It doesn't seem like 44 years ago, but in 1979, Both Sides Now first appeared in Goldmine Magazine, an article about stereo rock and roll records from 1958. Actually, the idea for Both Sides Now started much earlier than that. I had been collecting records since 1955, starting with 78s like my father, who had a large collection of pop music 78s from the '40s and '50s. I eventually moved into 45s and LPs about 1958, but when stereo came in in 1958, I had no idea what the big deal was, since we only had a mono player. By early 1964, I had amassed a few hundred records, but still didn't know what stereo was all about.

One day while sitting around in the dorm at college, my roommate and I were discussing music, and he shook his head and said, "You really don't know what stereo is, do you?" He pulled out his set of Koss stereophones and plopped them over my ears and said, "Here, listen to this." On came "Route 66 Theme" by Nelson Riddle in stereo. I was completely blown away and instantly addicted to true stereo. That moment was really the start of Both Sides Now. I became a stereo evangelist of sorts, finding captive audiences in unsuspecting people who visited me, "subjecting" them to true stereo rock and roll ("Here, listen to this!").

By 1973, I was working part-time in radio at WMOD-FM in Washington, DC, an all oldies format, where I supplied true stereo music from my own collection and wrote scripts on rock history for the jocks to read on the air. I subscribed to the collector's magazines of the time, noticed that nobody ever wrote about stereo, and decided to write some articles myself for one of these magazines. In 1975, I wrote to the editor of one west-coast publication, and recieved a positive return letter telling me to submit the articles. The first manuscripts were sent out under the title The Story Of Stereo Rock & Roll. After the first two articles were accepted for publication, a number of issues of the magazine came out, and over three years later, 1978, the articles still weren't in print. A fellow stereo collector, Wes Smith, as frustrated as I that there still wasn't anyone writing about stereo, suggested Goldmine, and kept after me until I finally wrote to them.

Goldmine's editor, Rick Whitesell, didn't know whether there would be much reader interest in the subject, since he had never seen any stories on it, but said the stories were interesting and he'd take a chance on a four-part series starting in the October, 1979, issue, and check out reader reaction. Rick at the time liked to name columns after records (e.g., Robert Pruter's column "Windy City Soul" was a Jerry Butler 45), and suggested the name "Both Sides Now" for the series. I agreed, as long as the original title was used as a subtitle. The first four installments of Both Sides Now appeared in Goldmine issues #41-44 under various combinations of titles.

Reader reaction was good, so Rick and I decided to make it a regular monthly column beginning in issue #46. As a column identification, I designed a double-arrow logo to look like the stereo banners across the tops of old record albums. The column continued regularly until May, 1981 (issue #60), when it became an irregular feature in Goldmine, appearing eight more times until the final column in the August 2, 1985 issue (#131). In all, there were 26 Goldmine columns, one two-part feature story (The Vee-Jay Records Story) that won the 1981-82 Goldmine reader's poll for best cover story of the year, one parody, a pseudonymous folk profile on Hoyt Axton, and several letters to the editor.

In addition, in late 1980 and early 1981, I was able to use my background in '50s pop music to do two installments of a column called Pop-50 in the short-lived Goldmine spinoff magazine Classic Wax. These were time-capsule columns about pop music in the early 1950s. During the early 1980s, I also contributed about two dozen lists to The Book Of Rock Lists (Marsh and Stein), wrote a significant part of the rock trivia book Rocktopicon (Marsh, Choron, and Geller), and had a series of articles appear in Jerry Osborne's Price Guides.

Finally, from 1986-2006, Both Sides Now switched from magazine column to a quarterly newsletter. The newsletter is much like the Goldmine column of the same name.

The newsletter itself changed significantly over the 20 years it was published, more in appearance than content. Issues #1 and #2 were individually run out of my dot matrix printer. This was practical, since the original subscription list for issue #1 was 23 people. Starting with issue #3, the newletter was professionally xeroxed until issue #22, when it went from 10 pages to 16 pages and began to be professionally printed. Some of the last issues were also specially printed in short runs of full color.

It has been nice to look back and see that almost all of my original subscribers stayed till the last issue in 2006. In fact, many of them go back to the Goldmine days. I had originally started writing about stereo because I couldn't get an information on it, and hoped to stimulate an exchange of information. What has happened over the past three-plus decades has been well beyond my most optimistic dreams. Not only has there been a great exchange of information, stereo collectors are now becoming persistent and clever enough to actually make a difference in the music we get from the record companies. Time after time, I hear from folks in the record companies that say that letters and phone calls do make a difference, and we can see the difference just a few people, or even one person, can make. More recently, members of the Both Sides Now Stereo Chat Board have been pioneers in converting mono oldies into stereo sound via computer editing using spectral stereo techniques.

The staff at Both Sides Now Publications include Mike Callahan, Publisher and Editor; David Edwards, Discographical Research. We can be reached via e-mail.