Saturday, September 19, 2009

Inserts



Most of my worldwide agents seemed to know what these weird object were but a few didn't which really impressed me. I actually had some obscure pop cultural knowledge that has missed the radar of those 'know-it-all" young punks (who I still love). Maybe these next two pictures will give you a clue.





Because the '45' (one of three standard sizes of records) had a large opening in the middle they required these pieces of metal or plastic to allow them to be played on the same players as regular records with their smaller middle hole. Back before time when we rode our dinosaurs to the record story, you could buy a smaller one song version of vinyl records that we called a '45' for the speed the record player had to be at to hear the songs on '45' correctly. Larger, older, thicker records played at '78' speed and the regular modern albums played at '33 1/3' speed. The speed was measured in RPMs or Revolutions Per Minute. Every record player was equipped to handle all three speeds if they were any good. But you could have a special one that ONLY played '45's and they were usually adorned with images of children's character or in my case superheroes and came in a case you could close and carry around with you. The day when I was six and my mother bought me a Superman '45' record player and all those superhero book/record sets was on the great times in my life. Many a later rock star can be proud to know that Superman also supported their efforts when the craze for '45's was going strong in the 70s.







2 comments:

Wings1295 said...

Good memories there, Cal.

Here is a pic of the record player I had as a kid/young teen. This pic was found on the net, my player is long gone... Wings' Old Timey Music Machine

Booksteve said...

I actually never saw or needed those as every record player I ever had from my Mickey Mouse kiddie player to my 8 track/record player and beyond came pre-equipped to play 45's with a pull-up thingie.I first saw pictures of the adaptors when I was in my late teens and I was like, WTF?