Ancient machines: The phonograph

We continue our series on 20th-century archaeology with a look at early devices for listening to music. In the darkest 1970s, when the adjective "groovy" was still in use and people thought reversing syllables to produce terms like "jeproks" (from Projects) and "bomalabs" (malabo, unclear) was cool, music was stored on flat vinyl discs called records.

Records came in large and small formats. The large ones were called "long-playing albums" or 33’s (as in revolutions per minute) — they were about 12 inches in diameter and contained an album’s worth of songs, five or six on each side. The small ones were "singles" or 45’s. They contained one song on each side, the hit song on the A-side. (Some of these terms are still in use today, but they no longer pertain to records.) Records were played on analog machines called "phonographs," also known as "turntables" because that’s essentially what they were. The record was placed on a spinning platform, then a metal arm with a needle was lowered onto the edge of the vinyl. With a faint hiss and scraping noise, the music would begin to play. As children we were warned not to drag the needle across the vinyl, or else the record would be scratched and we would get a spanking (In the ’70s, corporal punishment was widely administered, even in some schools). As adults now, we watch as DJs routinely scratch and scrape their records, and we feel slightly cheated.

In many middle-class households, phonographs were stored in wooden cabinets with large speakers. They were generically known as "stereos." These stereos played the music of Burt Bacharach, the Ray Conniff Singers, or Sergio Mendez at the adults’ parties. The adults in their highly flammable polyester outfits, their hair cemented into place with hairsprays that would eventually cause those holes in the ozone layer, would cluster around the stereo, holding their drinks, and swaying to the music. This was considered the height of sophistication.

When the adults were at work, we employed these ancient sound systems to play Shaun Cassidy and Leif Garrett records. Our older cousins bought dance albums which had illustrated manuals for doing the Salsa and other popular dance steps. I remember an aunt being scandalized by the photos on the instruction sheet because the boy dancer’s crotch was against the girl dancer’s crotch. Ah, the innocence of the martial law era. That’s called irony, by the way.

When our parents weren’t looking, we would entertain ourselves by playing records at the wrong speeds. A Frank Sinatra long-playing record played at 45 or 78 rpm sounded like the Chipmunks on helium, and that’s all we needed to become hysterical with laughter.

The alternative medium for storing music was tape. Initially it came in huge reels, but it gradually shrank until it could fit in a small plastic box called a "cassette." Early cassettes were about the size of a paperback novel, and were also known as "eight-track." Cassette players, also known as tape recorders because they could capture and store sound, were more convenient and portable than phonographs. You couldn’t mount a phonograph on the dashboard of a passenger jeepney. Not only would the records skip, but there was the danger that at every pothole or sharp turn, the record would fly off the turntable and decapitate some hapless passenger. So cassette players became the favorite music-purveying machine of drivers of public transportation.

In the 1980s, jeepneys became moving torture chambers in which passengers were assaulted nonstop by the drivers’ playlists. The staples of these playlists were Queen, Abba, the Scorpions and Nazareth. I do not recall ever riding a jeep in which Nazareth’s Love Hurts wasn’t blasting the eardrums out of my head. The driver’s music library would be arranged in stacks on the dashboard. Often the stacks would be so high that between the tops of the cassettes and the edge of the crocheted "God Knows Hudas Not Pay" curtain on the windshield, there would be an inch of glass left for the driver to see through. His visibility thus impaired, the driver would have to lean out of the jeep in order to navigate. This did not seem to trouble him, as he would frequently turn around in his seat to collect the passengers’ fares while the jeep was in motion.

The volume, bass and treble settings on the jeeps’ stereo system would be cranked all the way up; a few minutes into your journey, your brain would begin leaking out of your nose. It was pointless to request the driver to turn down the music — he would not hear you over the chords of Bohemian Rhapsody. I suspect that if he did hear you, he would not take kindly to having his taste in music questioned. So you tried to shut out the screeching vocals, the treble shredding your nerves, and the bass pounding the back of your skull. You turned your attention to the posters stuck to the walls and ceiling of the jeepney — dogs playing billiards, naked women draped on motorcycles, the actress Phoebe Cates — as the moving torture chamber careened to its destination, its driver dangling halfway out the door.

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