The 20th birthday re-release of Nirvana’s Nevermind wasn’t the only major reissue this week. An album that originally appeared in 1973 and has become one of rock music’s most famous works has also been repackaged in a variety of specially priced editions to commemorate it’s, er, 38th anniversary. Hey, the music industry is feeling the pinch more than most and it could be a lot worse by 2013. Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon arrived towards the latter half of rock’s second decade but, more significantly, during the first decade of the rock album. From the outset, rock music was all about the 7″. Albums were merely a collection of half a dozen singles padded out with inferior material. It wasn’t until the mid-sixties that the rock album became a consistent collection of original songs that could be listened to from beginning to end. Artists like Bob Dylan, The Beatles and even The Beach Boys released records that put popular music on a par with such supposedly more worthy styles as classical and jazz. In addition, the likes of Pet Sounds and, particularly, Sgt Pepper contained songs that were held together by a common theme in a similar fashion to such works as Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and the thematic LPs that Frank Sinatra released on Capitol during the 1950s
