And now for something completely different: a post about what we won’t be doing here this week.

First: today is Vinyl Record Day, the 132nd anniversary of the invention of the phonograph. In 2007 and 2008, I coordinated a celebratory event with contributing blogs from everywhere. This year, my lone contribution to the day is at WNEW.com, although I expect some of the bloggers who participated in the Vinyl Record Day observance the last couple of years will have things to say today as well. (You can find links to those blogs via the 2008 blogswarm posts here and the 2007 posts here.)

Second: the 40th anniversary of Woodstock is this weekend. I won’t be writing about it here, because I haven’t got anything else to say about it. At WNEW.com, I wrote about it last year, and I revisited the various Woodstock anniversary concerts earlier this year. (The Research Garage is all over it, however.) I am interested in attempts to find one or more of the babies allegedly born during the festival, although I don’t believe anyone’s come forward yet.

We’ve been awash in 40th anniversaries lately—the Stonewall Riots, Chappaquiddick, the Apollo 11 landing, the Tate/LaBianca murders, the shooting of the Abbey Road cover photo. And after Woodstock, there are the anniversaries Hurricane Camille, the My Lai massacre, the Chicago Eight trial and the Days of Rage, the Miracle Mets, Altamont. . . . You could say that the hits just keep on comin’.

Here’s something tenuously related to thoughts about the passage of time: Steely Dan is out on tour again this summer, and they’ve unveiled a new arrangement of a classic track. I don’t think it’s particularly great, but it’s damn sure different, and I admire the band’s efforts to freshen up the stuff they’ve been playing since the 70s. (The Eagles ought to try it.)

I’ve removed the title from the mp3 tag so you’ll have to listen to it to find out what it is.

Steely Dan mystery track, live in Italy 2009 (bootleg)

I’m taking the day off today and letting some of my favorite bloggers do the heavy lifting instead.

–Any Major Dude With Half a Heart recognizes the greatness of early 70s soul.

–At Bloggerhythms, Charlie picks 10 lesser-known/underrated Beatles songs.

–Barely Awake in Frog Pajamas welcomes you to July 36th.

–SHHH/Peaceful breaks down the American Top 40 broadcast from July 26, 1980.

–The latest entry in the annals of dumb corporate marketing decisions: Radio Shack dropping “radio” from its name. At Inside Music Media, Jerry Del Colliano finds a parallel in the radio industry itself.

–From Cracked, “Seven Songs From Your Grandpa’s Day That Would Make Eminem Blush.” For aficionados of the dirty blues, and not safe for work.

–Yesterday at WNEW.com, I wrote about the history of American Bandstand.

Also, if you have never been over to the Research Garage, check it out today, since there’s nothing more to see here.

Except this: I have recently received a couple of inquiries from fellow bloggers about a Vinyl Record Day event for this year. We have celebrated VRD the last couple of years on August 12 with a blogswarm, coordinated by me, but I’m not doing it this year. While I’m completely in favor of the celebration and preservation of music on vinyl, its up to the VRD Foundation to promote its own event. If it will.

I’m still coming down from Vinyl Record Day. (Perhaps I’m stoned on the fluid I sometimes use to clean the most stubbornly dirty discs in my library, but I don’t think so.) It was tremendously entertaining and endlessly fascinating to see how the different bloggers involved responded to a pretty simple challenge: Write something about vinyl. One thing’s clear: You probably know a bit more about each of us as people than you did before. That’s one of the unexpected side benefits of blogging, I find—the way people become almost three-dimensional to you based on what they write about, how they write about it, and the music they listen to.

The only one of the Vinyl Record Day bloggers I’ve met in the real world is Willie of Davewillieradio, whom I’ve known for nearly 30 years. (Closed circuit to Willie: Christ, we’re old.) Jeff of AM, Then FM is located a few hours away from me in Green Bay, but we’ve never met. True story: Years ago, Jeff published an e-mail newsletter about the Green Bay Packers. I was a subscriber from 1996 until he discontinued it earlier this decade. Sometime in 2005, he found his way to this blog and left a comment. When I figured out he was the same Jeff of newsletter fame, it was a weird sensation. Who knew the World Wide Web would turn out to be like a small town?

The rest of the participants are scattered across the United States from California to New York, in the UK, and even in Germany. (Did I miss any other countries?) There’s no guarantee that we’ll meet in the real world, although I am guessing if any of us got together in a barroom with a respectable beer list and/or a respectable jukebox, the staff would be turning on the lights and putting the chairs up before we were ready to leave. But even if our relationships stay virtual, we’re all inaugural members of the Vinyl Record Appreciation Society, the new category on my blogroll. And I think that when next August 12 rolls around, we’ll swarm again.

And Now, Music: By definition, vinyl collectors in a digital world tend to prize the rare and obscure, if only because we’ve already bought all the widely available and famous. I found a couple of things in the digital world yesterday that I’ve been looking for a long time. Coincidentally, both bands have numbers instead of names. The first one, 707, was on the radio 25 years ago this week. If you saw REO Speedwagon on tour in 1981, you may have seen 707 also, since they opened many of the shows on that tour. Their song “Mega Force” peaked at Number 62 in Billboard on July 31, 1982, and youi’d be forgiven for thinking it was by Journey. The second obscurity is a single from 1979 that missed the Hot 100 entirely. The group was called 1994, and it circled in Aerosmith’s orbit. Brad Whitford reportedly played some live gigs with them, and their two albums were produced by longtime Aerosmith producer Jack Douglas. We didn’t play their record for very long on our college radio station—just long enough for the hook to embed itself in my brain, where it’s stayed for 28 years. It isn’t as great as I remembered, but it’s such a rare bit of brain-fuzz that I decided to post it anyhow.

I bet Willie remembers it.

“Please Stand By”/1994 (1994’s debut album is in print, but Please Stand By appears not to be. There are a few copies at eBay.)

“Mega Force”/707 (buy it here)

(Final update.)

Today (Sunday, August 12) is Vinyl Record Day, the anniversary of the date in 1877 on which Edison invented the phonograph, and focus of an effort to preserve and celebrate vinyl as a music medium. This weekend, a crateful of music bloggers is banding together to celebrate Vinyl Record Day. Visit them all; you won’t be sorry. Some of them have put up multiple posts, because once you start, it feels too good to stop.

• Flea Market Funk’s DJ Prestige observes a scene of domestic disharmony while crate-digging
• At Echoes in the Wind, Whiteray runs through his vinyl collection by the numbers
• At Funky16Corners, Larry tells about his early adventures in flea marketing
• Davewillieradio says not even Dr. Phil can cure the love of vinyl, and you can download a podcast that proves it
• Homercat at Good Rockin’ Tonight attends a vinyl barbecue
• Py Korry mixes six vinyl tracks, including one from a three-sided album
• It’s a twofer from It’s Great Shakes—Todd was inspired to do his first podcast, and Brian writes about learning to love soul music in the hospital
• At Ickmusic, Pete does the Tube Snake Boogie and shows that he’s raising his daughters right (Link wasn’t working before. It’s fixed now.)
• Jefitoblog offers the self-described “lamest post” of the whole swarm
• Vincent brings big Fufu: at Fufu Stew, he plays back some of the first records he ever laid hands on, while at Fufu Snax, he plays some of the first records he ever bought (One of them is my favorite song of all time; there’s more Fufu below.)
• At Lost in the 80s, go vinyl-shopping with John—but be careful what you buy
• At Three-Sixty-Five45s, Dave discovers jazz, thanks to Mr. C
• Everybody’s collection started somewhere; Doug at the Underground Vault of Records, Music, and All Kinds of Stuff started with the Batman theme
• At AM, Then FM, it’s seeds and stems and Shaft, and AC/DC in an 82-year-old man’s closet
• At The “B” Side, Red gives us an example of what Vinyl Record Day is all about
• At In Dangerous Rhythm, read about the Skeleton in Colin’s past—and dig not one, but two special Vinyl Record Day mixes
• You Must Be From Away explains how listening to vinyl keeps you healthy, and hints that Shellac Record Day should be next
• At Got the Fever, Kevin gazes at album covers
• Retro Remixes revists the heyday of the club DJs and pays further homage to its reigning goddess
• Bloggerhythms classes up the joint with A Child’s Introduction to the Orchestra
• The Stepfather of Soul reveals how he became the Stepfather of Soul
• And The Hits Just Keep on Comin’ gasses on about something

We’ll give the last word on Vinyl Record Day (on what is still Sunday afternoon here in the States) to Vincent at Fufu Stew, who put up an additional post memorializing his favorite vinyl shopping haunts from days gone by. To that list I could add places like S&O TV, Gibson’s Discount Store, and Victrola—and you probably have yours as well. (Some of the participating bloggers mentioned their favorite stores in their posts. If you’d like to add yours, put ‘em in the comments.)

They said the Internet would make us into all loners—but this event proves that there’s a strong community of vinyl-heads out there, in several countries, on at least two continents. It’s been a blast for me to correspond with all the participants over the last few weeks, and to read what everyone’s contributed. My thanks to everybody who wrote, and to everybody who’s reading. We’ll do this again sometime, guaranteed.

Happy Vinyl Record Day weekend to all. Many music blogs around the web are participating in a blogswarm dedicated to the celebration and preservation of vinyl as a recording medium. (Links to the other participating blogs are here.) Also, my radio station, 93.1 The Lake in Madison, is playing classic album sides straight off the vinyl at the top of every hour through the weekend. (Modesty forbids me to mention that it was my idea.) I’ll be on the air there from 8-11am Saturday and 10a-2p Sunday, US Central, so tune in for the snap, crackle, and pop. We now return to the blogswarm, already in progress.

The 45s I play in my earliest memories of vinyl belonged to my father. Like record buyers everywhere, he bought what he liked the most, so his collection featured a lot of polka bands famed throughout the Upper Midwest circa 1950. (His collection also contained the first Spike Jones records I ever heard.) But 15 years removed from when they’d been purchased, he passed them on to his kids. I suppose Dad considered his records childish things he had put aside to raise his family, so what did it matter if we enjoyed them?

Some of Dad’s records were on green, blue, or red vinyl, as much fun to hold up to the light as they were to play. I got down close to them as they spun on Dad’s old portable, watching the grooves flow under the needle, all the way to the end. I put my ear close to the speaker to hear the fade go down to nothing, and it wasn’t long before I figured out that you could tell whether the music was loud or soft by the look of the grooves.

Dad’s portable seemed like the ultimate smart machine. Imagine knowing when a record was done and it was time to drop the next one to play, without my having to do a thing! And the audio experience provided by the changer was more than merely musical. There was the click of the mechanism and the instant silence that followed as the tonearm lifted off the record, a whap as it swung smartly out of the way, the ka-chunk of the next record dropping, and another whap as the tonearm moved back into place. Then the needle touched the vinyl again, yielding not sound, not yet, but not quite silence either, until it bit the first groove and the next three minutes of music began. I soon realized that the big console stereo in the living room moved in a much different way than the portable did. The console, with its slimmer, more delicate, slower-moving tonearm, was like an artist, a ballerina maybe, or someone who was slowly and deliberately bringing forth things of beauty, anyhow. The portable loaded and unloaded records one after the other like a burly driver running a delivery route—which, it occurs to me, is not a bad metaphor for the perceived aesthetic differences between albums and 45s at the time I was noticing the difference.

When I was 10, I started buying my own 45s, and they reflected the famous bands of my time. I preferred the Partridge Family to Lawrence Duchow’s Red Raven Orchestra (in the Midwest, considered second only to Lawrence Welk for dance-band pre-eminence in the late 40s), but I never stopped listening to my father’s music, either. Our local radio station, WEKZ, programmed a lot of it—had I gotten the first radio job I ever wanted, I would likely have hosted the polka show at WEKZ from time to time. I probably heard a polka or two nearly every day the entire time I lived at home, until I left for good at age 20.

And when I left home, I took a few of Dad’s 45s with me. Mostly the Spike Jones records.

Since I am guessing you aren’t dying to hear a polka by Whoopee John, Frankie Yankovic, or Louie Bashell and His Silk Umbrella Orchestra, I’ll post something else from Dad’s collection. It’s catchy (and scratchy off the vinyl), but it’s extremely uncharacteristic of the rest of his collection. Former big-band singer Ella Mae Morse scored a few modest hits on her own between 1943 and 1946, and a few more in 1952 and 1953. Since Dad is the son of a dairy farmer who grew up to be a dairy farmer himself, I could have understood it had he bought the other record for which Morse is remembered, the one she sang with Freddie Slack and His Orchestra in 1942—”Cow Cow Boogie.” But this ain’t that. It’s the biggest hit of her career, “The Blacksmith Blues” (which is not really a blues at all, and on which she is backed by the Nelson Riddle Orchestra), from 1953. The first second is clipped from the mp3, but it occurs to me that it probably doesn’t matter. It’s vinyl, after all.

“The Blacksmith Blues”/Ella Mae Morse (buy it here)

On vacation last week, I read Dirty Little Secrets of the Music Business: Why So Much Music You Hear Sucks by Hank Bordowitz. I could blog on it from now until St. Swithin’s Day, but I’ll talk about just one bit of it instead. Bordowitz quotes research from Ed Christman at Billboard, who likes to figure out just what percentage of the music released in a typical year actually sells. He uses data from SoundScan, which ticks off a number every time a CD is scanned at the register, like the odometer in your car. In 2005, over 60,000 new albums were released. These new releases accounted for 243.1 million of the 618 million albums sold that year. But of those 60,000 releases:

32 sold a million copies or more
62 sold between a half-million and a million
103 sold between a quarter and a half-million
213 sold a minimum of 100,000 but not more than a quarter-million

That’s 410 albums accounting for 169.2 million copies sold. The math works out like this: That year, 0.7 percent of new releases accounted for 70 percent of new-release sales that year, and 27 percent of everything the record industry sold. These numbers help explain why there’s so little innovation among the major labels—why the flavor du jour tends to get recycled until it’s like homeopathic soup. In other words, why so much of the music you hear sucks. In his book, Bordowitz explores the meaning of these numbers in greater detail, along with plenty of other interesting topics. (Fans of this blog are likely to be quite interested in the section titled “The Messy Suicide of Commercial Radio.”) Casual listener or music junkie, you’ll find something in the book that interests you.

If there’s any justice in the world, the new album by Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, This Is Somewhere, will become one of the million-sellers of 2007. Today is the album’s official release date. Thanks to the people at Situation Rocks, I got my copy a couple of weeks ago, and I’m recommending that you get yours any way you can, even if it means spending the baby’s milk money. As good as Nothing But the Water was, This Is Somewhere is better—better singin’, better playin’, better songs. To quote our friend Homercat (who first turned me on to Grace in 2006), “That voice slays me, and I have never heard a Hammond B3 sound so damn sexy.”

I don’t know if the Grace Potter album is going to be available on vinyl. Certain new releases are still released and/or available in the mother format, but not many: The dollar value of all the vinyl singles and albums shipped in 2006 was about 37.5 million, according to the RIAA. That’s something like 0.4 percent of all the music sold, down by almost half over the 2005 figures. Vinyl may be growing scarce in the marketplace, but it’s still important—the vast majority of the music made in the 20th century is, after all, unavailable on CD, only in vinyl versions. This coming weekend, as you may know already, a number of music blogs (including this one) are banding together to celebrate Vinyl Record Day. The day is officially Sunday, which will be the 130th anniversary of Edison’s invention of the phonograph. Blogs planning to participate are:

AM, Then FM
Bloggerhythms
The “B” Side (just added)
Davewillieradio
Echoes in the Wind
Flea Market Funk
Fufu Stew
Funky16Corners
Good Rockin’ Tonight
Got the Fever
Ickmusic (a new addition to the list)
In Dangerous Rhythm (also new to the list)
It’s Great Shakes (new, too)
Jefitoblog
Lost in the 80s
Py Korry
Retro Remixes
The Snack Bar (new, too)
The Stepfather of Soul
Three-Sixty-Five45s (just added)
Underground Vault of Records, Music, and All Kinds of Stuff (yep, new)
You Must Be From Away (just added, too)

I’ll have my post up on Friday; some of the other posts may also appear that day, or Saturday, or Sunday. If you’d like to participate at your site, there’s still time. You don’t have to be a music blogger who posts tracks. You can be just a regular person with a website who is interested in the preservation and celebration of vinyl as a music medium. E-mail me at jbemail229-blog at yahoo dot com.

Ah Mary/Grace Potter and the Nocturnals (This is the single from the new album; although it’s been widely posted around the web lately, I’m liking it better the more I hear it, so listen already. Then buy the album at the link above.)

If you’re like me, should your house ever burn down, you’ve got enough vinyl in it to make a big, smoky fire. Thus you might be interested to know that August 12 is Vinyl Record Day. It’s the anniversary of Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877, and the focal point for an effort to preserve and promote vinyl as a music medium. To commemorate the day, I’m organizing a modest blogswarm on the subject of vinyl. So far, the following fellow vinyl-heads are planning to participate: AM Then FM, Bloggerhythms, Davewillieradio, Echoes in the Wind, Flea Market Funk, Fufu Stew, Funky16Corners, Good Rockin’ Tonight, Got the Fever, Jefitoblog, Lost in the 80s, Py Korry, Retro Remixes, and the Stepfather of Soul. I’m hoping we’ll add a few more participants as the date gets closer. (If you’ve got a blog and would like to participate, e-mail me. Find my address here.) Prepare to swarm during the weekend of August 10-12.

I mean no disrespect to the other bloggers on the list—each of whom is a fine writer and quality human being with impeccable music taste—but the involvement of Larry Grogan at Funky16Corners is really gonna class up the joint. Every music-blog reader who digs the old school is a fan of his. Last Friday, he put up one of the mightiest music blog posts I’ve read anywhere in a long time, featuring Dennis Coffey’s 1971 hit “Scorpio.” Larry’s enthusiasm for his music is always right up front, but it’s pretty clear that “Scorpio” means something extra-special to him.

For what it’s worth, the way Larry first heard “Scorpio” back in the day was pretty much the way I first heard it back in the day, and I became, for a brief time at least, a Coffey fan. Coffey’s followup to “Scorpio” was another instrumental, “Taurus,” which sounds to me now like an obvious attempt to do the same thing, only different. I didn’t care back then. I bought that one on a 45, too. Unlike “Scorpio,” which made it to Number 6 in January 1972, “Taurus” missed the Top 10, peaking at Number 18 on the Hot 100 in April 1972. Its greater achievement was bringing some fiercely slashing guitar and funky rhythm to a season in which Top 40 stations were playing “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” every 90 minutes.

“Taurus”/Dennis Coffey (This one is rare. “Taurus” itself is un-anthologized, as far as I can tell. The original album, Goin’ for Myself, is out of print, although a fabulously expensive import is available if you want it on CD. Your best bet to find it is probably eBay, although if vinyl is OK, Dusty Groove America can help.)

(Post edited to add more participating blog-swarmers.)