FEATURE:
A New Revolution…
The 45 rpm Single at Seventy-Five
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ONE of the most important…
revolutions in music happened on 31st March, 1949. That is when the 45 rpm single was released. As we are approaching the seventy-fifth anniversary of a format that changed music, I wanted to spend some time looking at the history of the 45 rpm. This lightweight and inexpensive disc was introduced by RCA. Growing hugely in popularity in the early-1950s, soon all the major U.S. labels began manufacturing on seven-inch singles. I want to start off with a feature from Rolling Stone from 2019. They discussed how the 45 rpm brought Rock & Roll to the masses. It was a format that changed music forever. I do wonder what music would have been were it not for the 45 rpm. Such an exciting day back in 1949 when they were introduced:
“WHEN IT ARRIVED 70 years ago today, the 45 rpm single, a format that would revolutionize pop music, seemed less radical than simply confusing. On March 15th, 1949, RCA Victor became the first label to roll out records that were smaller (seven inches in diameter) and held less music (only a few minutes a side) than the in-vogue 78s.
The size of 45s alone, combined with the fact that different gear was suddenly required to play them, was enough to perplex the pre-rock music business. “My customers don’t know what to buy anymore,” a record store owner groused to the trade magazine Cashbox that month. “They’ll come in, ask for a recording, and then ask me whether or not it can be played on the particular phonogram they have at home.” More often than not, he said, potential buyers left without forking over any cash.
Then consider those initial seven RCA releases, which, according to the label’s archives, ranged from classical to kids’ music to country. The one most people will remember is Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s jumping-bean boogie “That’s All Right,” which became Elvis Presley’s breakout moment in the next decade, but the list also included a Yiddish song, “A Klein Melamedl (The Little Teacher),” sung by a cantor. Not quite the stuff of the pop charts at that moment in history. For added head-scratching, each 45 was printed in a different color, from “deep red” to “dark blue.” (Yes, colored vinyl actually existed in the years immediately after World War II.)
But with the release of those titles, and other companies soon entering the market, the singles revolution began. It’s impossible to underestimate the impact of the 45, which was the iTunes 99-cent download or surprise single (à la the Black Keys’ sudden “Lo/Hi”) of its day. Teenagers of the Fifties took to the portable, less-expensive format; one ad at the time priced the records at 65 cents each. One of rock’s most cataclysmic early hits, Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock,” sold 3 million singles in 1955.
In the decades that followed, everyone from the Beatles and the Rolling Stones through Patti Smith, Nirvana and the White Stripes released their first music on 45s. A handful of classic-rock standards, including Bob Dylan’s “Positively 4th Street” and the Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women,” were only initially released as singles, unattached to albums.
Some singles had picture sleeves or B sides of outtakes. If you flipped over Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way” in 1977, you’d come across “Silver Springs,” the Stevie Nicks landmark that was dumped from Rumours. The following decade, indie fans who snapped up Hüsker Dü’s “Makes No Sense at All” found their unlikely but fantastic cover of “Love Is All Around,” otherwise known as the Mary Tyler Moore Show theme song, on the flip.
According to the New York Times, the peak year for the seven-inch single was 1974, when 200 million were sold. By the early Eighties, the 45 began dying a slow, humiliating death. The number of jukeboxes in the country declined, boomer rock fans increasingly gravitated toward albums, and the cassette format (and even the wasteful “cassette single” and “mini-CD” format) began overtaking vinyl 45s”.
There is a lot of debate as to which single was the first to be released as a 45 rpm. Many say that it is Eddy Arnold’s Texarkana Baby. For the first fifty years or so of recorded music, people made do with a slightly unwieldly ten-inch record. Quite fragile and scratchy, there was this big leap in terms of stability, quality and economy when the 45 rpm came into the world. In 2019, Global News celebrated seventy years of the groundbreaking and seismic 45 rpm:
“Now here is an excerpt from an ad in Billboard magazine from April 2, 1949: “The new RCA Victor system of recorded music is a shining example of management’s foresight. With continued dealer confidence the ultimate profit is inevitable. Work started on the new system in 1939. RCA Victor engineers were granted complete freedom of action … freedom from even the major inhibitions, such as non-standardization of record sizes, and speed of turntables. Engineers had but a goal … to produce the finest changer and record ever conceived. The customers’ dollars will prove that these engineers reached their goal. The new RCA Victor record and changer constitute the sensible, modern, inexpensive way to enjoy recorded music. The product is ready … the public is ready. A demonstration, more than ever before, means a ‘close.’ Its advantages will eventually make it the only way to play music in the home.”
RCA’s other big idea was to colour-code releases by format. Country records were released on green vinyl. Children’s records were yellow. In between were hues of blues and reds for popular music, R&B, classical, and so on, for a total of seven colours. Digging deep into the history of the 45, it appears that the first record to go into regular production was PeeWee the Piccolo, pressed at a plant in Indianapolis on Dec. 7, 1948.
Customers who had grown used to 78s were now confused by 33 1/3 LPs and 45 RPM singles, neither of which could be played on the family gramophone. Not only did its motor spin at the wrong speed, the nail-sized stylus was too big and blunt to fit into microgrooves. Want to upgrade to vinyl? Then you needed to buy a new turntable —and you had to choose between Team Columbia and Team RCA. And there was the matter of acquiring one of RCA’s new record changers. They were not cheap, costing about $12.95 at the time, or roughly $140 today. People predicted doom for RCA”.
I am going to finish with this feature from 2020 that spotlighted forty-five 45s that changed the world. You can see more modern equivalents of the shift between the 78 and 45. If you look at a format such as the cassette or the C.D. How the Minidisc was seen as a more sleek and compact version of a cassette. Even though vinyl has been popular for decades, there was a demand and natural evolution in the music industry to find a format that was more portable and affordable. The seven-inch 45 rpm replaced the shellac 78. A competitor to the 33 long-playing record, the boom in single meant that more than 200 million had been sold within five years. Songs from artists of the day like Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley reached the masses:
“The golden age of 45s came at a time when teenagers, in a less constricted post-war world, found in record-buying something to bond over and identify with. Music became the most popular form of entertainment and shaped teenage lifestyles. The teenagers wouldn’t have known – or cared – whether a song aimed at their age group was written by a middle-aged man (as with “Rock Around The Clock”) or based on an old traditional (as with Chuck Berry“s “Maybellene”). If a song was about dancing, fun, cars and love, it hit the spot.
There were folk, blues and even classical music 45s (classical was produced on red vinyl), but Chuck Berry was always going to rule over Beethoven when it came to mass consumer appeal. As John Lennon put it: “If you tried to give rock’n’roll another name, you might call it Chuck Berry.” The rise of 45s went hand in hand with the rise of rock music.
Despite the surge of teenage buying power, sometimes performers had to adapt their music to the market and to prevailing moral attitudes. Richard Wayne Penniman, better known as Little Richard, has called himself “the architect of rock’n’roll,” and he was also savvy enough to know when he needed to compromise. With “Tutti Frutti,” a groundbreaking song recorded in a cramped studio in New Orleans, he put all his frenetic energy into delivering the memorable opening line, “A wopbopaloobop alopbamboom” (his vocal version of a drum pattern), having agreed to sing sanitized lyrics to a lewd song he played to risqué audiences in clubs; and hence “Tutti frutti, good booty” became “Tutti Frutti, aw rooty.”
The initial wave of 45 hits had come from the US (the UK did not issue 45s until 1952) and music fans throughout Europe were hungry to get their hands on the latest releases. If they were fortunate, they also saw their heroes in action, as they did when duet specialists Les Paul and Mary Ford toured in 1952, following another hit with “How High The Moon.” As well as the record-buying public, the influx of 45s was inspiring young musicians around the world. Elton John, The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney and his fellow future Beatles were all shaped by American rock’n’roll. In due course, they would make their own waves across the Atlantic.
“Tutti Frutti” was a key song for McCartney and a staple in his early performances. What made the Liverpool lad stand out was a burning desire to compose his own songs and potential hits. “Love Me Do,” jotted down in a school notebook by McCartney, was the first hit single for The Beatles. The song gave the Fab Four the confidence to perform their own material rather than just cover songs by Ray Charles and Little Richard.
Part of what makes a record such as “Love Me Do” seminal is the indelible mark it leaves on the minds of music lovers. It’s telling that “Love Me Do,” despite never getting higher than No.17 in the charts, has been chosen by 16 different castaways on the long-lasting UK radio show Desert Island Discs, including musician Brian Eno, who would have been 14 when it was released. Awesome songs are often landmarks of our youth.
“Love Me Do” was just over two minutes long and, though most of the singles of that time were brief (Maurice Williams And The Zodiacs’ doo-wop version of “Stay” was just one minute 37 seconds long) some were innovative and musically ambitious.
Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say,” released in 1959, is one of the most influential songs in popular music. The song evolved when Charles started improvising in the 12 minutes he had left to fill at a concert. Charles called across to his backing singers The Raelettes, “Listen, I’m going to fool around and y’all just follow me.” The crowd went wild and he knew he had to get it straight on record. The song, which blended blues, gospel, pop and soul in stirring call-and-response lyrics, was a groundbreaking triumph.
Three-minute singles became the norm in the early 60s (almost all produced in stereo sound by then) and record company bosses debated about the chances of success for Bob Dylan’s 1965 song “Like A Rolling Stone,” which lasted more than six minutes. Its success encouraged future epics, among the best of which is the long and stirring 1972 soul song “Papa Was A Rolling Stone” by The Temptations, which won three Grammy awards and remains a classic.
Some 45s become ingrained in popular culture. Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” (1959), the biggest-selling jazz single ever, was deemed just right as the background music for a key moody scene in the acclaimed HBO show The Sopranos. Queen“s “Bohemian Rhapsody” appears in the film Wayne’s World, and Sam Cooke’s civil-rights anthem “A Change Is Gonna Come” was sung by James Taylor to a fictional president in The West Wing – and to a real president in 2008, when Bettye LaVette and Jon Bon Jovi performed it for Barack Obama’s inauguration. Decades on, these marvelous tunes still resonate.
The single as a potent political tool is another significant part of the history of 45s, whether that is James Brown’s song about black empowerment, “Say It Out Loud – I’m Black And I’m Proud,” co-written by Brown with Pee Wee Ellis, the saxophonist known later for his work with Van Morrison, or Marvin Gaye“s “Abraham, Martin And John” (also from 1968), such a moving composition about the assassinations that have blighted America.
Political songs are not just been the preserve of America, though. There were many protest songs by European musicians in the 60s, a tradition taken up by Sex Pistols with their single “God Save The Queen,” which was also banned by the BBC in 1977, the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. The desire to make a statement with music has continued (think The Smiths and their unsettling song “Meat Is Murder”), including in America, with the environmental rock of “Monkey Gone To Heaven” by Pixies, or a piece of neat ironic social commentary from the 90s in Beck’s “Loser.”
Singles also represented their times. Aretha Franklin turned Otis Redding’s “Respect” into a potent feminist anthem; Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” and Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” captured the psychedelic and drug-fueled times of the late 60s.
Showmanship has always been a big part of music (think of Louis Jordan, the King Of The Jukeboxes, who had 18 No.1 hits in the 50s) and it continued with artists such as Hendrix. What changed was that the power of television made the art of performing vital to the success of a 45 (especially once music videos took off) and some music is intertwined with the image of its glitzy performers.
David Bowie’s extravagant “Space Oddity,” and his Major Tom character, is part of a pattern that weaves through ABBA and their dances in outlandish outfits to hits such as “Waterloo” (a song that originally had the far less memorable title “Honey Pie”), through to Freddie Mercury and his grandiose display on the video for the 1975 hit “Bohemian Rhapsody,” on from Beastie Boys and their iconic tongue-in-cheek videos and songs in the 80s (even if some people didn’t quite get the irony) through to modern eye-catching performers such as Lady Gaga.
Scores of 45s have a lasting musical influence. The sound of Parliament was such a distinctive model for funk; Musical Youth’s “Pass The Dutchie” popularized reggae on both sides of the Atlantic; Run-DMC helped usher in a new style of hip-hop with “It’s Like That”; while Nirvana brought alternative rock into the mainstream with “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
The whole concept of the generation gap was immortalized by The Who in 1965. But 45s were not just an audio sensation, they were exciting objects in themselves. People can normally remember the first single they bought, especially if it was graced by a beautiful miniature jacket. It was a thrill to buy a 45. The smell of new vinyl was good, even if you did worry about scratches. Guitarist Johnny Marr has described the 45s as an “otherworldly object.” It is no wonder that vinyl is still celebrated, though streaming and digital downloads bring the single-buying experience to a 21st-century audience in an exciting instant way.
Special songs have the power to make people feel connected, even if it is sharing a feeling of grief by listening to the same song. John Lennon’s “Imagine” was not even released as a single originally, but after his murder it became a No.1 hit as people sought solace from his beautiful words. It is also telling that Elton John“s re-recorded version of “Candle In The Wind,” released after the death of Princess Diana, remains the best-selling single of all time.
Whether it’s Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” a masterpiece of alienation, Sly And The Family Stone’s meditative “Family Affair” or the pulsating joy of Fats Domino’s “The Fat Man” (one of the big hits of the inaugural year of the 45), great songs are a compelling soundtrack to our inner worlds and a terrific way of simply being entertained. Any list of key singles will be personal rather than definitive, but the 45 45s in our playlist still inspire and delight”.
On 31st March, 1949, in a world still recovering from the impact of the Second World War, this sonic revolution meant that the rather cumbersome and outdated 78 saw an evolution and leap with the 45 rpm. That ability to take a single to the masses. It was one of the biggest leaps in music-playing technology to that point. Even if we do not really talk about and buy this format much nowadays, one cannot deny the impact and influence of the 45 rpm. This incredible and revolutionary record…
CHANGED the world.