Goodbye, B-sides

The first single I ever bought -- way back in 1973.

Don’t get me wrong — I love iTunes and the ability to download almost any song that works its way into my brain almost instantly, whether it happens at noon or 4 a.m.  (Good thing I already own all the Beatles’ CDS, though.)

But this instant gratification comes at a cost that can’t be measured in dollars and cents. iTunes and other music download services have killed the B-side.

When I first became aware of music in the early 1970s, my preteen friends and I bought singles instead of albums. We wanted to listen to the same hits we heard on our favorite radio station over and over, not plod through a whole album that might feature songs we didn’t like. Besides, singles only cost a little more than a buck, so they made economical sense, too, because you could get five or more of your favorite songs for the price of an album.

The first single I ever bought was Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” which then was in heavy rotation on the now-defunct, and much lamented, KSLQ in St. Louis. I was 9. As I remember it, I bought the single in the summer, riding my ultra-slick Raleigh Chopper to St. Clair Square with my best friends Barry and Bob and then racing home to slap the disk on my Sears portable record player. Most likely, though, I purchased it at Camelot Music while at the mall with my mom and rode home safely in her Monte Carlo.

For days I would play “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” over and over without thinking about turning it over and giving the other song on the disk a listen. But one day I did turn the disk over, and I was shocked to hear what it contained.

The B-side of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” is a song titled “Young Man’s Blues,” a pithy rebuke to English schoolboy life that contains the refrain “Screw you/ain’t got nothing to lose” as the key couplet in the chorus. I sat in dumb silence as the record played, praying that my mother hadn’t heard the words spewing forth from the small speaker on my record player. Little did I know at the time that the song is titled “Screw You” in the rest of the world and that it had been retitled for U.S. release, lest it offend American sensibilities.

What made the song unique, though, was that it didn’t appear on an Elton John album in the United States until the “Rare Masters” collection, which corralled two CDs worth of Elton John B-sides and rare tracks,  was released in 1992. The song’s only other album appearance was on the 1980 “Lady Samantha” album, a U.K.-only release that gathered much of Elton’s pre-”Caribou” B-sides. (Luckily my local record store had a huge import section, so I was able to “Lady Samantha” to my album collection when it was first released.)

Unfortunately, the days of the rare B-side have gone the same way as the 8-track and Billy Squier’s career, becoming just another footnote in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. In perusing my beloved, although relatively small, collection of 45s, there are several gems hidden on the back sides of some of my favorite singles.

The Beatles, of course, were the masters of the single. Most of their biggest hits — “Day Tripper,” “Paperback Writer” and “Hey Jude” among them — appeared only as singles in Britain, not appearing on albums until much later. The blockbuster “Hey Jude,” for example, didn’t appear on a Beatles album until “The Beatles: 1967-1970″ (more commonly called the “Blue Album”) compilation was released two years after the band broke up.

What made the Beatles unique was that some of their B-sides were as strong, if not stronger, than the A-sides. “Rain,” one of the band’s heaviest songs that presaged both heavy metal and psychedelia, appeared on the flip side of the 1966 single “Paperback Writer.” For me, “Rain” is my all-time favorite Beatles song, a churning stew of Epiphone guitars and sneering John Lennon tweaks at uptight straights. The song also contains the first use of backward masking on the coda, with Lennon’s vocals and George Harrison’s guitar run in reverse as the song fades out.

Even though I have the song on the “Past Masters” CD, I still like pulling out the single — with its full-color picture sleeve — and playing both sides of the disk. There’s a comfort there that transports me back to my childhood bedroom, the one with the blue shag carpet and the matching bedspread and curtains featuring sailing ships that were purchased from the Sears catalog, that I don’t find when I download a song from iTunes. Also gone is the sense of wonder at finding a hidden gem on the other side of a hit single, one that you can’t find anywhere else and that only the most diehard fans care about.

The B-side is dead. Long live the B-side.