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Music and Recording FeaturesMy Back Pages
Terry Riley: Get What You Need
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Jul 29, 2020  |  3 comments
For two months, I'd been planning to attend Terry Riley's appearance at Seattle's 536-seat Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall. For two weeks, I'd been planning to watch a presidential-candidate debate on television. Only one problem: As it turned out, the two events were scheduled for the same night. Even after a decade of trying to master the muddle known as multitasking, it was impossible to do both.
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My Back Pages
The Beatles: Liverpool Fantasy
John Swenson  |  Jun 29, 2021  |  1 comments
Last week, I had a puzzling dream. When I woke, the vision remaining from the dreamscape was of a single thread of conversation, almost oracular, with no context. Ringo was telling me, "That was actually John singing on that one, mate."

I searched for a hidden message. Maybe it was one of those naked-in-public dreams, the Beatles drummer chastising me for misidentifying the singer in some review I wrote. I soon forgot about it.

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My Back PagesThink Pieces
The Ghost in the Machine
Herb Reichert  |  Oct 29, 2019  |  19 comments
"The crying rain like a trumpet sang
And asked for no applause."—Bob Dylan, "Lay Down Your Weary Tune"

I remember as a toddler sitting in the kitchen on a highchair, watching my mother smoke a cigarette, apply red lipstick, and tune a turquoise table radio from one news station to another. Between the strange, nattering voices, the radio emitted a sharp hissing sound. That's my first memory of human voices coming from a little box.

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The Music Problem
Roger Skoff  |  Sep 27, 2022  |  52 comments
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.

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The Truth Will Make You Odd
Herb Reichert  |  Jan 02, 2024  |  11 comments
Recently I've been thinking a lot about the late Art Dudley and how Art worked humbly and relentlessly to get me to appreciate contemporary bluegrass, especially the work of renowned flat-picker Tony Rice. Back then, my contempt for contemporary bluegrass was equal to my contempt for contemporary country. Both seemed faux and shallow.
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My Back Pages
Thinking of You: Terry Hall & The Specials
Phil Brett  |  Mar 01, 2023  |  6 comments
A few weeks before Christmas—the time of year when all public spaces are required by law to play Mariah Carey on an endless loop—this 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.

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Tim Hardin: Reason to believe
Tony Scherman  |  Sep 01, 2022  |  3 comments
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.
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Music and Recording FeaturesMy Back Pages
Van the Man
John Atkinson  |  Aug 21, 2018  |  19 comments
The dingy green-and-ochre poster on the subway-station wall, advertising events at Queens's Forest Hills Stadium, didn't draw attention to itself. But what else is there to do on a subway platform but look at posters? I looked at it. There, near the bottom of the left column, I read: "SEPT 12: VAN MORRISON AND WILLIE NELSON & FAMILY."

Van Morrison. In concert. In Queens.

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My Back PagesThink Pieces
Vertigo
Sasha Matson  |  Sep 17, 2019  |  7 comments
In Alfred Hitchcock's great film Vertigo, filmed in San Francisco in 1957, the protagonist, Scottie, played by James Stewart, becomes obsessed with Madeleine, played by Kim Novak. Scottie, a retired detective, suffers from a disabling case of acrophobia, which becomes a critical if tenuous plot point.
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We need a new word
Robert Schryer  |  Dec 29, 2020  |  70 comments
When I first heard the word "audiophile," I loved it. It sounded fresh and dignified. I related to it instantly. An audiophile! I loved the whole idea of it, the focus on music, on sound. That was me! I'd found myself! And people like me. Other audiophiles, who lived all over the world. To paraphrase Tom Petty, it was like a first flash of freedom.
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What Price Perfection?
Rogier van Bakel  |  Mar 27, 2024  |  25 comments
The late Ken Fritz discusses his legendary audio system, from the YouTube video One Man’s Dream

When Ken Fritz died, many people wondered what would become of his stereo system. Fritz's rig was the stuff of legend. The audiophile from Chesterfield, Virginia, had built much of it with his own hands, including line-array speakers too tall to fit in most people's homes. They took 5400 hours to complete and were appraised at more than $200,000. He also designed and built a three-arm turntable that sat on a unique 1500lb antivibration platform. Fritz felt that his "Frankentable" rivaled or bested record players costing well into six figures.

That was just the beginning.

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Music and Recording FeaturesMy Back Pages
What's Wrong With Classical Record Reviews
Jim Austin  |  Sep 18, 2018  |  70 comments
I attend at least a couple of dozen classical-music performances each year. I also read reviews of recordings and live performances, and have even dabbled in writing them. Why, then, do I find classical music reviews so frequently annoying?

It's the vocabulary. In these reviews I often see words that I rarely see used elsewhere: scintillating, irresistible, delightful. One venerable reviewer for Gramophone magazine has used the word "beguiling" 100 times in some 900 reviews. When I read such words, I envision the poor music critic writhing in his (occasionally her) listening chair, approaching an involuntary state of aesthetic ecstasy. It isn't a pretty image.

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Why do you need all those microphones?
Jim Anderson  |  Aug 03, 2022  |  5 comments
"Why do you need all of those microphones?"

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.

It's a reasonable question, sometimes. Still.

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Why Not Listen to Everything?
Casey Miller  |  May 23, 2023  |  19 comments
I have been haunted for 15 years by these words: "Very often if I was given the choice of listening to a piece of music I really liked or listening to nothing at all, I would choose nothing at all. ... These days I don't listen to a lot of music, and I find a lot of pleasure in no music. There's a kind of silence and just hearing some conversation from outside, or hearing a police car in the distance, just these fragments of daily life are very poetic and very peaceful somehow."

They were spoken by Britisher David Toop, confirmed music-head, someone who has spent his life playing, listening to, and writing about music. Why would a person who amassed such a dragon's hoard of obscure releases that a documentary was made about it—who tried to listen to every darn thing ever recorded—at the end of the day prefer regular sounds that would not even fit the dictionary definition of music?

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Will the Circle Be Unbroken?
John Swenson  |  May 26, 2020  |  7 comments
I loved New Orleans music before I even knew what it was.

In the mid-1960s, I went to high school in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which back then was a bleak, On the Waterfront landscape of dock workers and drifters hanging out in the pool halls along Bedford Avenue. We were warned to watch out on our way to track practice at nearby McCarren Park, because the pool halls were violent and confrontations often spilled out onto the street.

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