“Three Ball Charlie” was a circus performer who could put three balls into his mouth (a tennis ball, a billiard ball, and a golf ball) side by side and whistle at the same time. His photo, with the three balls in his mouth, was what I instantly noticed when I looked at the cover of Exile On Main St., the iconic Rolling Stones’ 1972 album, for the first time.
The album cover is a famous photo by Robert Frank titled “Tattoo Parlor”, dated 1958 and likely shot at Hubert's Museum and Flea Circus, a popular dime museum1 near Times Square in New York City, where (I guess) a patchwork of photos of their most acclaimed performers (including Three Ball Charlie and, right below, Hezekiah Trambles, photographed by Diane Arbus and known as “Congo the Jungle Creep”) was posted on a wall.
In the early eighties, when I bought Exile, there was no Internet. Occasionally, if I wanted to know something about an album, I would ask around. But who knew about these things in a small town in Italy back then? Who could possibly know about Three Ball Charlie and Congo the Jungle Creep? So my curiosity had to wait a few years before I could research the album’s artwork online. And when I did, I was stunned by how much work and thinking and study and imagination went into the making of an album’s cover in the seventies, when it was the only way to communicate something about the music beyond the music itself.
I learned that Frank was already a famous photographer when he got approached by the Stones in 1972, having published “The Americans” in 1958, a groundbreaking collection of eighty-three photos that he chose among the twenty-seven thousand he took over a solo year-long road trip across the U.S., equipped with only a camera and an used Ford Coupe. I learned that “Tattoo Parlor” was an outtake, one of the twenty-seven thousand minus eighty-three photos that didn’t make it to The Americans. That John Van Hamersveld, a designer who had already worked with The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix and was hired by the Stones to put together the album package, somehow saw the photo and, together with Mick Jagger, chose it as the album’s cover image. And I learned that Exile was unlike anything the Stones had done prior, and that Jagger wanted its album cover to reflect the band as “runaway outlaws using the blues as its weapon against the world”, a “feeling of joyful isolation, grinning in the face of a scary and unknown future”. With its images of such unusual performers, likely outcasts in a world that reserved less and less space to their weird talents, Frank’s photo was perfect to convey all this. Plus, he was an exile himself (he emigrated to the U.S. from Switzerland in 1947).
Today there’s a vinyl revival. I don’t know if that's because people have re-discovered the beauty and purity of analog music, or just a fad. Maybe it’s a little of both: the quest for a superior listening experience and a nice-to-have, a whim. But when albums were the only game in town, when there were no CDs or MP3s or Spotify, owning a vinyl record was like owning a physical piece of art. It was an experience that transcended the music.
Much like with books, you could tell a person by the vinyl they owned, by the music you saw on their shelves. Albums were visible, and their degree of wear said a lot about the preferences, habits, care, and even thoughts and dreams of their owner. They were there, in plain sight, telling stories about personality traits, adventures, beliefs, identities that you would probably never be able to hear otherwise. Owning an album was clarifying and revealing -- this is me, it said, I don’t need many words and you know what I mean. And you did know, because inside that album you found music and words and art and ideas that blended to paint a picture that showed its lines and shades and colors slowly, little by little, as you listened with the album in your hands and followed the lyrics and admired the art, like invisible ink. And you could identify with that picture, it became yours, a mirror you looked yourself in.
In that world, you listened to music at home. You could tape some on a cassette and play it in your car or, later on, on a (huge) portable device, but, largely, your listening experience happened at your (or someone else’s) place. Our home had a dedicated room where mom let us keep our records and the stereo and two big speakers, and there were two couches facing each other, with a window on the side that opened on a balcony. My brother and I were the two music freaks of the family. I don’t know who we got that from, as neither dad nor mom were ever seriously into music. But for us, whenever we had some money of our own, we’d go buy records. I’d go to my favorite store, sometimes spend hours there browsing and chatting and fleetingly listening, decide on what to buy, and hurry home to lock myself in the listening room, the world outside. I’d unwrap the album, carefully (as sometimes on the plastic wrap itself there were stickers you wanted to keep), pull out the disc by holding it with my thumb on the outer rim and my middle finger on the hole at the center of the label, place it on the platter, and gently position the needle on the vinyl. It was a ritual that I would undertake with utmost concentration, as a mistake could damage the record and put me in a bad mood for days. And as the warm crackle of vinyl started, I’d relax on the couch, album in my hands, curiosity and expectations peaking. A whole unknown universe would unfold before my eyes and into my ears, and, with the help of the lyrics and the photos and (in rare circumstances) an explanatory paragraph here and there, I would try and pay attention to what it did to me: was it immediately likable, or something I had to work on?
Back then, bands used to release concept albums. A few of today’s artists have made them too, but nothing comparable to what’s been put out in the sixties and seventies. These were works unified by a theme, a common thread, a story. Within the album, tracks were put in a certain order for a reason, often never really ending but easing into the next one without interruption. Concept albums were organic, complex masterpieces where music and words merged in a cohesive and coherent whole, much like operas. They were hard to understand without context, especially for non-english speaking listeners (as I pretty much was at the time). Most of my all-time favorite music experiences originated from concept albums. And I had to work on them, they were definitely not immediately likable. It was difficult music. Difficult, but extraordinary. My first reaction would typically be a “what was that?”. But I knew that if I kept at it and listened over and over again and tried to understand the artist’s true message, a whole new world would open up and enrich my senses. Iconic albums like Genesis’ The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, or Pink Floyd’s The Wall, or The Who’s Tommy and Quadrophenia, or Frank Zappa’s Joe’s Garage, or The Beatles’ Stg. Pepper’s are still unrivaled treasures to this day.
So, listening to music was a completely different experience in that analog world. Something that you dedicated yourself to, where you paid attention, like going to a museum or to a theater play. Something mysteriously engaging and physical and visible. By making music portable and ubiquitous, digitalization turned it into a casual experience, something to do while doing something else. A soundtrack. Something invisible. But as much as I believe that that analog listening experience was awesome and unique and unreplicable, something was missing. Albums were a great means to understand more about the artists and their creative process, to try and look past the music into a world that was light years away from mine. These were heroes to me, hardly human beings floating in a parallel universe, where time and space had different meanings and existence had a different cadence. Who were those people? Did they really exist? Where were they? Did they have a family and a normal life? What did they think about the world?
It wasn’t until YouTube came along, many years later, that my favorite singers and musicians acquired a human dimension to me. Granted, the advent of YouTube coincided with a substantial improvement of my English, but still. And so my life turned into an endless journey of discovery of the gigantic body of video material available out there. I started to watch interviews, documentaries, and any type of non-music footage of my favorite bands and singers and musicians, non-stop. I wanted to go beyond the music and get to know these people, their histories and lives and thoughts. I wasn’t (and still am not) really interested in music videos. I’ve always thought they don’t add anything compelling to the experience, and that they are devices to help those with a lazy imagination visualize a story associated with the music. By telling just one story, the one filmed in the video, I see them as constraining and limiting tools.
So I watched and watched and found out that my heroes were normal people. They lived privileged lives, but they were human, vulnerable, fearful, dubious, emotional beings like the rest of us. And so many questions I’d had for years on their work and their view of the world and their creative process now had answers. Beautiful, intriguing, unexpected, thought-provoking answers that revealed something surprising to me back then: these people were dedicated, hard-working, serious professionals religiously devoted to their craft. They were detail-oriented, careful, and meticulous. They took their spouses and children on tour with them, had friends and were serious about their health. I learned about their political views, their hopes and dreams, their regrets. I learned about their own musical tastes and the artists they liked and endorsed. I learned about the lives of the ones who left this world too early, the Kurt Cobains, the Janis Joplins, the Jim Morrisons, the Jimi Hendrixes. Some of them were insecure, unhappy victims of their own success. Others had solid principles but were emotionally weak. All of them were human.
I didn’t take my vinyl collection with me when I moved out of my folks’. They’re all still there, on the same shelves, in the same pieces of furniture. Romantically, I like to think that they belong to a period of my life that no longer exists. A world that no longer exists. And if I ever want to listen to them, I’d do it there, in the listening room, on the same old turntable, through the same old speakers, I say to myself. But why would I want to listen to them, if I can easily hear the same music anywhere, anytime, by just tapping on a phone screen? Why would I want to reproduce a listening experience that has no reason to exist today without the mystery, the unknown, the fantasy necessary to unleash its magical power?
The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind, sang Bob Dylan.
Sometimes I picture all my records there sleeping, waiting for someone to go wake them and make them spin again. I imagine Three Ball Charlie on the worn cover of my Exile copy coming alive and wondering why, all these years, nobody has looked at him again with the same curiosity and amazement. One day I’ll go get them all, I often think. And pretend it’s the early eighties again.
This piece was promoted by Rachael Tiss. She asked me to write about my perspective on advancements in music listening technology and how my personal experiences shaped such perspective, and I thought the subject would blend well with some reflections on vinyl and album covers and how listening to music has changed over time for me.
Welcome to all new subscribers! I’m glad you’re here. Please leave a comment, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this piece and this newsletter and the universe and the future of mankind and what have you.
If you liked what you read, it would mean the world to me if you shared it.
And if you’re not yet a subscriber and just stumbled upon this page because someone shared it or by divine intervention, and you liked it, please do subscribe to receive my writing every Wednesday in your inbox.
Dime museums -- I learned -- were centers for entertainment and moral education for the working class (lowbrow, as opposed to highbrow, which were upper middle class cultural events) around the end of the 19th century. In places with a strong inflow of immigrants like New York City, dime museums were popular and cheap entertainment.
Awww the physical dimension of analogue music! Love the personal part blending into the history of music listening technology, and the vinyl part really speaks a lot about the physicality of the abstract form of music. One reason for the vinyl revival, as I suspect, is the visual arts. There's a lot more space for the album cover and just looks good!
Silvio, you have such a beautiful facility with conveying nostalgia with the uniqueness of your personal autobiography. Reading your writing seems reminiscent of watching VHS home video and the distinctive crackling of vinyl. It really feels like a kind of time travel interposed with your sagacious commentary. Thanks!