured you just kept changing sides all the time, or went off and did something else

that first situation where twelve inch 45rpm lps were accepted and used by artists, which gave them a whole new sonic palette,
eps with different songs at different speeds and the anderson certainly fits that case (done in new zealand on yinyl b.t.w.),

could be used to modulate and distort the sound, degradation into what MTV calls its "lo-fi" category (for the white tripes) spectacularly and fool radio listeners that their radio was melting (just for instance)

i missed the dead c play canterbury university the other day and that was annoying, and i do love bits of trapdoor..exit and the various DRx flavours -- more deserving of the lo-fi award i thought

lo-fi is that much more potentially self-destructible on vinyl, many sorts of frequency screw ups and bad needle counter-weighting (of course that's abstract art though, not rock music) problems, meaning you'll hear the record once spotless, and every time after that it will distort more and more (and you might want to cheque your needle)

because i haven't finished but i don't want to terminate the thread accidentally by boring anybody

"THE 2-SIDED LP MODEL"
    Side A
1. Big Opening Number for Side A
2. Hit Single
3. Knockoff of Hit Single
4. Filler
5. Filler
6. Peppy Number to close out Side A
    Side B
7. Big Opening Number for Side B
8. Possible other Hit Single
9. Knockoff of Possible other Hit Single
10. Filler
11. Big Symphonic Finale Number and Outro! TADAH!

"THE 1-SIDED CD MODEL"
    Side That Ain't Shiny
1. Big Opening Number
2. Hit Single
3. Knockoff of Hit Single
4. Feebler Knockoff of Hit Single
5. Filler
6. Filler
7. Filler
8. Filler
9. Filler
10. Filler
11. Filler
12. Filler
13. Filler
14. Suprisingly good song stranded at the end.
15. Filler
16. Big Finish and Outro! TADAH!
17. (Silence)
18. (Hidden Bonus Track)

if you get the lp sized 3lp, set, you get a nice box,
and the 32 page guide/ libretto forms the coffe table book

(and lot's of secret studio tricks)
(2 years to make 3lp six side set)

(and inter-galactic action with the radiophonic masterpiece "Dr. Why" -- nerdy ?)

- Music fans' health decreased considerably as they did no more have to get up from their sofa to turn the record over
- Doubled album length means that most major acts will wait 2-3 years between every album release.
- Those useless throwaway efforts that would be put on a single b-side earlier on (or hidden away to appear on a box-set or as part of a remastered album 20-30 years later) are now put at the end of the album instead

Plus, there's nothing that turns girls on more than when having sex and stopping to to flip the record over.

sonic youth programed four 12" eps at 33\1/3 and an album or two well

i think that album and the companion whitey album, that sonic youth showed us all their ideas -- DN was their crossover hit album, along with whitey -- theiw best two or three albums

And whenever there's bonus tracks, I program them last as a third side.

Two notes to this: There are certain albums that I've never seen on vinyl, so sometimes I have to make my own guess at when one side ends and the other one ends. Sometimes I am wrong. On All Shook Down by The Replacements, I always thought that "When It Began" ended side one and "All Shook Down" started side two. Not so.

I do prefer the CD copy of Big Star's Third. I can program the album with two sides. I can rearrange the sequencing to mimic some of the other issues. And I can go ahead and add "'Till the End of the Day" as the song to finish with.

But yeah. Definitely bring back two sides. Didn't Bob Mould stick fifteen seconds of a needle hitting the label between "sides" of his Bob Mould CD?

Umm. Come to think of it, good riddance.

Ha ha indeed! And another ha ha! to the group (whose name I infuriatingly cannot think of right now, altho I know that they were quite popular) whose first LP had a "Side One" and "Side A"!

Here's what I lament the loss of the most: The lack of a Side One Closer - Many classic bands over the years apparently considered that final slot to be the "prestige" position where they inserted the tours-de-force that they were proudest of at the time. I'm thinking of "Light My Fire", "Marquee Moon", "Stairway to heaven", etc. Not any more.

.

Joni, before I got my own first record player in '75, I used my parents' old 1960s-vintage 4-speed hi-fi, and I too was always curious about the 16rpm function, never having seen ANY records that played at 16, so I looked it up recently. Turns out that it was apparently used primarily for spoken-word things, like books-on-disc or recordings of famous speeches. Main priority was to maximize playing time, of course; sound quality was a non-issue.

1) does dave q still listen to everything on random?

2) what does cozen mean by the "classic British hopeful end-song" or, well, anything else he writes in this thread?

3) why doesn't a gap in the middle of a CD accomplish exactly what two sides did? yeah you can skip it but it's a manual gesture prompted by a silence and that does the same trick (provisional ans: since it is obviously not necessitated by any formal constraint, the "artistic whole" of the musician's bi-partite scheme takes on a different cast, is just (possibly) pretentious rather than ingenious; in any case, it niggles and feels imposed, because it is)

4) what does george gosset (where is he, by the way?? i am suddenly alarmed) mean when he says "twelve inch 45rpm lps were accepted and used by artists, which gave them a whole new sonic palette" ... i am only familiar with this on "dj copies" of singles and sometimes albums, where i assumed it was at 45 in order to spread out the song spatially so that it was easier to find a spot in the song to drop the needle into. also it has bizarrely only now that it's occured to me that 45s (and 78s) have better sound quality than 33s, given that the needle travels over more space - more space = more "resolution"? is this why john fahey released that set of 78s? (besides his being a cantankerous old you know what.)

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Gosh, I wish I remembered what that meant...

Some things are lost, but some things are gained.

Filler existed then. Filler exists now. At roughly the same ratios.

One can always "regress" the sequencing of a CD to vinyl standards if an artist/band wishes so. It's not as if anything in that regard is lost. It's very well documented, in fact. It's just that it's not the only choice anymore.

And now with mp3s, free 3rd party download sites etc. the contraints have changed not as much to what will fit within 80 minutes, but what will make the minimum requirements for a free YouSendIt link given your choice of bit-rate compression for a zip file of mp3s, or a long mix CD-R.

And this will change again, as media changes.

Standards/constraints rarely get lost. They get lost only if they are grossly impractical.

For example, someone could try to sequence an album today using 8-track tape standards, but why?

But the Side 1/Side 2 Of A Vinyl Album standard is not going to disappear at least anytime soon. Vinyl pressings have become more generally popular since the dearth in the 90s -- except in country and classical, if we're talkin' major mass markets and new releases.

i take your point about vinyl still being alive. i wonder, though, if bands think about it much these days. if a band was being smart it WOULDN'T since only crusty old freaks would be hearing it that way (or DJs, who have 0 use for track sequencing, anyway)

crossposts

Kid A isn't an LP, though - it was issued as a double 10" on vinyl (same as Amnesiac). Pulling out my copy - the sides are

Alpha: Everything In Its Right Place, Kid A
Beta: The National Anthem, How To Disappear..., Treefingers
Gamma: Optimistic, In Limbo
Delta: Idioteque, Morning Bell, Motion Picture Soundtrack

All of this is just making me want to put on Kid A for the first time in a long while. I will say, though, that much as I agree with almost everything said in this thread, particularly about the sequencing possibilities of having two "first songs" and two "last songs," it really falls apart with double albums. It's way too much getting up and sitting back down, but more importantly I think it's very hard to come up with FOUR different "first songs." Take the White Album, for example - I know every song on it by heart, but I couldn't tell you what side ANY of them are on, except that "Goodnight" is the last song and "Back in the USSR" is the very first. Whether "Piggies" is on the same side, or even the same record, as "Helter Skelter," I haven't a clue whatsoever. (All that said - "Dear Prudence" is in my mind the definitive "second song.")

Double LPs by '90s and '00s bands are often unlistenably sequenced because, composing with CD in mind, you end up with sides where there are maybe two songs total, and albums that as a whole could have easily been one-and-a-half-LPs instead of doubles, except that the long songs are all in the wrong places. I'm thinking here of The Moon and Antarctica, whose vinyl pressing is a disaster in many ways besides this. (The worst moment: the way the transition into "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes" starts up on Side A and then is simply cut off as the needle hits the end of the record.) It's all especially shameful because they seemed to get it so well on The Lonesome Crowded West, which to my memory actually has a completely different order to the tracklist in order to better flow for the format. It's also in a quietly unique package - two separate inner and outer sleeves, rather than a gatefold - which is neither here nor there, but I like it.

Props to Sleater-Kinney on The Woods, for just leaving side 4 blank rather than spreading all the tracks a little bit thinner and creating a superfluous side. They use the 4th side for a momentarily diverting screenprint of some tree rings, much the way Psychic Hearts has an illustration etched into the vinyl. This kind of shit may not necessarily be a selling point in itself, but it definitely beats creating a four-sided album for no good reason.

"what happens to LPs which had difft names to their sides when they come out on CD?"

The first time I ever heard Grin's 1+1 album, it was on a CD, and I was wondering why in the hell they put all these mushy love songs towards the end of the disc. Found out later that the vinyl version was split into a rockin' side and a romance side. Just like those OLDIES BUT GOODIES compilations on Original Sound.

I've recently added a few records to my collection with one classic side, where i've just decided to stop flipping the record over:

Steve Miller Band - Recall the Beginning...A Journey from Eden: Side 1 is a bunch of retro pastiche throwaways, and then side 2 is like he suddenly sold his soul to the devil to learn how to write perfect mellow psych-blues songs
Hall & Oates - Abandoned Luncheonette: I found a beater copy in the dollar bin recently, and i'm not even sure what's on side 2, but side 1 is wall-to-wall jams and i can't stop playing it. My kids are walking around the house singing "i'm just a kid don't make me feel like a man".
Bobby Hutcherson - Solo/Quartet: Solo = unique and classic, quartet = fine

Am i missing anything by not flipping these over?

Other examples of an entire skippable side?

This is a variation on the same idea, but I've started skipping the second record from Fairport Convention - The History Of Fairport Convention. It's a chronological best of compilation, and it just so happens that Sandy Denny's vocals stop right at the end of the first record, so i've realized that's all I need from that set.

ummm I don’t dislike it or anything, but I tend to eschew side b of discreet music

TS: Black Flag's My War side one and its descendants vs. Black Flag's My War side two and its descendants.

ELP's Tarkus is one of these, Side 2 just feels like a pile of bonus tracks that were cranked out in a couple of days. even though I kinda like 'em they also feel totally divorced from the main piece, it doesn't even really feel like a proper album to me

I also skip Side 2 of the first Roxy Music album a lot

Am i missing anything by not flipping these over?

"Laughing Boy" on the Hall and Oates record is an interesting mysterious ballad.

I tend to eschew side b of discreet music

So do I, and I dislike it too! An unsuccessful Eno experiment. On the other hand, I couldn't live without "The BOB (Medley)" or "Chance Meeting".

Other examples of an entire skippable side?

Side 1 of Silk Degrees and side 2 of Tangerine Dream's Cyclone are forgettable, but I love the other sides.

This feels like a chance to bring up something that I've heard, but have no idea if there is any truth to it: I've heard that back in the days of the LP, records would be sequenced so that the softer tracks like ballads would be sequenced to be near the end of a side for reasons related to sound quality. Is this true, or mostly made up?

that's definitely true, basically at the end of a side theres less space per revolution and the centripetal force of the needle increases, both which cause the sound to be more compressed, so if you put a softer/less dynamic track at the end it's much less noticeable

I think good engineers can get around this effect so long as the sides aren't too long but I don't know how good they were back then