What got lost when records stopped having two sides?

on "That's Incerdible" I saw a guy in America who could identify any classical work on lp by looking at the dynamics

(yeah i didn't believe him when i saw him on "That's Incredible" -- he managed to identify Tchaik. Pian. Conc. #1. for the cameras, which didn't strike me as overmelmingly convincing, but it convinced Fran Tarkington)

Side A: Earth's Impossible Day
Side B: Notebooks Out, Plagiarists!

(I love the Side B title).

Kate Bush's The Hounds Of Love is the most extreme example in my collection.

I also hear that there is a movement recently, that bands are returning towards having 40-minute albums, rather than trying to fill up an entire 74 minute CD, just because they can. A lot of albums, I like them, but they go on too long. If they were broken up into "sides" I think I would enjoy them more.

-No time to reflect on the side you just heard.. After 22 minutes you need to wake up again & reengage in what you're hearind. A few steps across the room can help with this.

-It's inconvenient (or, seems stupid) to start a CD in the middle to learn the songs at the end as well as you know the songs at the beginning. Many a great record was given new life when the listener discovered there was a second side!

-Subtle guilt about turning off a CD before it's over. You could give up on an LP after it was half over if you weren't diggin' it. Both you and the record save face by ending it at that natural break point. A CD may be 70 minutes of torture because you can't admit that it's sucking.

-Loss of "Classic album sides" - e.g. Side 1 of "Flip Your Wig" - made that a classic record. But side 2 really isn't that great. If you have to judge a record in its entirety, it may score lower - and that could deprive a lot of college students of hearing a great 1/2 record because the whole CD got 3 stars, but side 1 was totally five-star.

The same goes for Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space (between The Individual and Broken Heart), which is a 70+ minute record, but as we know J Spaceman is k-rockist so once again I reckon it was deliberate (ditto Lazer Guided Melodies).

Also the length of time it can for you take to feel ready to turn a record over / the sense of urgency with which you do, so can be almost like a form of participation which makes the experience more personal.

Certainly if you buy the Small Faces' "Darlings Of Wapping Wharf Launderette" the first CD ends where side 1 of "Ogden's Nut Gone Flake" ends and similarly I believe the first CD of "Love Story" ends where side 1 of "Forever Changes" ends - although whether that serves the same purpose in that context or serves merely to encourage the listener to play both discs one after the other is debatable (and how do CD multiplayers fit into this?).

["still the norm" poss. = "I was still buying them"]

Of course this also entailed the joy of having one of the records fail to grip properly on the one below and starting to slip....

< realises he's made appallingly embarrassing revelation regarding pre-punk listening habits; walks away whistling and attempting to look nonchalant whilst hoping no-one will notice and draw attention to this extraordinary faux pas >

you know if you look at an old (ie 20+ years old) record player, it often says 33 1/3 as opposed to just 33, which is all you see nowadays?

does this mean record manufaturing techniques have also changed in the intervening years? And if so, does this mean if I listen to an original 1968 pressing of The White album on my bought-it-last-year deck, I'm actually hearing the music a little bit slower than was originally intended?

I ask becaue a friend of mine played me some Magazine album or other on her ancient turntable a few months ago, and I mentioned that it sounded a bit fast, and she said she'd only ever heard it on that particular machine so didn't know if it was fast or not.

So maybe she's spent her whole life hearing music too quickly! Truly mind-frying implications, methinks.

LPs are much, much more interesting than CDs to me from a textual standpoint

Don't you think creating a (good) CD requires a similar process and discipline?

Just because the contraints are different doesn't mean they don't exist or aren't equally significant....

"I also think that for pop/rock/r&b, whatever, 40 minutes is more than enough for an album - these CDs that drone on and on and on for 70 minutes get on my wick."

Indeed, but doesn't that actually mean that knowing when to stop / what to leave off is a vital (additional?) discipline required for making a (good) CD?

A discipline that seems sadly lacking - especially with hip hop artists!

My parents gave my half-brother a copy of a record -- I think it may have been the Star Wars soundtrack, although I don't really recall -- and it turned out he already owned it. Rather than return it, though, he expressed his delight that now he could just put both records on the spindle (he, like me, had one of those nifty old hi-fi's where you could stack up multiple records, and when one was done playing, the next one would just drop on down) and listen to the whole thing in sequence, without having to get up and turn it over. I don't think this was for any particular aesthetic reason; he was just lazy. I don't think my mother ever really forgave him for that, although I'm not sure it was the waste or the laziness that galled her more.

An answer to Mark's question: What got lost? One more petty reason for families to squabble.

http://www.3e.org/nota/archives/pix/cbg.jpg

artists didn't put 40 minutes of music on classic vinyl albums because they thought that was a good platonic length; they did it because that's what the vinyl could hold. when vinyl used to spin at 78 rpm, they put less music on it. and if they could've figured out a sonically acceptable way to make the thing spin at 16 rpm, they would've put more on it.

we animals aspire to fill the time we have; always have and always will.

and when the time we had was 33 rpm vinyl, it was a good time.

I'm all for double-sided DVDs. People should be forced to get up and flip it over every six hours.

While I do like the two-side structure, I think that most really great albums (with all terrific songs, sequenced well) are probably equally great either way - especially now, in the CD era, when good sequencing involves figuring out how it's going to sound all in one shot. For more average albums, it seems like the programming template has just changed. It used to be that Side A would have most of the best songs, and Side B would kick off with a particularly strong song (often a single), and then slide into filler after that. Now, with CDs, the best songs tend to come at the beginning and end of the disc, with the filler towards the middle.

I do like it when a CD reissue of an older LP puts a little pause in between "sides," but I don't think it's really necessary (you can put it in mentally, as long as the songs are grouped the original way on the back cover). For (usually indie) albums released after the advent of CDs, in which the band knew they'd be issuing a vinyl version as well as a CD, it's kind of interesting sometimes to see how the songs are arranged. (Like with Pavement's Crooked Rain, which is a prime example of the "LP-era" filler-on-side-B template.)

The switch from 2 sides to 1 changed the emphasis from space (or time-geography) to simple pure time. That is, the 30 or so minutes of 1 side was a terrain that could or probably would or is markedly possible manipulable: it is a geography, a country, a map reliable or not. And you had two to play off in a civil war or dance or a fuck. Whereas, the switch to CD expanded everything out into the formless size of a universe. Or another way to put it, perhaps, '2 sides' is equivalent to poetry where the sure marshalling of scansion, space, pacing, footings and holdings are all dictated as part of the form. (Constraints sediment content; form sediments content.) '1 side' = prose, woah free for all till the paper runs out. (But obv. structures develop within the loose of the novel / 1 side, so as in novels we accept the Chapter, in CDs [or albums?] we accept certain memes [the classic British hopeful end-song eg Mazinquaye, OPM, Boy in Da Corner]). Huh.

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