The recent Analogue Productions reissue of Texas bluesman Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkin’s classic Goin’ Away [Lightnin' Hopkins (vocals, guitar); Leonard Gaskins (bass); Herbie Lovelle (drums), originally recorded June 1963] is in many respects emblematic of both the best and worst aspects of the vinyl record subculture in the early 21st century. Let’s talk about the “worst” aspect with no further ado: the price of admission is $50 for the double-LP set, which puts it far out of reach of many music fans, and especially out of reach for the younger fans who might find in Hopkins’s masterful blues guitar some valuable inspiration.
Vinyl has made a resurgence in the last ten years, after nearly being killed dead in the 1980s, with the introduction of compact disks, which promised “perfect sound forever” to the millions who closeted their turntables and bought the first generation of digital players. This history is well known to all music lovers. With the introduction of mp3 players—especially the iconic and ubiquitous iPod—those same CDs were consigned to the dustbin, there to gather dust alongside abandoned 8-track tapes and 78rpm shellac disks from previous generations of music lovers. But to those for whom high fidelity reproduction of sound was an essential tribute to their beloved musical artists, vinyl never went away but instead remained for perhaps two decades a kind of underground pursuit kept alive, often at great expense, by devoted listeners. Skip ahead to the 21st century, and the music business looks (and sounds) a lot different. File sharing has practically killed off the business model that the record labels used for most of the last century to make their enormous profits, most digital music sounds terrible because of the essential nature of that technology (sampled sound will never sound as good as analog), and the loudness compression used by current recording engineers to make their music sound good on cheap earbuds can make extended listening harsh and grating. Artists who can’t rely on record sales any more, since all digital music is essentially free to all thanks to P2P technologies like BitTorrent. The incomparable Gillian Welch, among the many victims of this crisis in the music business, gives a bittersweet taste of what it’s like to be an artist with plenty to say, a burning need to say it, but with nobody willing to pay for it:
Everything is free now,
That’s what they say.
Everything I ever loved,
I’m going to give it away.
Someone hit the big score.
They figured it out,
That we’re gonna do it anyway,
Even if doesn’t pay.
--Gillian Welch, “Everything is Free” from Time, the Revelator (2001)
For an earlier generation, analog vinyl disks were cheap and ubiquitous, but for postmodern listeners, the best of vinyl reproduction often comes at a high price. Jazz and blues records, particularly the most interesting ones—many of which were released in small numbers by obscure labels—now command extremely high prices in the collector market. And only a few high-end companies are stoking the vinyl market with high quality re-issues of this material. But some of these re-issues, heard through the latest vinyl playback equipment, provide a listening experience that could not have been imagined during the height of the vinyl era (1955-1985). Hopkins’s “Goin’ Away” is a classic example of the pricey-but-stunning kind of recording that has come available during the past decade of the analog music renaissance. Cut at 45rpm on two pristine black slabs of 200gram vinyl, this great recording is in every respect the antithesis of the iPod experience. What you don’t get is the portable genius of the slender and chic digital player that shuffles its way serendipitously through thousands of your “favorite” tunes. Instead, you get two or three songs per 45rpm side before you have to flip the record over for more of the best blues recorded by one of the great American musical artists of the past century, who is conjured holographically from the loudspeakers without a trace of digital hash. Check out the sly “Don’t Embarrass Me, Baby” from the first side, for example, to get a sense of the bluesy growl of Hopkins’s voice and the rock steady pulse of his simple but uncanny fingerpicked guitar style. These are the roadhouse blues that Jim Morrison was trying to conjure. And all this time, you thought Elvis was the source of rock and roll. Think again. Now if we could just figure out a way to make that 50 kilogram turntable, garden-hose looking speaker cables, and refrigerator-sized loudspeakers fit in a backpack for the younger set to enjoy the Texas blues the way they were meant to be heard…
