When I was a kid, growing up on the farm, every Saturday morning I’d climb on my Schwinn and ride 4 miles into town and spend my allowance at the Dairy Queen, the local pinball place, and I would ride to Cummins Electric to look through their stack of 45s and LPs. Now granted, they didn’t have the greatest selection, but that was cool, it was a very small town. Later, I moved to a river town and Saturdays would be the day that I would enter the closest thing we had to an art gallery in the city and that would be The Curiosity Shoppe in downtown Davenport. I guess you could called it a “head shop” now a days but back then, it was a place where you could walk through aisles and aisles of records, little pieces of art all decorated with album covers meant to catch your eye and In fact, there were many times I would get turned on to music my buying an album for it’s cover. I made some great discoveries that way, Osibisa, Mandrell, Lee Ritenour and the list goes on. Most of the time, there was something cool being played in the store, whether it was Billy Cobham, Mahavishnu Orchestra or Steve Hillage and Gong. You could handle the music, take it home, unwrap it and then smell it. I will never forget the smell of a new album freshly unsealed. My enjoyment of listening to Fragile by Yes was definatey enhanced by the album cover and the little booklet inside. I know that when I took “Dark Side Of The Moon” home for the first time, while I was listening to the album, I explored all the cool stuff inside. Remember the poster and the pictures that accompanied Dark Side? When CDs came along, the music sure sounded better but then the trade off was the artwork, the product was smaller and not conducive to letting groups put a lot of attention to the visual stimulation that accompanied this great sounding invention. Sadly, today’s youth will never know that opportunity. All they do is order a song on line or download a song from this website, or that website and wham it’s in their computer or Ipod. Maybe that is why music doesn’t mean as much to kids as it did to us. They can’t feel it, touch it, see it or smell it…and that’s too bad.
1 comment:
You could handle the music, take it home, unwrap it and then smell it. I will never forget the smell of a new album freshly unsealed.
I miss that, too. I liked the smell of new cassette tapes. The Warner Bros. family of labels usually had the best smelling tapes, they smelled fruity to me. The kids at U. City High would look at me funny when I'd sit there sniffing a tape as I put it in my Walkman. Maybe they looked at me funny all the time, I don't know...
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