45 Labels Tell The Story

 

   Buried deep in my old stereo cabinet is a tattered red portfolio full of 45 rpm records. Each page is a sleeve that holds one record with a 3” hole to reveal  a colorful label.

   Thumbing through the book I can name almost every record without reading the labels because those labels are so familiar.  The odds are good that orange and yellow swirls on a Capitol Record label means Beatles or Beach Boys.  The solid red Columbia label belongs to my oldest record: The Battle of New Orleans by Johnny Horton. The record is completely unplayable but I can’t let it go.

   The light blue pattern signaled the Rolling Stones on London records and the solid blue label with the white whale was undeniably Happy Together by the Turtles.

  Something I never realized about record labels was how often they changed in the early days of rock and roll.  The most striking example was Elvis Presley who began his career on the colorful Sun label but hit his stride with the black label of RCA Victor Records. RCA was one of the five major labels in the 50’s along Decca, Columbia, Capitol and Mercury Records.

   Beyond the big ones were hundreds of small labels owned by companies that came and went and merged throughout the early 1960’s.  Anyone who owned a stack of 45’s will remember some of the more familiar ones like Bell (Box Tops, Delfonics), Roulette (Tommy James), Dot (Pat Boone), and Scepter (BJ Thomas).

   Teenage record buyers weren’t all that concerned about who owned what but many new labels in the 1960’s were derived from bigger companies.  Columbia Records owned Colpix (later Colgems) the familiar label for The Monkees.   Atlantic or Atco owned Stax Records and Kama Sutra Records (Lovin Spoonful) merged with Buddah (Melanie).

   The 1960’s ended with many of the same big companies dominating record sales although Motown, MCA and the Beatles’ Apple Records gave them all a run for the money.

   I didn’t start this column intending to lecture on record label history. I wanted to say that thumbing through the 45’s was like visiting with some old friends. These guys were played over and over and over again on a cheap phonograph that quickly gave them a scratchy background noise.

   I asked for the record “album” one Christmas so that I could haul my collection of singles around to friend’s houses. We would sit and play take turns playing the new ones or if mom allowed, we would stack them on the grownup’s phonograph.

   While the 45’s were gradually phased out by lps in the 1970’s we continued to have listening sessions in basements and attics and later dorm rooms. I can tell you where I was when I first heard many of the classic rock albums that now fill my IPOD.

   Simply listening to a new recording is something that has been lost with the advent of digital music and headphones.  Listening to a new song is more of a personal experience in earphones or the car although accessibility to music has never been greater.

   My meager 45 rpm collection included 24 records.  Today my IPOD has over 10,000 songs inside of it, including files for every 45 in that old collection. I’d love it if I could have some friends over and we could play them all. They just don’t seem to have the time.  I understand though. According to I-Tunes, my collection is 23.1 days long.