Do you remember the skips?

The Radio.biz Music Blog – Entry #6

As I write this, it’s the evening of the 250th birthday of the United States. A lot has changed in 250 years, including the way we listen to music. Back in 1776, people had to gather in person—in churches, taverns, or public squares—to hear music. Today, we can ask Alexa to play just about any song ever recorded in seconds.

It made me think about how listening to music has changed just in my lifetime.

I was driving the other day and decided to listen to the Adventures in Utopia album by the band Utopia. Utopia, of course, is the band that Todd Rundgren formed in 1973. This album was released just after Christmas in 1979, and by then the band had already shifted from prog rock to a power pop quartet.

I was listening to the song “Caravan,” a seven-minute track sung by keyboardist Roger Powell. I have a fond memory of this song from Mr. Aljancic’s English Literature class in high school, when we were talking about similes. Mr. Aljancic would often let us give examples from pop culture.

I got called on to provide an example of a simile, and I used a line from “Caravan.”

I walked up to the chalkboard and wrote, “The sand is like a razor slashing at my face.”

Mr. A. was pretty cool.

Anyway, as I listened to “Caravan” in my car, it reached the end of the song, where there’s a trade-off of solos between Roger’s Moog synthesizer and Todd’s electric guitar.

Just as Roger starts his first solo, my mind immediately expects the solo to repeat—a few extra bars—before continuing.

Why? Because when I recorded the album onto a cassette in high school, the record skipped at that exact spot before I tapped the turntable to get the song moving again.

So now, whenever I hear that song, I always expect Roger’s solo to repeat for a few seconds.

Do you remember the skips?

If you’re of a certain age, you probably recorded your albums onto cassette so you could listen in your car. I’m sure that while making at least one of those recordings, the record skipped. Did you leave it like that on the cassette?

It also made me think about making mix tapes, as we did back in the day. There are still songs I hear today where, when one ends, I expect another song from a completely different artist to play immediately after—simply because I heard them in that order hundreds of times on those tapes.

Today’s playlists just aren’t the same. You can easily listen in “shuffle,” and the songs play in a different, random order every time.

And the songs never skip.

It makes me nostalgic for the connection we had with our music—and how it’s changed. If you really loved an album and wanted to make sure you could listen to it wherever you went, you had to put in some effort. You had to record it onto another medium so you could take it with you.

That is, unless you just bought it on cassette in the first place. But why would you do that when vinyl is so much more fun?

So I ask you:

Do you remember the skips?