Historical

Worldly success and career fulfillment had never been part of my life plan. I'd never had a life plan. I'd washed dishes, worked at a natural food store and herb farm, run a blueline machine in a blueprint shop, laundered shirts, been a cook in a French restaurant, studied Native American herbology, managed a kite kiosk in a mall, been a night sexton at a church, studied and spent a few years as an actor (never quite a good one), and through it all had filled thousands of sheets of paper with awful novels and stories and poems. In short, I had a B.A. in English Literature. Becoming a typesetter in my late 20s had been a big step up. But a job in which I would actually use my actual if still nascent skills as reader and writer and editor, even typography, and my love for and knowledge of music, all at once? Seemed a bit dodgy, and surprisingly . . . perfect. I wrote just well enough, and knew just enough about a number of different genres of music, to at least sound knowledgeable. What if, as was inevitable, people—John, Larry, the magazine's readers—found out the truth?

I thought about it for two weeks. Mostly, I tried to avoid thinking about it. Finally, I realized that if I didn't take the job John and Larry offered, I would always regret it. And it occurred to me that a musical generalist with a broad but shallow knowledge of many types of music might be just right for the job. All I had to do was learn a lot more about everything, and hire freelancers who clearly knew more than I did about their areas of musical expertise. How hard could it be?

Somehow, I puffed myself up with enough arrogance to set John and Larry certain conditions: 1) Whatever music section I put together had to be, first and foremost, not about the sound of recordings but about the music. 2) I would not be expected to write about music myself. John and Larry readily agreed to both, if not quite so readily to my third demand: 3) a yearly salary of $20,000. (This was 1987, but still.) Twenty-four hours later, I was in. They supported me in living up to Condition 1 for the next nine years. I broke Condition 2 myself with my very first issue as music editor (October 1987). They eventually broke Condition 3 by giving me a raise.

Meanwhile, I'd taken possession of my first office. The magazine had just moved to a building (above) formerly occupied by an architectural firm, on Delgado Street, on Santa Fe's posh East Side—the oldest part of town, where European settlement dates back over 400 years and Native occupation millennia before that; where all the adobe is real, not mere stuccoed frame. Today, it's a neighborhood of million-dollar mud huts. My office, all my own, had a door I could actually close—a first. I closed it and did not open it again for three days, furiously editing my first issue's worth of copy, red pencil flying. This was the only part of my new job I actually knew how to do.

Squatting on a table behind me was a little orange-and-gray Corona computer. I think it had 1MB of RAM. I had never touched a computer. John introduced me to the mysteries of XyWrite, the DOS-prompt editing software in which he and I would edit the next 20 years' worth of Stereophile, long after everyone else was staring through Windows. John tells me he still uses XyWrite—he and a few other ancient editors, chained to their terminals deep in a cave somewhere under the Appalachians. That first issue as a Stereophile staffer was the last I copyedited in red pencil.

I placed an ad in the next issue of Stereophile, calling for music writers, and from the responses chose my first stable of freelance music writers. The first edition of the magazine's regular record-review section appeared in the October 1987 issue, with reviews by David B. Alfvin, John Atkinson, Les Berkley, James Berwin, Tom Gillett (aka Sam Tellig), George Graves, J. Gordon Holt, Harold Lynn, Bernard Soll, and me.

Nine years passed. Stereophile's circulation had risen from less than 3000 when Larry bought the magazine from JGH in 1982, to about 25,000 by the time I joined the staff in 1987, to over 80,000 when I left in 1996. The music section grew from a few pages at the back of a rather thin digest-size magazine to 25 or 30 or sometimes 40 much bigger pages of much thicker books. For some years in the mid-1990s, in each issue I was publishing the work of 25 or 30 freelance record reviewers, feature writers, and interviewers, and writing three to five of my own reviews. And, always, copyediting everything: the music section, the equipment reports, columns, features, readers' letters, manufacturers' comments, the table of contents, classified ads, cutlines, credits, page numbers, cover headlines—as well as the magazine's direct-mail copy and brochures.

The first five of those nine years were the happiest of my life as anyone's employee. John and Larry gave me carte blanche to edit the music section as I saw fit, and always fully supported me in my decisions as music editor. In practice, they paid me to learn on the job, and to make all of my mistakes in full view of the reading public. This I dutifully did, especially the latter. Mixing as many metaphors as possible, I rode or beat my high, dead hobbyhorses deep into the ground of everyone else's being. Endless columns of type about the musics of Richard Wagner and Frank Zappa oozed from my fingers. (Unfortunately, some of the Zappa stuff, little better than fanboy drivel, can still be read on www.stereophile.com here and here.)

I learned not to opine in public about the music of Beethoven when, in a review, I marveled that the Scherzo of Georg Solti's new recording of the Ninth Symphony seemed to proceed at precisely the same tempo he'd used in his previous recording while being two minutes shorter. How was that possible? I went on at some length about the temporal illusions made possible by masterful conducting, and was quite pleased with myself. After that review was published, Christopher Breunig, then the music editor of John Atkinson's former magazine, Hi-Fi News & Record Review, wrote to gently point out that Solti had taken the repeats in his first recording, but hadn't in this new one. Ah. I learned to listen more closely, and to check my facts more carefully. Then there was Keith Jarrett. Bob Dylan. PJ Harvey. Anton Bruckner. I seemed to have a lot to say, and I kept saying it. Some of it was worth reading.

My last four years as a Stereophile employee were less happy only because, as the magazine grew, my jobs became far too much of some very good things. (When I was hired, I was the magazine's 10th full-time employee. When I left nine years later, there were 50 of us.) When we expanded the editorial department to lighten John's and my loads, I took on a new job: supervising the new hires below me on the editorial staff. To say that I was not good at this is to be kinder than I was to my supervisees. Born copyeditors—we know who we are—are seldom graced with surfeits of social skills and charm. Our annoying habits include correcting other people's usage or diction or grammar, not only in print (which we are paid to do) but in conversation (which we are not). We take an inordinate pleasure in knowing things, and little in other people's knowing those same things. Our unsolicited sharings of our largesses of learning seldom go down well, but somehow that escapes us—god help us, we expect to be thanked. My poor supervisees . . .

Only after I resigned did I realize that in those last years on staff I had grown steadily less tolerant of caffeine, and that the two big, strong cafés con leche I had every morning may as well have been stiff hits of PCP. I became aggressive, belligerent, impatient, prone to panic attacks: in short, a jerk. To the three copyeditors I serially hired and basically browbeat into resigning—Kristin, Paul, Jeannette—I apologize.

In 1996, exhausted from overwork and stress, and having become someone I did not much like, I left the magazine to complete my MFA in Writing: Poetry. Once an English major, always an English major. This was my first farewell to Stereophile, but I took with me to again do freelance the part of my job I had always best loved, and which everyone agreed was what, anyway, I had always been best at: copyediting.

Making It Better
A word about words, and the copyediting of them. There are as many types of copyediting as there are copyeditors, or publications, or writers, or articles. A good copyeditor is competent, even excellent, at all of the basics: spelling, punctuation, grammar, syntax, sentence structure, rhythm, the organization of a phrase or sentence or paragraph or section or entire article. Facts need to be checked, proper names and nouns verified and corrected. These things can be learned, and any copyeditor whose time is worth paying for should be able to do them all. Ideally, however, something else is possible, or at least hoped for, by writers and commissioning editors alike.

We like to think, or at least we like to say, that each writer's voice is unique, but it isn't. Too often, what a writer most fondly feels is his unique voice is actually a combination of bad habits and received language and tones shared with all too many other not-very-good writers. The inspired copyeditor's task is to bend an ear finely tuned to hearing the least hint of unique music in a writer's voice, strip away the accretions of junk language and tone picked up in a life drenched in TV and marketing and promotional copy and political obfuscation and bureaucratese, and then revise, even rewrite the piece in whatever authentic voice remains. The job is to produce a final edited article written in the writer's own voice, but in language and tone more consistently and authentically the writer's very own than that writer can produce herself or himself.

This means that the talented and inspired copyeditor can turn in an edited version of an article that is better or truer or more authentic than the piece originally submitted by the writer—in audio terms, a copy of a recording that is better than the original. Any audiophile will tell you that that is simply not possible, yet it is what the very best copyeditors do every working day, or most of those days. I know I've done it when I ask a writer's thoughts about the work I've done on her piece, and she replies, "Well, I'm not sure what you want me to say. It reads fine. You hardly did anything to it." This about an article I've basically rewritten, in which no clause or phrase remains unchanged, no sentence has not been restructured, no paragraph has not been completely reorganized to tell a story previously only hinted at, or told out of order, or both—in short, an article in which I have made thousands of changes, but that to the writer's ear now sounds precisely like herself—and, to her, reads precisely like the article she would swear she wrote and submitted in the first place.