The Physicality of Nostalgia

 

One of the great 45 rpm label designs
(image ganked from canuckistanmusic.com
'cause my own copy is long gone)

Lately I've been reading about pop music (and despite this post's title I haven't focused exclusively on the music of my adolescence—just mostly) and one thing I read (it was a while back and I've read a lot of books during the lockdown but it was probably in David Hajdu's Love for Sale: Pop Music in America) had a sort of Proustian impact, a non-edible madeleine moment. The impact hasn't diminished in the month since I read Hajdu's book* so I thought I would noodle something about it here.

Hajdu was writing about the current state of pop music, in which songs are streamed and nobody seems to own anything, as compared with his (and my) adolescence, when one of the biggest aspects of loving music was being able to hold the record in your hand. When I read this I had a sudden flash of memory of my own early adolescence and hours spent looking at (and occasionally purchasing) 45 rpm singles from the record department of the Woolco† store at Southland Drive and MacLeod Trail in south-west Calgary.

For me (at the time, at least) it was never just about the music. I absolutely loved the single as object, and a huge part of this was in the labels. Some were better than others to my eyes (RCA was dull, Capitol—with its massive orange-yellow swirl—was much more exciting (and Capitol had both the Beatles and the Beach Boys!) and Roulette (Tommy James and the Shondells; at the time I didn't know how seriously mobbed-up that label was) was so garish it could almost induce seizures when you spun a disc. After playing a Roulette single it was almost a relief to look at the relatively sedate labels from Atlantic and its subsidiary Atco.

For me the best-looking label is the one I've chosen to illustrate this post—and I'm pretty sure it's something few non-Canadian readers could have seen. Nimbus (I also remember it as Nimbus 9) was the label used by legendary Toronto-based producer Jack Richardson. I had Nimbus singles in my collection because I was a nearly-obsessive Guess Who fan (theirs were among the first LPs I ever bought) and I was always ready to shell out my seventy cents (or whatever it was) to buy a new Guess Who single. And the colours and the graphic on the Nimbus label sang to me nearly as clearly as did Burton Cummings. Even when I'd forgotten pretty much everything about 45 rpm records I still remembered that pink-and-orange label.

I hadn't thought about any of this for decades until the Hajdu book; at one time I had hundreds of 45s, but the best of them had been played so much they wound up sounding as if one was listening to them under water, and when it became possible to replace them with CDs I did so. For another decade or so afterward I continued to lug the boxes of singles around with me from one home to the next. But eventually I got rid of them, just to free up storage space.

So now I have to use the web to remind myself of what those old labels looked like. Seems appropriate, somehow: music is mostly ephemeral now (even the music I grew up with), so it only makes sense that my nostalgia for the discs and their labels has to be virtual as well.

*Strictly speaking a re-read; I first came across the book a couple of years ago, but read it again in July as part of a binge of pop-music books. I have been tracking my reading this year, not just as pandemic therapy, and intend to do a series of posts on the list toward the end of 2020.

†I had originally published this as "Woolworth's" but I now believe that was incorrect. A bit of research (which I ought to have done before posting) shows the store was actually a Woolco... a department-store version of the Woolworth five-and-dime.