The Vinyl Word

I couldn't resist the title. Sorry. 

So, records... Old-fashioned, 33 RPM, vinyl records...

Don't run away -- this is not going to be an audiophile post, I promise. I'm not a fan of most 'Philes, to be honest with you. I am a fan of the Phillies, but not of the 'Philes, just to keep things straight. 

(Too much coffee this morning. Mea culpa.) 

Anyway, records. I like them. I just patched up the old stereo system with a new amplifier -- which gets used mostly for watching movies in 5.1 surround. (Surround just makes movies so much cooler. The first fight scene in the not-bad Gibson movie, The Patriot, will sell you on the merits of surround sound, if you are not already a believer.)

But, having gotten a turntable a few years ago, I have been rebuilding a record collection. 

There is a camp that argues for the merits of "analog" sound (records and tape), versus "digital" (CDs and MP3s) but, as a musician who works primarily in the digital world, I see the merits of both. (I do think, however, that one can hear a major difference between MP3s and streaming, as opposed to CDs or records. Too much to go into, here.)

This is not about sound quality, though; it's about the experience of listening to a record. 

When I decide to listen to an vinyl album, I have to put it on the turntable, drop the needle and sit back to listen. There is no easy "pausing" and there is no skipping of tracks without standing up, walking across the room and lifting the needle -- after which, one has to find the notch between tracks and carefully put the needle down in the right spot, which is usually a question of trial and error, laced with stifled profanities. (The other day, listening to Sting's The Soul Cages, I actually sat through "St. Agnes and the Burning Train." Who does that?) 

With a record, one commits to the act of listening with attention in a way one doesn't with playlists. And, halfway through, one needs to flip the record over. This, to me, is a refocusing of attention and an awakening of the body: standing up re-awakens the brain, which is why I sometimes tell my classes, mid-session, to stand up and then sit down again. 

And we can't forget the fact that albums were created as songs grouped together around a central idea or theme or vibe, in the past -- or, at the very least, were written during the same timespan and, so, share similarities, if only as a result of the songwriters' preferences or artistic development at the time. This is a completely different experience than setting the phone on "shuffle." (Around the time of the inception of the iPod, I had a young student tell me he listened to new albums on "shuffle" so he never got tired of the order. But the order was chosen for a reason...or, used to be.)

Undeniably, there is an element of nostalgia for a guy my age in listening to actual records: the large-scale cover art; the liner notes; the lyrics. But, listeing to a record used to be an active process, whereas now music has become more of a background thing for most people. 

I like the connection and the committment of listening to a record. And, yes, sitting between loudspeakers that are moving actual air and hearing sounds generated from a needle traveling through actual grooves in actual material must, in some way, make a difference. 

In case you are wondering, no: I never understood why people were nostalgic about the cracks, pops and jumps. They still suck. Which is why I highly recommend re-releases on 180 gram vinyl. 

Now get out there and spin stuff. 

Who Cares How the Cookie Crumbles?

It's easy, when living in one's own head space, to assume that one is perfectly normal. A simplistic statement and (perhaps) a simplistic state. But, on occasion, one can be presented with a situation in which everyone else feels one way and he or she does not. 

For instance, I am not much good at nostalgia, especially in that I don't seem to care in the least about institutions or organizations of which I have been a part. 

My old high school? No interest since the day of graduation. My old colleges? Same thing. Sure, I remember some events fondly and memories of doing things with friends can still make me smile, but the schools were just a backdrop, to me. Somehow, that tether that holds many never attached to me. 

Not me. 

Just yesterday, a friend posted, on Facebook, that "The Great American Cookie Company" closed its stores. I worked there for a few years before graduate school. I had great friends there (many of whom I remain friends with) and we had a lot of fun. My romance with my wife, Karen, even blossomed there. Yet, I simply do not care that it closed. To me, the business had as little to do with the relationships I developed than the clouds have to do with a 747 pilot's lunch conversation. Sure, he is up in the sky, and wouldn't have been if that situation if not for the sky's existence, but the sky doesn't get credit for his conversational topic. 

It's not "Penn State" that I miss when I think of keg parties by firelight in the woods, late night talks, Saturday morning touch football games, Denny's breakfasts at four in the morning, romantic scenarios, four-hour composition sessions on the Baldwin grand piano in the empty science building theater or watching "Alf" on Wednesday nights with everyone on my dormitory floor (in some ways, the most important event of the week) crammed into one tiny dorm room... It's not Penn State, the school, I think of. It's the people. It's the life lessons learned and the impressions made. I don't feel as if I owe Penn State for that or that Penn State was, as a school institution, even any part of all that. 

My time in grad school wasn't about Rutgers -- it was about my friends; it was about in-class epiphanies; it was about evenings researching Coleridge in my room; it was about immersion in music and literature. Sure, Rutgers (and Penn State) provided the classes and the great professors (at great cost -- let's not forget, I paid handsomely for school either in dollars or in work)...but, it's the experiences I love, not the buildings or the billing office or the board... 

Maybe I feel that individualism that is so important to me; maybe I don't want a corporate or educational structure to claim any credit for my personal experiences. Either way, affection for a company or a school does not compute. If I met you  there, I might be your friend forever, but, if my respective schools close their doors tomorrow, I might say, "How about that?" and finish my bagel. That will be the most thought I give it. 

We had good times at The Cookie Company. It was also an unfulfilling, messy, and often undignified low-paying job. Why would I care that is closed? The closing of the company in no way closes the curtains on my memories of laughter, friendship, love and tomfoolery. I may still have some pride that I was a decorating wiz (many witnesses will, to this day, testify that I actually did a portrait of Juan Valdez in chocolate and vanilla icing on a giant chocolate chip cookie, once) but I don't owe the corporation for that. 

Does any of this make me selfish or weird? Either way, I can't pretend affection when I feel nothing. Love and loyalty, for me, for people, not for buildings and infrastructures. I don't disparage people for being different. I almost envy my friends who love Penn State enough to spend tons of money to go back for football games... Seems like fun. But...it just ain't there, for me. That connection between the experiences, the people and the institution...it just is not there, for better or worse... 

1983: A Journey Journey

I have never been a nostalgic person; I certainly have never professed to have missed the eighties, the decade in which I grew up. The music, for the most part, was awful, for one thing. With very few exceptions, the electronic music revolution was full of stilted, cold, overblown but childish attempts at songwriting. (The bleeps and blips may have been enough for many, but not for me.) The era itself was colored cold; everything was candy-hued, from the leg-warmers to the Hawaiian shirts to the jewelry to the lip-gloss. None of it could have been farther from my younger (and current) preferences for an atmosphere of trees and woods and warm images and warm instrumental timbres. I was a wood-over-plastic guy in a plastic world.

I retreated from a lot of it. I listened to classical music (mostly impressionistic) and some jazz while my friends listened to The Pet Shop Boys and to Madonna's impossibly annoying hootings and watched her sexually pedestrian rollings-around-on-the-floor.

Still craving, as one must, the music of the young, though, I found the progressive and "art" rock of the era (or some from a decade before) of Rush, Genesis and Yes. In short, I created, as I tend to do, my own world into which to retreat. It's not that I didn't like some popular music -- it's just that the music had to be played by people and not be MIDI programmed and it had to have some level of compositional quality and some level of real musicianship. I liked Journey, for instance. (More about them in a minute.)

Looking back, though, I see some things through a different lens.

In fact, I found a documentary on YouTube, the other day, that I used to watch over and over: Frontiers and Beyond. I purposefully didn't call it a "rockumentary" because this early documentary about a rock band did and could not follow the since-established formula. It was a true documentary about a band on the road but, more precisely, about a road crew and a band on the road. The band was Journey, but, in truth, the film was more focused on the crew.

People mistakenly group Journey in with the other bands of the era that stank of eighties pop-rockishness the same way they mistakenly call every long hairstyle on a guy from the eighties a "mullet." There is only one mullet: short on the top and sides and long in the back; likewise, there is a world of difference between Journey and, say, Loverboy or REO Speedwagon (even if Speedwagon was the closest competitor to Journey -- kind of like the little brother who simply could not get as many hits as his older brother in high school baseball). Journey were a band full of fine musicians, including two on the virtuoso level, in Steve Smith (drums) and Neil Schon (guitars). And Steve Perry, the singer, is a vocal phenomenon whose pipes are nothing short of miraculous. Compositionally, there are moments of brilliance, owing, in great part, to the keyboardist, Jonathan Cain. (The other guy just played bass. Okay, that was mean, but I can live with it.)

But that is all not the point of this. In watching Frontiers and Beyond, I found myself, maybe for the first time, ever, becoming nostalgic for the eighties. It had a lot to do with the girls in the audiences in the video. Maybe they reminded me a little of my first real girlfriend or of my innumerable crushes between fifth and eight grade. Maybe I was struck by a certain innocence in the puffy hair and the candy-colored lipstick. The whole crowd, however, girls and boys alike seemed lovable to me. There they were, young and hopeful -- hopeful for the world; hopeful for their future places in it. There they were, in the city of my birth, Philadelphia, at JFK stadium. Some of my high school friends certainly stood in that crowd, in the summer heat, and they were all in a similar place to the fifteen-year-old me, both developmentally and in the sense that, every day, they had to try to have fun growing up in a world chilled by the spectre of the Cold War and under the fear that someone, whether in America or Russia, would "push the button" and end the world in a nuclear holocaust.

There was also the voice or John Facenda, the familiar narrator of NFL Films, a company based near my New Jersey home; a voice I recognized from (and that was inextricably attached to) their dramatic, orchestra-backed movies about the Philadelphia Eagles and the rest of the NFL...

Of course, it had a lot to do with Journey's music. And though I am not the guy who listens to the "oldies" station in order to recapture my youth, that music that had lived in my head, back then, does conjure memories, both fond and not-so-fond. Journey's music was a sometime soundtrack to my dreams of musical fame, with its sweeping, lyrical, sometimes Romantic accessible rock power.

I suppose all decades had things that were special about them, no matter whether we noticed at the time or not. The eighties had their charm. In watching the movies or the era with my boys, I realize that there was a certain warmth to both the good and the bad films; that their un-hipness was a pretty sweet thing. Back then, we still "dated" and we still held on to some human traditions that have since gone dead.

And, really -- if you don't think "Faithfully" is a beautiful song; if Neil Schon's ending solo doesn't give you chills, I don't wanna know ya. This video's footage is take from the documentary I mentioned. [Neil Schon and Steve Perry at around 3:48 -- soul-wrenching]: