The Needle
I’m watching the Jeff Lynne documentary, I recorded it from Palladia. And I’d like to recommend it, but it’s kind of like the rock bios, Keith Richards does a good one and then everybody jumps on the bandwagon and there are too many, most are not good enough and you end up ignoring all of them. Now that video is so cheap, you can make a film about anybody in hi-def with decent production values so we get to see our heroes but there’s no critical analysis employed. If you were under the age of twenty and you watched this documentary you’d think Jeff Lynne was the biggest and most skilled star of the seventies and however talented Jeff might be, that is untrue. Furthermore, they skated almost completely over the Move and Roy Wood, which is really the only reason I tuned in, I wanted to know more about this legendary madman/recluse.
But there was a moment early on, when they played Jeff’s first single with the Idle Race…
Everybody comes from somewhere. And an explication of Jeff’s journey from Birmingham to here, Los Angeles, would be interesting, but they dropped the needle on the 45 and…
You’ve got to know, turntables did not become the rage until the very late sixties, in some cases the seventies. Audiophiles might have an AR or a Thorens, eventually the hoi polloi purchased Garrards and Duals, but before that…we had record players.
The tonearms were about as sleek as a Dodge. Heavy, they were rarely automatic and you frequently taped a dime, penny or even a quarter on top to ensure they did not skip.
But what brought me back watching this documentary was the little arm, the little piece of plastic on the side… It was the lever you used to flip the needle from 33 to 45. And when you thought the music was getting a bit distorted, a bit scratchy, you’d go to your local electronics shop, which was just like an auto parts store but dustier, with more crap lying around, and you’d hold the needle in front of the guy behind the counter and he’d go back and retrieve a new one, which was encased in a tiny plastic jewel box, sitting on a piece of foam rubber.
Sometimes he had to look it up in a book. He’d translate it into a generic brand, the most popular was Pfanstiehl.
And you’d go back home, pop it in, and listen once again through your all-in-one unit with the single speaker.
This was how everybody did it. It was a routine as familiar as dialing a rotary phone. And it’s been lost to the sands of time.
It’s one thing to look at pictures of stuff that happened long before you were born. It’s quite another to be jolted into a past you were extremely familiar with that has completely disappeared.
The image in the doc warmed my heart more than the music. This was the last stop, where the rubber met the road, after you’d paid your money and bought your record, this is where you heard it.
And everything was not at your fingertips. You built a collection slowly. You did not want to buy a dud.
And when you dropped the needle on your favorite record, you were in heaven.
