Ziggy played for time.....

Trevor Bolder has died. Trevor was a member of The Spiders from Mars and played bass on these albums and, obviously, on "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars". I didn't include that as I wanted to show more of these two covers.

I decided on this blip as soon as I heard the news last night. It gave me an excuse to find the albums and in doing that I had to go through some of the other LPs in my aging collection. It gave me an opportunity to marvel again at the quality of the album art - isn't Aladdin Sane simply stunning? Still, after all these years? In there is the first album I bought, another Bowie; 2001 a space oddity, and the second which is Alice Cooper's School's Out with the desk design. I still have a turntable on which to play these - I recently saw a turntable described as a "vinyl player", I suppose this is a retro-fit to align it with cassette player and CD player but it's still a turntable to me. I also got to thinking about the process of going to a shop and parting with real money and then getting home and breaking the seal on the packaging so that I could hear the music for the first time while poring over the sleeve notes. These included the famous "And nobody played synthesizer" on the early Queen albums and often the words to all the songs. The Bruce Spingsteen Live (1975 - 85) box set has a sumptuous booklet with lyrics and comments from Bruce and photos from concerts. The Who Live at Leeds has copies of the ticket stubs and letters from the band's manager and other ephemera that made the album contents interesting while the music blew me away; I saw The Who live in 1976. For those too young to know - a vinyl album is about 12 inches across.

Now I usually access music online and download it. It's instant gratification and the transaction is done virtually; a charge on my bank statement. This is all well and good but a great distance from how it was when I were a lad and far less of an "event".

Thanks for the music Trevor and for the wander down memory lane.