Book ,'Objects In Space'
There's a lady plays her fav'rite records/On the jukebox ev'ry day/All day long she plays the same old songs/And she believes the things that they say/She sings along with all the saddest songs/And she believes the stories are real/She lets the music dictate the way that she feels.
So the standard back then for an album was "a couple of good songs and the rest filler," right? When/what album did that change? It was the Beatles' doing, right?
I'd say around the time of Rubber Soul. I think that's their first album without cover songs, depending on how you count the Hard Day's Night soundtrack.
But yeah, it was a singles driven market then. (EPs in the UK, actually.) Long Players were for classical and jazz.
Depends on what you mean by "filler." I have a couple of Perry Como albums from the early '70s that are a couple of singles and a lot of covers. Some of the covers are too good to be dismissed as "filler" (though someone should have warned him that it wasn't a good idea to cover "I Think I Love You"), but they'd never have been released as singles on their own.
I have a couple of Perry Como albums from the early '70s that are a couple of singles and a lot of covers.
That's a different market. An A&R guy would be employed specifically to find songs for a vocalist. Doing the Great American Songbook is different than remaking a current Top 40 hit.
Agreed, the Rolling Stones and Perry Como appealed to very different groups in the early '70s -- but the Como albums are It's Impossible and And I Love You So, both of which had significant pop hits.
The Beatles and the Beach Boys may have started the idea that the album was important as a coherent artistic statement (or at least something more than two-singles-and-filler), but the idea didn't immediately sweep all areas of popular music.
I think it sort of ties into yesterday's conversation about how wide open the mainstream was in the late '60s and early '70s. The Rolling Stones and Perry Como, Sticky Fingers/"Brown Sugar" and It's Impossible/"It's Impossible" together in the mainstream.
Malcolm McLaren Is Dead
Wow. Unexpected.
You know aside from the Pistols, I really did love that whackass opera/dance music album he did.
Either someone get me a paper bag or someone make Frank Iero less adorable.
It's a cute-head interview during the photo shoot for the NYLON cover. Gerard is talking about their look, as Gerard does.
Warning: Bob is here, but he looks sad.
As sad as it is, I don't think he's a successful poster child for health care reform. A better candidate is one who is following all of society's "rules" about the way we're supposed to work (full time job, not quoted saying "why work when I don't have to?", etc) and still can't get affordable health care. There are millions of candidates who fit *that* bill.
I'm not saying that he should be a poster child, I'm just saying that it sucks.