Cataloguing that Old Grease
Call me a yuppie or a baby-boomer if you will -- although I
am a bit old to be either -- but when old rock-and-roll records pop up on the airwaves,
the programming could have been designed for me. Nowadays, my record shelves are fairly
typical for an audiophile -- well-recorded versions of good pop, jazz, and classical
music, carefully maintained and preserved in vinyl, plus too many CDs. But before about
1970 my main musical interest was top-40 rock, and I amassed a large number of hit
singles, stretching back to 1952, when I bought my first record.
True discophiles might look askance at this mass of musical
detritus, but I tend to think of it as a real collection -- one that not only
reflects the musical trends of the period but also my own taste at that time. My youthful
acquisitiveness drove me to purchase virtually every song I liked, and I have never
disposed of a record -- they have moved with me over the years and now occupy a
significant amount of my basement.
From time to time, however, I used to contemplate these
with the frustrating feeling that I really didn't know what I had. Often enough, when the
mood struck me to listen to one old record, I encountered another I had forgotten about,
only to wonder how many more such favorites were lurking in the shelves, but not in my
memory.
And yet, the idea of actually producing some sort of index
was always somewhat daunting. I occasionally conceived various schemes for using file
cards to bring some order to the chaos, but the amount of time such plans would take to
execute ensured that my discs would remain in their unorganized state. It isn't totally
random, of course -- everything is filed in alphabetical order by artist, and so I am
usually able to find a particular piece of music, as long as I recall that I have it.
Finally, about 15 years ago, it occurred to me that my
personal computer might come to the rescue. Its main use was word processing, and since I
intended to organize my old records only once, it didn't make sense to invest in a program
specifically designed for record cataloging, although such programs probably existed.
Nevertheless, I made it a weekend project to devise a way to list and cross-index the
records using my trusty old Mac.
The first challenge was to locate all the records I
intended to include. The bulk were in the form of 45rpm singles bought at the time they
were first released, and I had at least the good sense almost from the beginning to store
these in heavy-duty filing sleeves, alphabetically by artist. The basic index could be
made up of a simple listing of these. In the earliest days, however, I bought much of my
music on 78s, which had been augmented over the years as various friends abandoned that
format and bequeathed me their records. The 78s were filed separately both because of
their larger size and because they weigh so much that they could be housed only on bottom
shelves.
Over the years I supplemented these records in various
ways, either to fill gaps in the collection or to replace damaged originals. In some
cases, I bought 45rpm reissues, which were filed along with the originals. Further
additions were on LPs, usually "greatest hits" collections by particular
artists, but sometimes conventional albums that contained one or more hits. These records
were filed alphabetically with more recent LPs. A considerable amount of the period's
music was also contained in various multiple-artist "oldies" records that had
their own sections (including a few early ones issued as 45rpm EPs), or in soundtrack
albums filed by show title. Finally, even in those early days, many record companies had
reissued some of this material on compact disc, and this had to be taken into account as
well, although at the time my own collection was still almost completely vinyl.
All in all, I determined that a song from the 1950s or
1960s could be in any one of eight different parts of my collection. Each section would
have to be gone through record by record, and the appropriate selections noted.
It became clear from the start that listing absolutely
everything would result in a massive document of not much use, so I had to decide on some
criteria for inclusion. There were some obvious candidates for rejection -- a yodeling
record picked up on vacation in Austria, for instance, along with a couple of bagpipe
selections bought for reasons that escape me now, and other similar anomalies. As for the
"mainstream" records, I decided to eliminate "B" sides of singles
unless they were hits in their own right or had some special meaning for me. On the other
hand, any 45 I purchased at the time would be included whether it became a hit or not, on
the theory that I liked it sufficiently to pay money for it. With 78s I chose to be much
more selective, listing only major hits, and then only if the 78 version was the only one
in the collection.
As for songs included in albums, they would only make the
index if they had become individual hits. One might argue that everything certain
artists recorded had hit status -- the Beatles, for instance -- but there seemed to be
little point in listing every song they produced. Similarly, whole albums often became
hits, particularly in the late 1960s, but I chose to include only songs that made the
charts individually. With collections of oldies, virtually everything qualified, but
"greatest hits" records of particular artists often contained some filler; these
dubious items were excluded.
Once I had settled on these rules, the question arose as to
what information should be included about each song. Once the artist's name and the song
title had been noted, there was relatively little room for supplementary data; in the
interests of space, and for ease of later manipulation, I wanted to keep each entry to a
single line. While some fans of old records would insist on including information about
record labels and numbers, I decided that, for me, this was irrelevant. The date of each
record was much more important to me, and I determined to include a year for every song,
even though I knew that ferreting out such dates might be difficult with some of the
lesser-known material.
One potentially useful bit of information might have been
some sort of quality rating, because the records themselves had varied histories of use
and abuse. No simple way of rating them presented itself, however, and the necessity of
actually listening to every record made this consideration impractical. Instead, I devised
a simple letter-code to identify the format of each recording: "A" for original
45s, "B" for reissued 45s, and so forth. This system served a number of
purposes. For one thing, it indicated with little fuss where a recording could be found in
the files, and allowed easy identification of songs that existed in several formats. In
addition, the code could serve as a rough guide to quality -- LPs were generally pristine,
as were reissued 45s and EPs (which therefore required their own codes); 78s were dreadful
almost without exception; while original 45s were of variable quality, most of them having
suffered through too many parties being played on none-too-sophisticated turntables.
With LPs and CDs, there was some temptation to indicate
which album a song might be found on, but I rejected this idea because of space. Instead,
separate codes were used for multi-artist oldies collections, soundtracks, and albums by a
particular artist. No one artist had a section so large that a song could not be found
readily; by the same token the collections and soundtracks sections were small, so finding
a given song would not be a huge task.
One last question remained: how would the final catalog be
organized? I knew from the start that, as a minimum, I wanted to end up with an
alphabetical master list that would bring together all the appropriate music in a single
document, but once that existed it could perhaps be rearranged for other purposes. I
decided that a breakdown by years would be useful, as would an alphabetical listing by
song title. Without a program specifically designed to reorganize the data in this way, I
knew I would have to do it by "brute force," but this would be easier on the
computer than with file cards.
So far, all of these decisions had been a matter of
planning. At some point, however, I would actually have to face the keyboard and start
creating the catalog. Because the wall full of 45s represented the biggest single piece of
the collection, and because it was already arranged in the order the final listing would
take, I began the laborious process of transferring information from the record sleeves to
the computer, one record at a time. This was fairly mindless work, but satisfying in its
own way, as I reacquainted myself with music I hadn't thought about in years.
This basic list of "core" music took several
weeks to complete, but it was only the first step. The next was to intersperse these
listings with songs in other formats. The 78s were arranged in a similar order, so simply
dropping those listings in-between the ones already in the computer was no real problem,
particularly as I had been fairly ruthless in deciding which ones to reject. The LPs by
individual artists were also alphabetical, and could be incorporated by the same method,
although going through all the records to discover which ones might contain appropriate
music, and then checking various reference sources to see which songs actually made the
charts, took more time than building the original basic list.
The oldies collections were slightly more complicated
because there was no order to them. The simplest way to include them, I found, was to list
the songs in whatever order they occurred, then arrange them in alphabetical order in the
computer. Then each entry could be dropped into its appropriate place in the list.
Finally, the handful of songs I owned that had been reissued on compact disc was
incorporated. Once this had been done, the master list was complete, at least as far as
titles and artists were concerned.
Now came what was to be the trickiest part of the whole
project: dating the recordings. The majority of 45s presented no problem, because I had
always noted the year on each filing sleeve when I bought a record, and I simply entered
this when making the basic list. I knew that these years might vary a bit from the
reference books, some of which dated recordings by their time of release, while others
went by their appearance on the charts. In any event, songs were inclined to become
popular at different times in different regions, especially in the 1950s and early 1960s.
My own dating system tended to reflect when I bought a record, which usually coincided
with its first appearance on the radio in my area. Also, the earliest 45s were purchased
before I had set up an organized filing system, and had therefore been dated after the
fact -- quite accurately, as it turns out, because I could relate most of them to
particular events or people. Overall, I decided that an accuracy of plus-or-minus one year
was as close as I was likely to get.
During the period covered by my catalog, record companies
were notorious for not dating their products, which posed some problems,
particularly with lesser-known songs. Major hits are well documented elsewhere, however,
so the majority of the records I hadn't dated myself -- songs on LPs, for instance --
could be found in reference books, and this allowed not only their dating but their
identification as hits as well. The reissued 45s often bore original release dates, and
the very fact that they had been re-released I took as proof that they qualified. For
regional hits, I went through a carefully preserved stack of hit-parade charts published
by a local radio station during the period.
After all that, I had managed to date all but about 20
recordings in the list, mostly from the early 1950s. For these, I found I had to resort to
a sort of "disc archaeology:" taking as many records on the same label as I
could find, I arranged them by record number, noting their dates where possible. If one of
the mystery discs had a number that fell within the series, its date could be fixed fairly
closely. Fortunately, during that period, the number of record labels was much smaller
than would later be the case, so it was reasonably simple to find enough known dates to
make the technique work. In the end I failed to date only one record, which I decided --
arbitrarily, I admit -- was sufficiently obscure as to warrant deletion.
From this point, what remained was to reorganize this
master list by date and by song title. There are undoubtedly easier ways to achieve this,
but my technique was simply one of successive deletions: to come up with all the songs for
a particular year, for example, I duplicated the main list, and then removed every record
that didn't carry that year's date, one by one. This was time-consuming but effective.
The catalog, when completed, contained just over 2000
entries in each of its three sections, was some 180 pages long, and took considerably
longer to produce than the weekend I had anticipated. But even though I am still not sure
what sort of practical use it might have, it does document an important aspect of
my life: the music of my youth. The next move will be to index the more recent part of my
collection, but that will have to wait for another weekend.
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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