Dick Clark – 20 Years of Rock n’ Roll (Buddah 0798) (1973)

VOL. 4 OF THE THRIFTY VINYL ARCHIVE SERIES“In the 1950′s people used to ask me, ‘How long can Rock last–’ In the 1970′s Rock rolls on….” Dick Clark

So said the self-styled world’s oldest living teen-ager (now deceased) and erstwhile host of long-running music show American Bandstand on the back sleeve of this superb double album compilation.  20 Years of Rock n’ Roll‘s simple, but effective concept is to cherry-pick one or two stone classics from each year (from ’52 to ’72) and present them chronologically. There’s no Chuck/Beatles/Stones/Motown/ Elvis/Stooges, nor is this a Nuggest-style specialist excavation; this is a populist, US AM radio-friendly set featuring representative examples of the Rock style during the genre’s first two decades. See the track list for yourselves here if you don’t believe me.

20 Years formed the backbone of my record collection at a time when the music library was in single digits, only accumulated at a rate of one or two albums every 12 months and I was too young to know what “Electronically Reproduced For Stereo” meant. Music choice was not so freely available back in the day to tyrannize and overwhelm, so this album was a handy, perfectly-judged godsend; truly, a happy education.

I still like every single song here and listen to the record every couple of years. Thanks, Dick.

Also included in the package (which I thrifted from Mount Vernon, Ohio’s Goodwill store over three and a half decades ago for 50 cents), is a 12cm x 12cm cardboard flexi-disc of Dick’s “off-the-cuff” showbizzy reminiscences called “Inside Stories”. As if. It is, unsurprisingly, too cheesy by half and there’s something unsettling about the hole in the middle of Clark’s forehead.

Practical Electronics Oct 1967 Flexi-Disc

Electronic Sounds and Effects for Electronic Music (Judd)

An amazing demonstration disc of the basic sounds of electronic sources circa 1967 – pure sine/square/pulse tones at various throbbing cycles … unfiltered white noise – ring-modulation of sine waves – electronically controlled attack/delay/reverb/echo – mechanical spring-line reverberation, echo by means of mag-tape feedback, reversed-echo weirdness – and some uber-cool experiments using tape-loops – that with a suitable back-beat would not be amiss in any minimal-tech night …

All this put together by a certain F.C. Judd …

A complete scan of the whole of the October 1967 Practical electronics issue written by F.C. Judd can be grabbed here.

The added beauty of this disc is that I found it for free – stuck inside a disc of bird song recording – more of which will be posted real real soon … !