DJ Sue's Vinyl Siding

Every Monday night, from 7-9 PM, I will be presenting DJ Sue’s Vinyl Siding.

Back in the late 60’s and 70’s, we had vinyl LP records.  This was before iPods, CD’s, and randomized favorites.  There simply was no way to put together a playlist.  If you wanted to hear a Led Zeppelin tune you needed to get the record out and remove it from both the outer and inner sleeves.  Then you placed it on the turntable and cleaned it.  After that, you picked up the tonearm and placed it delicately onto the portion of the record that held song.  After the song played through, if you wanted to hear a Stones song next, you had to get up, walk to the turntable, put Led Zeppelin away and then repeat the process with another record.  It was all time consuming.

There was one obvious solution and that was to play the album side all of the way through.  This way you could go maybe 18 minutes before attending to the music.  There was just one problem, there was usually a song or two that really weren’t worth listening to or were just not ones you liked.  Some of us would just suffer through those songs, while others would get up, lift the tonearm and move it forward beyond the unwanted cut.

Every so often, we would discover an album side on which every song was a winner.  Those would be joys to play and we would often put those special sides of our vinyl LP records on when we were working on something or we had a party going on.  While we might play both sides, we seldom did. After 18 minutes we were usually ready for a new band or artist.

DJ Sue’s Vinyl siding does not involve home improvement contracting, but revisits that era where the quest for the perfect album side reigned.  I’ll be presenting those album sides that were popular because you could drop the needle at the beginning and play the whole side through.

Every Monday night I will feature 4 complete vinyl album sides by 4 different artists.  (On the first Monday of each month, I only do a 90 minute set do to the AWT Concert Series.  Those Mondays I will only do 3 sides.)  Hope to see you there.