The January 2009 issue of
Stereophile is now on newsstands. Volume 32 Number 1 is pretty much bursting at the seams with radicalness. I received a voicemail from a long-time subscriber telling me so. It went:
Yeah, hi. I've been a Stereophile reader for, like, PHEW!, a long time—since, like, 1970-something and, um, I just wanted to say your January issue is, like, the best issue you've put out in… in… ages! They're all good, but this particular issue just seems to be, like, extraordinary…
There you have it folks. The dude's right. We are extraordinary: Twelve product reviews; Mikey Fremer's coverage from the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest; Sam Tellig reporting from Italy; Kal Rubinson's take on multichannel music and Blu-ray; Robert Baird discussing his lifelong journey with vinyl LPs; and Art Dudley laying out a course for breaking the rules of system building.
For me, producing this issue was especially exciting because I got to write the "Recording of the Month" piece. Robert Baird caught me head-banging to Mogwai's
The Hawk Is Howling, and asked if I'd like to write it up. It happened on a Thursday afternoon.
"Hmm. When do you need it?" I asked.
"Oh," Robert shrugged, "how about Monday?"
I nodded coolly, like it was nothing.
"Yeah, I think I can do that."
Inside, I was dying.
Dying! It was my first attempt at a ROTM, and I was nervous! To prepare, I went into our online archives and dug out some of my favorite ROTMs. I chose Corey Greenberg's piece on
Nirvana's Nevermind, Richard Lehnert's review of the
Keith Jarrett Trio's Tribute, and Allen St. John's piece on
Richard Thompson's Rumor and Sigh. These excellent reviews served both as inspirations and as guidelines. I wanted to get an idea of what I could and could not do within the boundaries of ROTM. (By choosing a Corey Greenberg piece, I had given myself the option to pretty much go berserk.) Being that Mogwai is a Scottish band, my first idea was to write the entire review using Scottish slang. I found a website that has pages and pages of great lines like: "An then yer arse fell aff!"
Which is exactly what would have happened to me had I continued along that route. My ass would have fallen off. There was no way that I'd be able to write the entire piece in Scottish slang; I'm not that clever. "Away an bile yer heid ya numpty," I told myself. "Ye dinnae ken whit yer talkin aboot!"
I trashed the idea.
Because I was only casually familiar with Mogwai's work, I went out and bought a couple of their earlier albums—on CD, unfortunately. These were the first compact discs I'd purchased since
that wonderful day in April. Had to do it, though; I needed more reference material, and I didn't have time to find the albums on vinyl. I even bought
The Hawk on compact disc, so I could make comparisons to the LP. Fortunately, the CD versions of both
The Hawk and
Mr. Beast came with DVDs of behind-the-scenes material, lending insight into the band's chemistry and methodology. I watched the hell out of those DVDs and listened the crap out of the albums. Seriously, I listened
the crap out of those albums. After I felt comfortable with how the band had grown since their debut, I listened and listened and listened to
The Hawk. I didn't listen to anything else. I couldn't allow any other music to get in my head and potentially screw me up.
It was a dismal, rainy weekend, and the music enhanced the mood that was already permeating the cool November air. It was intense. I had crazy dreams. Somewhere in the middle of all that listening, I got the idea to write the review as a soundtrack to a weekend I spent in Edinburgh, Scotland, while in college. I had been studying abroad with my best friend Pete and my ex-girlfriend Michelle. We studied hard, drank hard, fought hard, loved hard. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. I was miserable, homesick, lonely.
Pete and I decided to do something. We started the day with
a bit of Bell's and a couple cups of coffee. Then, we started walking. For me, it was some sort of an attempt to just get away from things. I'm not sure what it was for Pete. Maybe he was just trying to
help me get away from things. I wouldn't be surprised.
That day, just like the day I spent writing the review, was cold and gray. We walked and walked and walked—
stopping in pubs along the way—and gradually became more and more lost. I don't know how we managed it, but we found ourselves on a long, rocky trail leading up into the sky. We followed it. It went up and up and up. The trail faded away into the gravel and grass and clouds. This was serious climbing now. With bloody hands and muddy boots, we continued on. I wondered how we'd ever get down. I often wanted to turn back, in fact, but Pete was so damn
far ahead of me that I couldn't even get his attention. I kept following.
When we finally reached the top, we found
a strange surprise: The rest of our classmates were there. All of the people we'd wanted to get away from
were already there, as if waiting for us. It turned out that they had taken a staircase up the softly sloping side of the peak, while we had struggled our way up a decrepit, obsolete trail. Funny, no? There's something absurd about that. Maybe everything about it is absurd. We had taken the long, hard road just to get back to where we began. But it didn't matter: At the top of what I'd later learn to call "Arthur's Peak," I looked out onto
the jagged, gray city and felt
immortal. Pete gave me
the two fingers.
My original review for
The Hawk Is Howling used this story as a sort of extended metaphor for the album. When it was complete, however, it totaled nearly 1300 words: Five hundred words too many.
John Atkinson tells me that you never hurt a piece of writing by making it shorter; you can only make it better. So I went to work at slashing it down. In a couple of hours, I had it trimmed to 800 words, and it was a much better piece. Of everything I wrote this year, the Mogwai review is what makes me happiest. I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to write it.
