Singles: Do you remember 45's?

Trapped in a box for years and years, they still play!

They were held captive, tossed together in a plastic leather case in my garage, left alone to speak amongst themselves, to wonder why fate had frowned on them so.

There was a time when jukeboxes all across the world clamored for them, sometimes on a weekly basis. Chuck Berry wrote songs about them, music fans collected them by the score. Elvis Presley got started with one. Then Carl Perkins. And everybody hopped on the train.

Heck, The Beatles’ producer George Martin kept two of their greatest songs off maybe their greatest album so he could release a two-sided single, maybe the all-time champion of singles or 45’s; “Penny Lane” b/w “Strawberry Fields Forever.”

Sure enough, your correspondent, growing up in the 60’s and 70’s — those that agree I grew up at all — collected singles, too. But I must confess until this rainy afternoon, I have ignored them all these years. I knew I had ‘em, had another separate box of Elvis Presley 45’s that I’ll get to another day.

Singles! Remember them? 45 RPM records! They still play!!!

But I sat down with them today, apologized and dusted a few off just to see if they still had some life in them. And they weren’t mad, didn’t pout, those vinyl grooves seemed so damn happy to be singing out to the world once again. And they played just as well as when I first got them.

Why, here’s Roy Orbison with “Pretty Woman” — his absolute, stone-cold smash that knocked The Animals’ “House Of The Rising Sun” out of the top spot in late September and ruled the top spot for three weeks. That beginning…the drum beat and the unmistakable guitar figure…gotta be one of the greatest songs of the last 60 years, right, Mike?

Then here’s “Happy” with Keith Richards telling Mick Jagger to shove over, let ME sing this one. And the single sleeve, a Rolling Stones’ single sleeve and check out the price. $.69! Can you believe it?

And here’s a fabulous Big Country single, “Where The Rose Is Sown” a fantastic song from “Steeltown” on Side A and their really cool cover of Roxy Music’s “Prairie Rose,” one of the best tracks off my favorite Roxy album, “Country Life.” They just never quite hit it big here, unfortunately. Peers of U2, maybe the boys from Ireland were just so relentless, there wasn’t enough room on the charts or something or maybe American ears can only handle one fabulous European band at a time.

Speaking of U2, when they had their smash “Joshua Tree” album — I got to see the first and third shows of that tour in Worcester, Massachusetts (FABULOUS!) — they were on such a roll, they released a bunch of picture singles. I got them all and particularly loved “With Or Without You” on the A side, “Luminous Times” and the absolutely stunning “Walk To The Water’ on the flip. They didn’t sound like B-Sides to me.

And of course, we have a Bob Dylan single that is one of those cuts that makes his fans and likely his producers, too throw up their hands and his decision NOT to include the cut on the “Shot Of Love” album he was recording at the time. One of the rockingest tracks in all of Bob’s history, “The Groom’s Still Waiting At The Altar” is so damn good, once I’d heard it somewhere, maybe on WBCN, I had to get the single which I think I did at the Harvard Coop, a picture-single backed with “Heart Of Mine.” Good song but “Groom” is so good, it was wise of Columbia to include it on “Biograph” in 1985, a fine collection of Dylan cuts, some choice cuts that included a handful of fabulous tracks that Bob said “Nah…leave it off the album.”

Over the years, there ended up being so many of those sorts of leftover tracks, Columbia came up with an entire Bootleg Series of live and discarded, stashed away tracks, now up to Volume 17.

I wrote about Roxy Music the other day and of course, lead singer and principal songwriter Bryan Ferry had himself a solo career, too. And his EP, an Extended Play single with four tracks from an upcoming album, an amazing Everly Brothers’ cover “The Price Of Love,” a bluesy Jimmy Reed cover “Shame, Shame, Shame,” a Gallagher and Lyle cover that is just beautiful, “Heart On My Sleeve.” The four-song EP ends with an inventive cover of “It’s Only Love,” by these little-known fellas from Liverpool who used to go by “The Silver Beatles.” Thank God, they changed their name, huh?

Perhaps the prize possession of all these 45’s is this, unassuming Columbia record 45 4-43683 - 5:36 seconds of Bob Dylan and The Hawks from Liverpool, England on that raucous Dylan/Hawks World Tour of 1966, the first and for the longest time the only audio evidence of the brilliance of Dylan and The Hawks (later The Band) across European stages, shows that set the musical world ablaze.

I bought this 45 at a little dinky convenience store in Milford, New Hampshire that was run by a fast-talking, cigar-smoking guy who certainly would have tripled the price had he known what he had. But he didn’t. And when I got home and played it, I knew that I just had to find a way to hear more of the music from that amazing tour. The great Dylan expert Michael Gray, who was at that show, has written that it was the single-greatest performance of Dylan’s career. And I got it for under a buck.

Years later, I was able to get a bootleg copy of Dylan and The Hawks at The Royal Albert Hall (turned out it was actually the Manchester Trade Hall) and this was the famous “Judas” concert. The quality of the bootleg that I bought in Philadelphia’s late, lamented Third Street Jazz and Rock Shop, was beyond what I could have expected.

So it was pretty cool many years later when Columbia decided to release a 36-CD set of that whole World Tour. Of course, I bought it, listened to every CD and compared the Manchester CD with my bootleg version. Pretty cool. Don’t know why it took Columbia so damn long to release it. Bob has never been more into the shows. Or better.

All in all, it was a nice afternoon, getting reacquainted with these old singles. There’s many more. And I promised the lot of them, we’d do this again. Real soon.