Most of us were not born with musical tastes intact. Tastes develop over time as we learn and experience new music and other things. An open mind, an ear attuned to songs and sound, and a procession of mentors and musical guides make for a musical life that's rich and full. To my way of thinking, the best life has a soundtrack that's varied and constantly expanding.
Which is not to say there aren't transformative events. Prior to my lightning-strike momentabout which, more in a minutethe blues were all around me, as they always are around all of us. As a kid attuned to rock'n'roll, growing up in the suburbs with a full FM dial, I was exposed to blues-based music current and past, from Elvis on the oldies stations to Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones.
A few weeks before Christmasthe time of year when all public spaces are required by law to play Mariah Carey on an endless loopthis writer was pushing a trolley idly around a London supermarket. I was over by the fresh veg when the distinctive, Hammond-driven intro of the Specials' "Ghost Town" was piped through. Heads nodded. Some shoppers started to sing along.
Weeks later, I heard that Specials front-man Terry Hall had died, of pancreatic cancer. Memories came flooding back.
I never collected baseball cards, played Cops & Robbers, or was a Boy Scout. From the moment I heard the opening guitar riff of Blondie's "One Way or Another," at age 6, it was clear that music would be central to everything I was going to do. It was my first important big thing, and my last.
I'd heard many times over the years that the Warsaw Showofficially called Audio Video Show 2022was a "great" show. But that gives barely a hint of the special nature of this show, the second largest audio show in Europe.
Summer 1959. The concert under the stars in the Wellfleet, Massachusetts, town parking lot was over. Pete Seeger was packing up his banjo as I approached him gingerlyI was 6 years old. I stuck out the notepad I'd been careful to bring. "Can I have your autograph?"
Towering over me, six-three to my three-eight, Seeger said in exasperation, if not outright coldness, "I don't give autographs. I'm not some goddamned star."
It was another glorious Lower Cape summer, the warm breeze almost viscous against your skin. Tim Dickey played bass, or ersatz bass, tuning his Gibson SG Special down an octave. I played drums. My brother John and cousin Dave Scherman traded leads. Tony Kahn was a good guitarist, but with the surfeit of guitarists, he played organ.
I remember the exact moment I became an audiophile. It was 1954. I was 12 years old. My father's friend, Mitch Rose, wanted to buy a "hi-fi set," which was what they called them in those days. Mitch asked my father to go with him to help pick one out. My father asked if I wanted to go along for the ride.
I did, and we went to Emmons Audio in Studio City, California, for what turned out to be one of the formative moments of my life.
It would have been in the spring of 1967 that Tim Hardin's music first wafted in over my transom. I was 13. My older brother, who loved Hardin at least as much as I did and was something of a fetishist besides, forbade me to touch his copy of Hardin's debut album, Tim Hardin 1, not even the jacket. He had to be present when I auditioned it. Tim Hardin 2 didn't especially float my boat, so my brother had it to himself. But the moment I heard Tim Hardin 3 Live in Concert, I took matters into my own hands, so to speak, and plunked my own $5 down.
I've been asked this question more than once, by musicians you may have heard of. I'm not going to name names, but if you press me I might. Let's see where this goes.
Gullibility is a disadvantage in any business, but it's a cardinal sin in journalism. During my J-school years, I acquired the occupational deformity that afflicts most reporters: a degree of skepticism bordering on the cynical. In my professional circles, an adage holds that "if your mother says she loves you, check it out."
In audio reviewing, there's a tension between scientific explanations for the qualities of the sound we hear and how the music, as conveyed through our equipment, makes us feel. Insights from the new field of interpersonal neurobiology can help us understand this conflict.
In the spring of 1969, as an aspiring jazz drummer of 15 pretentiously and largely uncomprehendingly drawn to the music's difficult avant-garde, I learned that Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman's alter ego during Ornette's starvation years and an icon of free jazz himself, had recently moved to the village of Congers in my native Rockland County, New York, just north of New York City. Ornette was putting together a group drawn mostly from his early cohorts, and the call went out to Stockholm, where Don had settledto the extent that he settled anywherewith his Swedish wife, Moki. Hence his arrival practically on my doorstep.
Axiomatically, audiophile audio is about quality of reproduced sound. Experientially thoughfor me at leastit's about visions in the mind's eye. The older I get, the more attentively I listen to recordings, the more importance I assign to the myriad moving pictures I see between my speakers.
The advantage of a highly resolving music system is that you can hear deeper into recordings. The disadvantage is that you can hear deeper into recordings.
Hello, and Happy New Year! I'm greeting you in October 2021just before Halloween, in anticipation of Stereophile's publication deadlinebut by the time this magazine arrives in your mailbox, it'll be after the holidays.