The Way We Listened: The Mighty 45

Two sides, one little record, and a whole world of music.

There was a time when hearing a song you loved created a problem.

You couldn't pull out your phone.

You couldn't open Spotify.

You couldn't ask some little electronic assistant what song was playing and have the entire history of the artist sitting in front of you thirty seconds later.

You heard a song.

And if you wanted to hear it again whenever you wanted?

You had to go get it.

For a lot of us growing up, one of the first ways we did that was with a little seven-inch piece of vinyl spinning at 45 revolutions per minute.

The 45.

Oh, the mighty 45.

It gave us one song we desperately wanted.

Then we flipped it over.

And sometimes it gave us something we didn't even know we needed.

The Hors d'Oeuvre of Music

That's how I think about the 45 now.

It was the hors d'oeuvre.

A taste.

Maybe I heard something on the radio.

Maybe I saw an artist perform on American Bandstand.

And yes, we're going to talk about American Bandstand one of these days because that was a whole thing unto itself.

Maybe a friend played something for me.

Whatever the source, there would be that moment:

I need that song.

Not necessarily the band.

Not yet.

I didn't necessarily know anything else they'd recorded.

I just wanted that song.

Maybe it was a disco record.

Maybe it was Chicago's “If You Leave Me Now.”

Maybe it was something completely different from anything else I owned.

That was part of the fun.

The 45 didn't require you to make a major commitment.

It said:

Here. Taste this.

And for a young person without a whole lot of money, that mattered.

Music at Kid Prices

The 45 wasn't invented for Gen X.

RCA Victor introduced its seven-inch 45 RPM format in 1949, a year after Columbia introduced the LP. At first, there was an honest-to-goodness format war happening. Consumers were choosing among 78s, the new 33⅓ RPM LPs and RCA's little 45.

Then something happened that would change popular music.

Teenagers got involved.

The 45 was small, easy to carry and relatively inexpensive. By the mid-1950s, American teenagers had embraced it, and the format became an important vehicle for the rock-and-roll music young people were discovering. Jukeboxes helped too, spreading singles and creating demand for the records people heard while they were out.

By the time my generation came along, the 45 was simply part of the landscape.

And price was still a big part of the appeal.

In the early 1980s, when full LPs might run around $8 to $10, singles could commonly be found for roughly 99 cents to $1.99.

That difference is enormous when you're young.

We didn't have jobs and mortgages and retirement accounts.

We had allowances.

Babysitting money.

Birthday money.

Change.

A couple of dollars we'd managed not to spend on something else.

An album could require planning.

A 45 could be possible.

And that gave young people something important.

The ability to start choosing our own music.

My Barbie Record Player

I had a Barbie record player.

Yes.

Barbie.

Looking back at those little record players now, they're adorable.

Were they the pinnacle of high-fidelity audio engineering?

Absolutely not.

I don't imagine the serious stereo manufacturers of the day were sitting in emergency meetings wondering how they were going to compete with Barbie.

But let me tell you something.

That record player was mine.

And when you're a kid, that changes everything.

The big stereo belonged to the house.

This was in my room.

My player.

My records.

My music.

I could put my newest 45 on that thing, drop the needle and play it.

Again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

Until everyone else in the house had learned the song against their will.

That little record player gave me something we take completely for granted now.

Control over my own listening.

And as I bought more 45s, something else began happening.

I was building a music collection.

We Had Cases

Of course we had cases.

Little carrying cases made to hold your 45s.

And we filled them.

Those records weren't invisible files sitting somewhere in the cloud.

They were things.

You picked them up.

You carried them.

You handled them by the edges.

You organized them.

You took them to somebody else's house.

You traded them.

You hunted for them.

You knew when one was missing.

And apparently some children were perfectly capable of having a case full of records and simply enjoying themselves.

I was not one of those children.

I cataloged mine.

😂

Remember, there wasn't a home computer sitting in everybody's bedroom.

There was no database automatically keeping track of my collection.

So I had binders.

Paper.

Handwritten notes.

Artist.

Song title.

Genre.

Release date.

I had a system.

Some kids collected 45s.

I collected 45s with accompanying documentation.

What can I say?

Once a nerd, always a nerd.

But looking back, I love that I did it.

Before computers cataloged so much of our lives for us, we cataloged the things we loved ourselves.

Side A

Of course, Side A was why you were there.

That was the song.

The one you heard on the radio.

The one everybody was talking about.

The one you saw on television.

The one you had been waiting to own.

Put it on.

Drop the needle.

There it is.

And the music industry understood exactly what singles could do.

Sometimes the version released as a single was adapted from the album version. Songs could be shortened or edited for radio and single release.

Which created another wonderful experience when you eventually bought the album.

You put on a song you thought you knew and suddenly:

Wait a minute.

There's more?

A longer intro?

Another instrumental section?

A different ending?

Sometimes the little 45 really had been the appetizer.

The album was the meal.

But before we got to the album...

we had to turn that little record over.

Oh, the B-Side

The B-side.

If you know, you know.

The A-side was the song you bought.

The B-side was the song that came along for the ride.

You already owned it.

So eventually...

Flip.

Sometimes you listened once and thought:

Okay. I understand why THAT'S on the other side.

😂

Back to Side A.

But sometimes?

Ohhhhh.

What is THIS?

The B-side could be your first real peek beyond the hit.

Maybe the artist sounded different.

Maybe the song was stranger.

Maybe it wasn't designed for radio.

Maybe you liked it even more than the song you had actually paid for.

Albums could be expensive.

There was no internet search waiting for you.

You couldn't pull up the band's entire discography because you were curious.

But you had this second song sitting right there in your hand.

So you listened.

The B-side was discovery by accident.

“Time to Play B-Sides”

That's why a little line from Blue Öyster Cult's “Burnin' for You” makes me smile now.

They sing about it being “time to play B-sides.”

That phrase once required absolutely no explanation.

Everybody knew what a B-side was.

Today, the terminology still exists. Musicians use it. Collectors use it. Music fans use it.

But the physical experience that gave the phrase its everyday meaning isn't part of life for most listeners anymore.

You don't flip Spotify over.

There isn't another song physically attached to the back of the one you're streaming.

And there's an especially fun bit of irony here: “Burnin' for You” itself was issued as a single in 1981, during the very era when single versions and album versions could differ.

The language belonged to the technology.

And the technology shaped the way we explored music.

Sometimes the 45 Started the Hunt

This is where the 45 connects directly to something I've already written about in The Way We Listened.

The Hunt.

Maybe the 45 was enough.

You loved the song. You played it to death. Life went on.

But sometimes that little record created a problem.

Because now you wanted more.

Who's this band?

What else have they done?

Does the rest of the album sound like this?

Are there older records?

And remember...

there was no search box.

You had to find out.

Ask somebody.

Listen to the radio.

Read a music magazine.

Talk to the person at the record store.

Look through somebody else's collection.

Go hunting through the racks.

That little 45 might eventually send you to Tower Records looking for the album.

And then you weren't buying a song anymore.

You were becoming a fan.

We Traded Them

Our collections had social lives too.

We traded records.

We compared what we had.

Someone else owned something you wanted.

You had something they wanted.

Negotiations commenced.

😂

We hunted for what now feels like little musical relics.

And when cassette recording became part of our lives, all those records became ingredients for something else.

The mixtape.

Oh, we're going to get to the mixtape.

Because THAT deserves an article of its own.

Making a mixtape was not simply putting songs together.

There was sequencing.

There was strategy.

There were feelings.

And if you were making one for somebody you had a crush on?

God help you.

Every song suddenly carried the diplomatic significance of an international treaty.

But that's another day.

The point is that the 45 didn't live alone.

It became part of an entire musical ecosystem.

We Didn't Have Unlimited Music

There's something important I want to say here.

I don't think the old way was inherently better.

I love being able to hear almost any song I can think of within seconds.

That's extraordinary.

If you'd shown teenage me Spotify, I might have considered you a wizard.

But unlimited access changed something.

When I owned one 45, I owned two songs.

Those were the songs available to me at that moment.

So I explored them.

I turned the record over.

I read the label.

I learned the artist's name.

I knew which song was on which side.

I knew where the record was in my collection.

And yes, because apparently I had been born seventy years old, I entered the relevant information into my binder.

😂

We had fewer choices immediately available to us.

Sometimes that meant we paid closer attention to the choices we had.

And Now They're Collectibles

Here's the funny part.

Those little records we tossed into cases, traded with friends and played on bedroom record players never completely disappeared.

There are collectors today who take seven-inch singles very seriously.

Picture sleeves.

Promotional copies.

Unusual pressings.

Different labels.

Rare B-sides.

Regional releases.

Condition.

All of those little differences can turn what once looked like an ordinary single into something collectors hunt for.

There are record stores containing enormous inventories of them even now. Smithsonian magazine profiled one legendary Philadelphia-area record dealer whose millions of records included more than four million seven-inch 45s acquired from jukebox companies, radio stations, labels, stores, pressing plants and individual collectors.

The hunt never entirely ended.

It just changed hunters.

And somewhere, the little girl who meticulously cataloged her 45s would like it officially entered into the record that she was not being ridiculous.

She was an archivist.

Thank you very much.

😂

Two Sides, One Little Record

The more I think about the 45, the less I think of it as obsolete technology.

It represented a particular stage in our relationship with music.

The radio or television introduced us.

The 45 let us take the song home.

The B-side invited us deeper.

The collection began revealing who we were.

And if the artist really got hold of us?

We went hunting.

One song could lead to another.

One artist could lead to another.

One genre could open the door to something we'd never considered listening to before.

Music led to music.

And for a kid beginning to figure out who she was, that mattered.

My Barbie record player wasn't just playing songs.

Those little cases weren't just holding pieces of vinyl.

I was slowly building something that belonged to me.

My tastes.

My discoveries.

My collection.

My soundtrack.

One little seven-inch record at a time.

And sometimes all it took to discover something wonderful...

was turning it over.

Thanks for taking another trip back with me.

Did you have a 45 collection? What kind of player did you have? And here's the question I really want answered:

What B-side did you discover that turned out to be better than the song you bought the record for?

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Until next time...

Keep the memories alive. Keep the stories coming. And whatever you do... turn it up.

— Dr. AY Heath (Angel)

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