Gawd, do I miss LP albums! Must’ve squandered a small fortune—no, make that a big fortune— on LP’s when I was teenager. The Temptations, Candy Staton (she’s an evangelist these days, I think) Smokey Robinson, The Rascals, The Intruders, Mary Wells, Otis Redding, etc, etc. I think the thing that I miss the most are the liner notes on the backs of the LP album jackets In those days before Al Gore invented the Internet and Ted Turner invented the 24 hour news cycle at CNN, that was the place where I got most of my ‘inside information’ about my artists/heroes. From liner notes, you learned heretofore top secret information like “Davis” was the real name of David Ruffin (the troubled but perhaps also the most under rated soul singer of our Baby Boom generation) and he hailed from the small town of Whynot, Miss. Or that the ‘Pips’ were named in honor of Gladys and brother Bubba’s cousin. You couldn’t find information like that that ‘jes anywhere’.
Yeah, yeah, I know that liner notes were often included on CD’s but I always had a devlish time trying to figure out how to get those little CD jewel cases open after purchase. I swear, seems like it sometimes took hours. (This might have been the real reason for the demise of the record industry.) Often I was forced to resort to using a hammer…which ruined everything including the liner notes.