How the first double album in history changed music forever
When pop culture first got moving in the 1950s, long-play records were pretty much redundant. The birth of rock ‘n’ roll and the rise of public radio led to a period where singles were king. With the portable radio reaching the masses in the mid-1950s as new affordable models made the 1941 invention mainstream, tracks now had to be punchy enough to sting the ears of the public in the short window of airtime available. Anything over two minutes cut down on the patter time available to presenters so they simply wouldn’t play it.
A certain quiff sporting, hip-snaking singer was well aware of this. So, he rattled off hooky howitzers in rapid-fire time. With the charts being consistently topped by the likes of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ (1:58), ‘Great Balls of Fire’ (1:51), and ‘Tutti Frutti’ (2:22), an era of short, snappy hits became prevalent. This lent itself to shorter records too. And following their invention in 1949, little 45s became the vogue way for kids to swap these new hits around the playground in a hurry.
However, these kids got older, and they couldn’t listen to wham, bam two-minute blasts forever. They wanted something with a bit more substance for a change. These youngsters had grown up in the wake of World War II and all the nuclear panic that came along with it. They wanted something a little bit more spiritual to sit with the uncertain zeitgeist when they came of age—something that went beyond two-minute dance craze records.
Thus, the insatiable appetite for music’s first commercial rock stars meant that LPs, which were first invented in 1948, gained popularity. These longer records called for more introspection. After a while, folks like Bob Dylan found the endless variations of ‘Rock around the Clock’ a little bit vapid. LPs allowed for greater depth and diversity. Suddenly not every song that a commercial artist put to record had to be a radio hit. While it took the Motown hit parade a while to catch on to this notion, the troubadours flocking to Greenwich Village were about to get arty with what you could do on a 42-minute LP.
Ordinary LPs limited you to 21 minutes on each side so artists still had to remain relatively conventional when it came to song lengths. However, with record production costs falling, for the first time, musicians could put out double LPs and still make a profit. With Blonde on Blonde, Dylan put out what is considered to be the first double LP featuring only self-penned songs, one of which was the masterful ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ which took up the entirety of side four.
The fallout from this masterpiece has been both good and bad. You see, prior to Blonde on Blonde, Dylan had just become every musician’s favourite musician with the release of Highway 61 Revisited. “It seemed to go on and on forever,” Paul McCartney recalled when John Lennon summoned him to listen to ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. “It was just beautiful.” They took stock in his lengthy rally cry and music grew more progressive.
This freed music for good. If DJs didn’t want to play these long masterpieces, then so be it—kids could listen to the affordable LPs without ever growing tired of the same old thing. Now, bands didn’t have to compromise for the sake of commercial viability. They didn’t have to curtail their message, cut out any chords or think about boundaries to creation in the act of inception at all. This was the great liberating moment for modern music. Just over a year later, The Beatles would put out their own double album (The White Album) and many other huge names followed.
But every step forward has its own pitfalls and there are those that would argue that the liberating double album also had an Achilles heel. As John Cooper Clarke once wrote: “I love Bob Dylan, but I hold him responsible for two bad ideas: a) the extended running time of the popular song and b) the lyric sheet. Both fine for Bob who usually occupied the extra time in agreeably entertaining ways. The rot, however, set in between 1968 and 1975 when the airwaves were clogged with over-manned combos of cheesecloth-shirted bozos, with names like Jon Hiseman’s Colosseum… the end is listless.”
With most great boundary-pushing art, it usually results in sorry imitators clinging to the lowest common denominator of the feat—Dylan’s progress became dreary prog. His sprawling epics like ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ used space to transfigure the usual cliched honeypie song into a realistic journey over the potholes and pretty vistas on the memory lane of love. That was scrapped by many bands who seemed to think that the depth came from the distance itself. All of a sudden, you had fools desperately defying pop by pretentiously wailing ‘look how good I am’ for interminable dreary eternities. All thanks to Dylan and his beautiful, seismic double album exploration.
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