The locked groove: a classic secret trickery of the record era
One of music’s sad losses in the digital streaming age is the loss of easter eggs, or physical trickery worked into the 12.5″x12.5″ relic or compact disc treasure held in your hands during the peak of the album era.
Hidden booklets behind Radiohead’s Kid A‘s black CD tray, ‘Me, White Noise’ played when rewinding from the start of Blur’s Think Tank‘s first track, or the terrifying shock to any Nirvana fan who’d forgotten to stop Nevermind before ‘Endless, Nameless’ sludgy racket punctured the extended silence that follows ‘Something in the Way, such quirks and buried creativity served as small but endearing pieces of an album’s mythology, a feature difficult to see a return with the same magic from a Bandcamp download.
Unless you had a record player with an automatic arm lift, each side would end with the needle drifting into a locked groove to save its damage to the record’s centre. The needle would rotate ad infinitum and emit that special warm crackle so beloved by audiophiles and vinyl purists. It’s entirely possible to include a piece of looped audio in this groove, and many bands throughout the years have taken advantage of this technical quirk to force the listener to lift the needle in a fun and even subversive way.
The most famous use of the locked groove is the final snippet of cut-up gibberish that closes The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Once A Day in the Life’s sustained piano drop has faded away, a 15-kilohertz high-frequency tone will annoy any dog in the vicinity before backward laughter breaks into a disjointed audio mash of John Lennon saying, “Been so high,” and Paul McCartney responding, “Never could be any other way.”
Dropped in a febrile counterculture beginning to read far too much in backwards messages, a brief controversy was had when the closing loop was thought to say “I’ll fuck you like Superman” when reversed.
Many of The Beatles’ peers joined in on the infinity fun. The Who included a circular jingle on their commercial lampoon The Who Sell Out, an incessant leaky tap drips on Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother, and The Moody Blues’ On the Threshold of a Dream marks their narrative arc by ending as the album begins, a droning Mellotron sound that drifts after ‘Have You Heard’s reprise.
Such novelty flourishes were a gift to the Monty Python comedy troupe, who ended their second LP with a screech followed by Michael Palin glumly apologising “Sorry, squire! I scratched the record” for all time. Not wanting their gag ruined by modern innovations, the groove was deliberately farther away from the label, so automatic return wouldn’t spoil the goof.
The punks later embraced the locked groove: Dead Kennedys, The Damned, and Flipper all deployed artful loops at the end of LPs and 7″s, and ‘Express Way To Yr Skull’ that closes Sonic Youth’s Evol had its duration listed as ‘∞’ due to its eternal rumble of feedback. With a lack of permanence in music collections today, hopefully, the locked grooves of old may inspire new and novel ways such technical oddities can be translated in the download era.
