Friend of 360°Sound Eric Wolfson returns to talk all things compact disc. Wolfson has twice been a part of our long-running “Author Talk” series, dishing on his engrossing books, From Elvis in Memphis and Fifty Years of the Concept Album in Popular Music.
Wolfson, 44, has been collecting CDs since the format first surpassed vinyl sales in the late 1980s. In this interview, the Washington, D.C.-based rock ‘n’ roll enthusiast discusses the first CDs he ever bought, the incredible box sets in his collection, and why the CD format is ideal for the concept album.
360°Sound: Do you remember the first CD you ever bought?
Eric Wolfson: My dad didn’t get a CD player until a friend forced his hand when he bought my dad’s favorite album, The Eagles’ Desperado, for him on CD. They still were sold in those weird long gratuitous rectangular boxes that supposedly prevented theft [Editor’s Note: Check out CD Junkie Mark Seaman’s ode to the longbox]. But Desperado was enough, and we owned a CD player within a week or two.
Among the first CDs my family bought was one especially for me, the 1987 two-disc comp of Elvis Presley’s The Top Ten Hits. Minus the Sun material, it’s the best intro to Elvis ever, only missing two truly essential cuts: “Blue Suede Shoes” and “If I Can Dream.” Along with the original The Sun Sessions CD, this was where I cut my teeth on the King. All that said, the first CD I ever bought with my own money was The Beatles’ Revolver. I still consider it one of the very best albums ever made.
What do you love about the CD format?
I love that it can hold nearly one hour and 20 minutes. This is a great limit to put on any playlist. You can include all the Beatles’ original UK A-sides., or all the songs Elvis released from “That’s All Right” through the “Love Me Tender”/“Any Way You Want Me” single, which includes all 10 Sun sides, plus his first album and subsequent singles.
I find it to be the perfect amount of time to trace an artist’s arc, as well as a bit of a challenge: Does a bigger hit that’s generally considered not a great song get included over an album track that’s a masterpiece? Is it possible to fit all the artist’s #1s? Or Top 5s? Or Top 10s? Or do these hits even reflect the scope of the artist?
What are the essential 80 minutes of music for a band like The Rolling Stones? Do you chop it off at, say, Exile On Main St.? Or see it through to “Start Me Up”? Or beyond? This game can go on forever, and I’ve been playing it since I started uploading music onto my computer. I always keep the mixes at 80 minutes or less in case the internet is taken out, and I have to download my playlist “albums” back onto CDs.
I also love how a CD works as a unit of measurement, which really puts into perspective various artists’ outputs. After realizing that everything Elvis released in the ’50s fit comfortably on four discs, I was curious to see how that stacked up. Turns out everything Chuck Berry released in the ’50s fits on two discs. The same goes for Little Richard and James Brown. Everything Jerry Lee Lewis released in the ’50s is like four songs away from fitting on one disc. Outside of Fats Domino, who released singles and albums from the dawn to the dusk of the decade, there just really wasn’t that much music released by these major figures in their prime – at least when measured against a CD. In this regard, CDs aren’t just useful – they’re economical.
How many CDs do you have in your collection?
I’ve gone from about a thousand to a few hundred in my purging time. Moving around so much as a young adult forced me to shed CDs faster than I would have otherwise done. When I was a kid, my grandfather had a listening room in his basement. It had nice leather couches and chairs, a high-quality stereo system, and two long walls facing each other, which were lined with records – one side jazz and one side classical. The only rock album I could ever find was The Beatles’ red album. At any rate, there was no TV, no telephone. You went down there to sit and listen.
Some years later, I was babysitting this very well-off kid whose stepfather had basically a version of the same thing that my grandfather had only instead of having all the records, he had all the CD box sets. This was back in the mid-’90s, when those things were hard to find in people’s actual collections and almost always cost-prohibitive for a teenager.
By the time I was working in a used record store after college, I basically doubled my collection, in part because you got paid overtime in CDs. I had a running tally of several artists who, if I saw a CD by them, I’d buy it (e.g. The Beach Boys, The Byrds, Radiohead), while many more, like Simon & Garfunkel and Janis Joplin, I just picked up their complete box set.
Before that, I bought box sets using my employee discount at Tower Records in the 1990s and created a library foundation with box sets like the Hitsville, U.S.A.: Motown 1959-1971, The Doo-Wop Box, The Sun Records Collection, and the Little Richard 3-disc The Specialty Sessions. I was in paradise.
Before long, sets like the original Nuggets set and Loud, Fast, & Out of Control: Wild Sounds Of ’50s Rock were joined by future used record store purchases made over a decade later in which I bought boxed sets of everyone: Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, Joy Division, The Temptations, and on my final day at work, the then-new Grateful Dead box with their initial run of albums on Warner Brothers.
Your book Fifty Years of the Concept Album in Popular Music examines 25 important concept albums. Do you think the CD format lends itself well to concept albums because they are meant to be taken in as a whole?
I generally think the CD is great for the concept album because it allows for continuous play. This is especially useful for the later albums, which were primarily intended for CD and would take up multiple records to issue on vinyl.
That said, there is something useful about having distinct sides to split up a work. Donna Summer’s Once Upon A Time… is an album that utilizes this, dividing her double album into four distinct suites of music. When it first came out, New York discos often played one side at a time, as opposed to one song at a time.
So, while CDs are non-intrusive to a record, I suppose the best answer is to listen to things in the format in which they were originally published. From a historical perspective, that’s the best way to understand the complete experience of an album.
I already owned (or soon bought) the physical CD for all 25 albums in this book. It really helps me to have a tangible thing to work from. Plus, there is little that can top CD liner notes for a historic overview, especially in deluxe edition reissue sets.
How do you feel about the future of the CD? Do you think we will see a revival similar to what has happened with vinyl?
Vinyl has remained the collecting gold standard. As much as I think there is a place for CDs and would love to see a revival, I don’t see a vinyl-like renaissance of the format. I chalk this up to a few reasons:
- Most music (especially music recorded before the digital age) sounds best on a new vinyl.
- CDs aren’t as exciting as vinyl because of their size.
- CDs disintegrate over time.
I feel like a traitor because, as I hope I’ve shown, I do love CDs and will always think of them as the core of my music collection. But as for their long-term legacy, I am skeptical that future generations will be as enthralled by them as I have. For what it’s worth, my kids are certainly more drawn to my vinyl “big black CDs.”
But then again, who knows? When I ran the music department at a Barnes & Noble in Queens, our main CD customers were baby boomers. But every time a new Kanye West album came out (this was around 2010), we’d get a line of kids going into the building and downstairs to the CD section. They’d grab a copy of the CD, purchase it, then go straight back out the door like they were on a conveyer belt. I asked a couple of the kids about why they were buying something now, and they all gave different versions of the same answer: “I’m like a real Kanye fan. I already downloaded the album this morning. But I need to have the thing.” And for me, CDs will always be the thing.
Order your copy of Eric Wolfson’s Fifty Years of the Concept Album in Popular Music direct from the publisher at bloomsbury.com
