Back to Black: The Magic of Mono

As I sit down to write this on a bleary-eyed early morning, I can hear the coffee maker click on automatically. My phone dings insistently to remind me of meetings, appointments and upcoming annoyances, then it offers up a morning tweet for dessert. In my pocket I there’s a little flash drive smaller than my thumb, carrying about 35 albums’ worth of music with a little room for more.

Technology has surely wiped some of the romance out of modern life; what did you expect? Old guys like me quickly get tiresome in referencing the past to recall the many ways that life was better – yeah, guilty as charged.

Thankfully, at my house there’s an easy way to shut up the old guy: slap some vinyl on the turntable, and crank it. With the resurgence of vinyl records we’ve all rediscovered our roots, and we are “remembering” our past, meaning: if we knew this at all, surely we forgot. Frankly, I forgot about mono.

Back in the day, record companies put out music in monophonic – as opposed to stereo – because they wanted their hit singles to sound good on AM radio and on the crappy sound systems that lived in most homes. Stereo was kind of an afterthought, and often you could hear stuff on the mono (meaning: “original version”) that didn’t show up on the stereo versions. Or so we’re told today.

When LPs nearly died and CDs came along, old music got remixed, remastered and repackaged. The resurgence of vinyl provided another opportunity to hear (and buy) the same old stuff once more and then we have the mono versions. I don’t know how many versions of Revolver or Highway 61 Revisited I want, but I certainly have more than I need. Mono is the aural version of watching a black-and-white movie: experiencing the past while not quite reliving it. Know what I mean? (I think I don’t.)

Hell, I didn’t know the Beatles did their albums in mono. I was just a kid when the Beatles were a real thing, and besides, I didn’t buy albums – just 45 singles. I knew about Brian Wilson’s famous deafness in one ear, and that’s why he did many of his masterpieces in mono; but I learned that only after I had gotten older.

So here we are, a decade deep into the 21st century, and we’re still spinning mono records on turntables. You gotta admit, that stuff sounds GOOD.

MP3: “Mr. Soul” (45 single) by Buffalo Springfield

MP3: “Run Through The Jungle” (45 single) by Creedence Clearwater Revival

MP3: “A Hazy Shade of Winter” (mono remaster) by Simon & Garfunkel

MP3: “All Tomorrow’s Parties” (45 single) by the Velvet Underground

MP3: “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” (mono remaster) by the Beatles

MP3: “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” (45 single) by the Rolling Stones

MP3: “Help Me Rhonda” (mono album version) by the Beach Boys

Record Store Day official website

Video of the Week: “Rock and Roll Woman”

A bit of history happened Saturday night in Mountain View, California, as the three surviving members of legendary rock band Buffalo Springfield reunited for the first time since 1968.  Playing to benefit the Bridge School for children with cerebral palsy, original Springfield members Stephen Stills, Richie Furay and Neil Young ran through a loose set of classics including “Mr. Soul,” “Rock and Roll Woman,” “On The Way Home” and of course, “For What It’s Worth.”

Catch more videos from the Buffalo Springfield reunion at GuitarVibe.com

 

Lost Classics! Poco

In the late 1960s, country rock was still in its infancy.  And frankly, not a whole lot of people knew exactly what it was – even some of its better practitioners.  But in 1968, along came this band Poco, and they seemed to have a pretty good idea of what they were doing. 

The lineage of this band had great promise: Richie Furay came out of the fractured Buffalo Springfield, and Jim Messina was that band’s last bass player and producer.  Furay and Messina recruited multi-instrumentalist Rusty Young (who played on Furay’s “Kind Woman” for the Springfield), drummer George Grantham and bass player Randy Meisner. 

When the fledgling band went looking for a record label, they were helped out by Furay’s old Buffalo Springfield band mate Stephen Stills, who negotiated a baseball-like “trade”: Furay and Messina’s band would go to Columbia/Epic in exchange for David Crosby (Byrds) and Graham Nash (the Hollies).  Crosby-Nash joined Stills on Atlantic, the Buffalo Springfield’s old label, and you know what happened there.

Rock Moment: Buffalo Springfield Disintegrates

UPDATE: Go here for our post on the death of Dewey Martin.

Buffalo Springfield could’a been a contender.  Even though they were barely together for a year, the Springfield made incredible rock music that, for one moment, made them American rivals to the Beatles. 

Maybe two geniuses in one group are too much: Stephen Stills and Neil Young got their respective starts here, and the rivalry/partnership crystallizes on the band’s 1967 Buffalo Springfield Again.  This is a classic album – Stills contributes “Rock and Roll Woman” and “Bluebird,” two of his best songs ever, while Young points the way to his solo career with “Mr. Soul” and “Broken Arrow.”  And yet there was still room for guitarist Richie Furay to crank out a country-rock classic, “A Child’s Claim To Fame.”

Of course, you know about Stills’ protest song “For What It’s Worth,” which hit the Top 10 in ’67.  But by the fall of that year Young had split, forcing the Springfield to recruit then-current Byrds member David Crosby to play with them at the Monterey Pop Festival.