I just watched a documentary about the making of Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. I remember sometime in the mid-70s, I would have been 11 or 12. My parent’s had gone out for the afternoon. I pulled out the stereo and dragged it into the middle of the lounge room, and dug out some LPs I wanted to listen to. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was one. I remember the physicality of it. The stereo sitting, largeish and bulky on the carpeted floor. The LP sleeves scattered on the floor. The tone arm of the turntable moving across to place the stylus in the groove of the record. The label going slowly round at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute. Picking up the record and turning it over at the end of the each side. Those were the images of music of my day. You focussed on the music and you saw the machinery of its reproduction. That, and the sleeve art. It may be the innocence of being that age, or that you never focus on anything in quite the same way again, but I don’t think any images provided to accompany music ever added much to the experience. I loved LPs. I loved the sleeves and jackets. I loved turntables and the technology of it in a way that I have never loved the mechanics of the digital era, and I guess I’ll always remember that afternoon. Or the night we played the entire Beatles catalogue all the way through. Or hundreds of similar experiences.
I must be getting old. Nostalgia is claiming me.
Yes, I saw it too, never quite got Elton John though, catchy as the tunes were, what’s really scary was the doco afterwards on Beck.
‘Loser’ came out fourteen years ago. Can’t believe it. There should be a word for this reaction like Nostalgia, though that requires belief in the passing of time, it’s unrecoverable foreign countryness, its lost innocent cosiness. It’s a shock of the loss.
Surely it is still 1994. Isn’t it? I can’t be 43, but I definitely don’t want to do the time warp again, so life goes on despite the shock.
1994, was that the year I stopped listening to new music, or just the year it stopped making an impression on me?
Do I pretend now that I always like Classic FM?