I’ve just uploaded my CD of Donovan’s ‘A Gift From A Flower To A Garden’ to my Roon library and I noticed in the write-up (presumably from All Music Guide) that this was the first LP box set of the rock era. I know Donovan is supposed to have invented music and all that but is that actually true?
A Gift From A Flower To A Garden
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It was possibly the first rock/pop box set but there were lots of classical box sets released before it.
The term “album” has it’s origin from sets of 10″ 78rpm shellac records of lengthy classical works, which were marketed in book form before the advent of 33⅓rpm vinyl records made it possible to put complete works on single discs.
So what you’re saying then is Donovan is older than he looks.
DONOVAN invented old age.
I have a Bing Crosby box set somewhere, all on 78s, not sure what the actual duration is.
Is DONOVAN’s one a real box set?
I suspect READERS DIGEST and/or WORLD MUSIC CLUB were at it long before DONOVAN was. Might have been the first one of original material aimed at ver yoof though. Box sets are usually retrospective.
My thoughts as well. Although to describe this as a ‘box set’ is a stretch – surely it is a double album that someone decided to put in a box rather than a gatefold sleeve..? It was nice marketing though.
I think this is correct. It could have been a big gatefold cover thing, which would likely have cost just as much as the box did to produce. But with a gatefold sleeve you can’t quite as effectively have loose bits and pieces included; the box gives you a container that doesn’t immediately shed its contents when you take if off the shelf. It is a lovely thing to own, and was designed and delivered with a considerable degree of panache. But it’s not a boxed set as we think of them today; usually (leavened with a few ‘previously unavailable’ tracks to loosen the purse strings) mostly of a retrospective nature, of prodigious size and often wallet-emptyingly expensive.
Somebody like Mojo will know the correct figures but memory says a standard LP at the time cost two quid-ish, a double three pound fifty. Flower To Garden in its lovely box was four ninety nine. Nobody I knew, apart from that plonker Harry Barlow, could afford it so we all deemed it as “commercial crap, the end of hippydom” etc
Wouldn’t that be 4 pounds, 19 shillings and 11d?
LPs were 32/6d when I started buying them in 63/64 and I don’t think they went up much during the 60s. From memory, they had crept up to around the £2 mark in the early 70s. I have an idea the White album was around £3/10s, but I have no clear recollection. That was the only double I bought in the 60s. It’s been said here before, but records cost a LOT!
And we’re living in the 60s again today.
Two quid birthday money bought you a LP and a single!
That’s around £450 today (roughly)
Just used that internet thingie – £2 in 1967 is £32.15 today. We wuz robbed!
My copy is a 1967 US release on Epic, with a New York address on the box inner. There’s no price shown anywhere, and happily no stupid herbert ever felt the need to sully the cover with a bloody sticker (as was rampant in the shitty UK retail outlets at the time). It’s pretty much mint, and I bought it from Tony’s on Park Street in Bristol, sometime in the 1980s, and it’s (adopts deeply camp growl) GORGEOUS. I think I paid about £20 for it.
I worked in a record shop at the time and drooled over the box but even with my staff discount I couldn’t afford it.
People who work in record shops “buying” records?
The humanity!
I’m aware of some classical double albums from that era (and before) which were issued as a boxed set instead of just as a gatefold album. This was to allow a booklet containing notes to be included. One example is the 1963 original recording of Britten’s War Requiem.
Pfft. Reader’s Digest was invented by DONOVAN, as any fule kno.
@Black-Type
Donovan’s ingenuity dates back much further than that.
He not only invented reading but the actual letters that form
words we read
Speaking of Roon, @jazzjet, I’ve just stumbled on something rather interesting. When you search on an artist the albums in your core that you own come up first, but then everything else appears too. So far, so Allmusic. For instance, I own The Essential Elvis Presley and his 1956 album. Scroll down and his entire oeuvre appears, and what’s more you can actually play it! I’m currently grooving to Elvis Sings the Wonderful World of Christmas, though not for much longer I suspect. I own nothing by Neil Diamond, but there are 64 albums available to play. Have you clocked this?
@mikethep. My understanding is that you need a subscription to Tidal or Qobuz to do this. When you subscribe to one of these services (I subscribe to Tidal) and integrate that subscription in Roon you effectively get your personal uploaded library plus ALL the music on Tidal (or Qobuz) available to play within Roon. You can add a Tidal album to your library by clicking the plus button in the album view, or just play it as and when you want. For example, I have 4339 albums of my own that I have uploaded to Roon plus 295 albums I’ve added from Tidal. Bear in mind though that any albums you add to your library from Tidal will count to your capacity limit on Roon.
A more important question, however, is why you’re playing Elvis’s Christmas album in March???
Why? Merely because I can. Won’t do it again, promise.
I have a Qobuz subscription, that explains it.
I think the first box set in the form we understand it – a multi-disc retrospective anthology with bonus tracks, and a book – was Soft Machine’s Triple Echo. As far as I know Donovan had no say in it.
I think you will find DONOVAN invented the human body, as written about by WSB, as a prelude to the Love Makes Sweet Music hitmakers appropriating the term.
I must say you lot are very harsh on the diminutive tunesmith. I can only say you’d be a lot harsher if you knew what The Stromberg Twins was about.
Doesn’t really sit with the hippy chic does it? All that gas.
I might say John and Yoko’s “Wedding Album” could be the first box set in rock (or whatever it is), only one album, but lots of additional stuff/crap that one finds in box sets these days. Yes I own a copy (reissue), no I haven’t played it
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedding_Album#:~:text=The%20record%20came%20as%20an,press%20clippings%20about%20the%20couple.
I’ve got an original UK mono Box. It is a thing of beauty. As well as the actual rekirds it includes an orange folder containing 10 A4 prints of lyrics and illustrations, each printed on a different pastel coloured paper.
It’s also a very good record.