Electronic stereo equipment has played a large part in my life. I was born in 1961, and have lived through a tremendous boom in production of electronic music machines. Around 1970, my parents bought a cutting edge stereo set-up from Myer-Emco, a dealer in the Washington, DC area. An installer came to our house and set the thing up: a fine Dual turntable (the 1019, I believe) with Shure cartridge and KLH model 27 receiver on a shelf in the closet, with AR 2ax speakers mounted in the bookshelves at the opposite wall of our den, an approximately 15x20 foot room with wood paneling, perhaps something close to a perfect listening room. I went through major phases of my early music education in that room, although the first stages came listening to cheap radios.
We had several radios around the house. Our mother was an avid radio listener, tuning in for WMAL AM's morning blend of talk, news and jingles. She also listened to some opera on Saturdays. We kids gravitated towards WRC, which played the day's pop music and had call-in contests. Some of my brother Tom's first favorites were Cover of the Rolling Stone by Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show and Elton John's Crocodile Rock. He led the way. My early favorites included some Spinners songs. We started buying 7-inch singles when they cost 55 cents at Record City in Bethesda. My 3rd grade classmate Boyd McHugh had good taste leaning towards the Allman Brothers, Leon Russell and Johnny Winter, no doubt influenced by an older sister. (His influence may have also turned me into a Los Angeles Rams and Roman Gabriel fan.) I was still buying singles when Stevie Wonder's You Are The Sunshine came out; I remember returning that 45 several times due to bad vinyl causing really scratchy play and being in tears over it.
I bought a Panasonic Take'n'Tape at K-Mart and started taping songs from the radio, the recorder placed somewhere near the radio speaker. Later, I asked for an AM/FM digital cock radio for Christmas, which allowed listening in bed at night and counting back songs in the long setlist to figure out which song you loved. The dial was set to WHFS, a freeform FM station famous for marathon sets. I found Little Feat and Nils Lofgren through 'HFS.
My classmate Chris Barker worked cutting lawns and delivering newspapers and so was able to buy himself a great stereo system early on. Chris also had his own car, a 69 VW bug he bought from his father and he installed an awesome Pioneer Super-Tuner in it, complete with 3-channel stereo. This was a speaker circuit promoted by Popular Electronics that involved hooking a third rear speaker up to the positive leads of the right and left channels. Brian Eno later put a diagram of this method on the back of one of his records.
Everyone had to have a kick-ass stereo in their car, preferably the Pioneer Super-Tuner, which had tremendous FM reception and great cassette playback. Cassettes were everywhere, largely because LP records did not travel well and could not be played in cars. People wanted to determine exactly what they were listening to and when. Capitalism's grasp on reality was expanding with the glorified freedom of the open road and cheap gasoline. Cassettes could be bought at the Supermarket and, when spent, were thrown into the ditch on the roadside. FM Stereo had recently conquered AM as the youth generation radio band. Albums were produced more and more for great stereo sound and radio became "album oriented". The soundtrack of young lives. (The Beatles catalog in Mono vs. Stereo is a perfect timeline guide to the changeover from AM pop to FM AOR. Watch as the sonic effects start to "Pepper" the music.)
Another classmate, Fred Schnider, invited me over for a sleepover once. He had an older brother and so had a lot of unusual records around. We were in the initial stages of inhaling reefer. He had black light posters and we listened to Black Sabbath. I don't recall what the music system was at Fred's house, but his basement rooms, adjacent to a pool table funhouse rec room, was the location of many tipsy music-drenched nights across the high school period. Fred had Zappa albums. He super-glued a cigarette to a Frank Zappa cover mounted on the wall which stayed that way a long time.
At a summer camp in 1977, two Swedish brothers played me a cassette of Rush's first live album, All the World's a Stage, and told me of seeing them live just a few weeks before. I was initially resistant to Geddy Lee's vocal delivery, like Robert Plant on steroids, but the songs I heard (2112/Temples of Syrinx) stayed in my memory and I bought that live record soon after getting back to DC. Rush released a new studio record around that time, A Farewell to Kings, which I also bought and my friend Will Russell arranged to get us tickets to their upcoming concert at Warner Theater. Fred and I blew smoke rings into the spotlights from our balcony seats as Rush pranced across their white stage carpet awash in dry ice smoke, playing double-neck guitars for the song Xanadu.
I was a diehard Rush fan from 1977 until around 1982, when I was adventuring into further out musical territory and Rush started producing more poppy records. I did check in with Rush along the way, always impressed with their cohesion as a band in spite of the world's tendency to fall apart. I saw Rush concerts in 1977, 1979, 1980 and 81, 1985, 1996, and then over their great comeback which started in 2002 I've seen another 8 or so concerts.
I had very good concert luck in 1977, seeing Little Feat earlier in the year at Warner's, and I also had the fortune of seeing one of Led Zeppelin's Capitol Center shows that May. My classmate Dwight Bostwick had been given a gift that his parents won at an auction for any event at the Cap Center in a Sky Suite, a box above the general seating. The flashpots during the Whole Lotta Love encore are burned into my memory.
I listened to WHFS and turned my friends on to Little Feat and Nils Lofgren. I turned my class on to Rush. My brother and I also listened to Yes and Kansas; he loved ELP and The Who and Jeff Beck and he learned to play guitar by listening to Peter Frampton, who was the radio god of the summer of 1976. My brother was an expert at radio station phone contests for a while. His greatest win was a pair of tickets to see Queen, Kansas and Mahoghany Rush at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall in 1974, which we were allowed to attend because our parents were willing to get tickets for a theater show in the Kennedy Center for the same night. We agreed to meet them outside the theater at 10:30. Kansas and Mahoghany Rush had played, but Queen hadn't even gone on by then! After 15 minutes of waiting, we asked the usher if we could go back into the concert, hearing the onslaught coming from inside. We saw 4 or 5 songs--amazing, Freddie Mercury at his prime--and were snapped back to reality when we saw our parents' silhouettes walking towards the stage, Queen's multi-colored dry ice spectacle behind them.
I've failed to mention several musical taste excursions I went on a little earlier: in junior high school I dug deep into Grand Funk and Bachman Turner Overdrive, buying several albums by each group. I also bought Rare Earth's backpack designed album, Argent's Hold Your Head Up album and some other hit-and-miss material. I was searching. Chicago IV. Jackson Brown's Late For the Sky was also in my collection around that time. These were some of my earliest albums. I also bought Goodbye Yellowbrick Road.
And I had Jimi Hendrix records, first on the merits of his Smash Hits collection, and followed by Electric Ladyland and Cry of Love. Hendrix was a real door opener for me, a great guitarist, singer and songwriter, but also a genre defying artist who flew between labels so easily.
Kiss was a phenomenon due to their first live album. They were close to the embodiment of evil when they first appeared, frightening parents over the lives of their teenage children.
Record City often had LPs for $3.99, so collecting records was not impossible.
I didn't have a stereo in my room until the summer after my senior year, when I took a job at the local Volvo dealer's car wash. It was a lousy job, since the car wash was leaking grease onto car paint rather than taking dirt off, and we had to pretty much handwash the cars with windex. I earned enough to buy a new Technics SA-202 receiver and some used BIC Venturi 2 speakers, a decent little radio system. I still had to go downstairs to "the den" to listen to vinyl.
Chris Barker and I were really studying music by the end of high school. Chris was getting very adventurous in his listening, finding a show of progressive rock on WAMU. He had the independent record stores in the area mapped out and we could find promo copies of a lot of albums for $3.99. The University of Maryland had a progressive music bin in their campus record store, where he found albums by Art Zoyd and Univers Zero, out first brush with the weird music we would uncover over the next few years.
My brother Tom was in a Yes cover band for a while with his friend at Georgetown Prep named Roger Greenawalt, and through them we discovered the first Bill Bruford albums which led to guitarist Allan Holdsworth. His work would represent the pinnacle of guitar playing. Bruford's band toured the States in 1979 or so and we went to a show in Virginia, hoping to see Dave Stewart and Allan Holdsworth along with rhythm section Bruford and Jeff Berlin. Unfortunately, Holdsworth did not tour with Bruford; a guitarist named John Clark was there in his stead.
Other albums of the era: Cheech and Chong--Los Cochinos,
I don't recall a lot about the transition to college, except that I took my albums up to a dorm room outside of Boston. I may have bought a Dual turntable, though I know I spent most of my solvency on marijuana which was smoked very quickly. I spent 2 years in Tufts University dormitories and bought records at Discount Records in Harvard Square.
I met Hahn Rowe in my first days at Tufts and we hung out and listened to music. He took me to some concerts I wouldn't have heard otherwise, such as Fred Frith and Chris Cutler at a chemistry lab on campus. That led to my extreme interest in Henry Cow and Robert Wyatt over the next 20 years or so.
Tufts had a little 10-watt radio station called WMFO which had a great record library and some great shows, in particular Mental Notes, "the program designed with your mind in mind", which was hosted alternatingly by Michael Paillas and Andy MacKenzie. Hahn and I went down to WMFO and got oriented and eventually got ourselves on the air. You had to practice segues and make a demo skim tape for the program director before going on the air at 2am. I eventually graduated to a 10pm to 2am show. Playing records over the radio is like having the greatest stereo system in the world. Someone might have a stereo with 100 or 200 watts per channel, but with the little 10-watt radio transmitter, we were sending our signals clear across town. Or a few miles at least.
When Hahn's friend from Choate, Jake Dillon, appeared in Medford, the three of us decided to form a band called Loaf of Wonder. The rules were: you had to make your own guitar and wear a bad Hawaiian shirt. Fred Frith was playing homemade guitars, so we jumped on that bandwagon. I don't know if Frith wore Hawaiian shirts, he wasn't invited into the band anyway. We did 2 or three concerts and then Hahn moved to New York. Hahn and Jake were both better musicians than me, but I brought enthusiasm to the project.
I remember the day the Talking Heads LP Remain in Light came out; Hahn and I were in Harvard Square and walked into Discount Records and he saw the Heads album and bought it. (Or was it the Byrne/Eno record My Life in the Bush of Ghosts?) I looked down and saw there was also a new Rush album: Moving Pictures, bought it, and we went back to my dorm room and played our new records.
There were great used record shops in Boston. Nuggets in Kenmore Square, Cheepo in Central Square, Disc Diggers in Davis Sq. and In Your Ear in Allston. The In Your Ear guys started selling on campuses of several colleges, including Tufts. We would try to walk to class and get waylaid by the set up of album crates. Hahn And I bought a lot of records and had listening parties rather than going to class. Hahn once got the great Hatfield and the North LP The Rotters' Club from those guys and I wanted that record so badly I permanently borrowed it from Hahn. Sorry about that.
Getting back to the stereo story, I had no turntable when I arrived in Boston (Somerville/Medford), but I did have some money from the summer job and my parents may have given me a little money. I went to Tweeter Etc, a stereo shop in Cambridge, and bought a new Dual 506 turntable. It worked well for several years. Having grown up in a Dual household, I was a devoted fan of the turnplatters. That stereo, still my first, followed me through several home changes: two years in dormitories, then into an apartment near Porter Square. I must have packed it up when I did a semester abroad in Barcelona, then back to Medford. I studied African Drum and Dance one summer at Tufts with David Locke, he taught an agbekor group there. I moved into a girlfriend's house near Inman Square with that same stereo, although I recall buying an AR turntable at a used stereo shop in Cambridge. Then I took a cross-country roadtrip with Jake and when I returned I never got that stereo system back. My girlfriend, who had looked after the stuff along with all my records, let a girlfriend of hers take the stereo and it was never given back. I got back most of the records, which I realized were much more precious and time consuming to replace.
At some point I acquired another Dual turntable, probably again at Tweeter Etc, who were the Cambridge Dual dealer. I can't remember what else I had for a system. I did continue to do radio at WMFO, so that was like always having an incredible music system at your fingers. There was a production studio there with twin Otari reel tape decks that was more exciting than sitting at home listening to records, although I did buy music. But I also began to compose my own tape music more seriously. Hahn Rowe visited from NY and taught me how to make and use tape loops, to make my own music. I started experimenting with skipping records as a variation on the loop. Outgoing answering machine cassettes were also employed as an option for a quick tape loop.
I decided in 1981 that I would cross-register at the Boston Museum School and study art more seriously. After taking a summer animation class in Boston, I applied for a 5-year, double-degree program Tufts had recently established with the Museum School.
Richard Lerman was a film teacher at the Museum School and his specialty was in sound. He was doing great things with piezo contact microphone elements and taught students to do that as well. He shot a stunning series of super8 films documenting his transducer work (Transducer Series). I started playing around with piezos, my first project with them called Ben Franklin, being the amplification of a kite in flight. Well, it was amplified kite string, using a cheap plastic party cup with a hole drilled in the bottom, the kite string is passed through the hole and its vibration is sounded by the cup as a resonator. A piezo disc is scotch taped to the cup in order to record the sound created at the cup by this long string basically screaming in the wind. I took Jake out back of the radio station to the ballfield there and let the kite rip, it was great, recording onto a cheap mono tabletop recorder and then going inside to the studio and listening to so much crazy sound captured.
I don't recall what else I had for a stereo at this point. I lived several places in Somerville, then in Leverett in western Mass, and then moved up to Portland, Maine. I think I had some Cambridge Soundworks speakers, and the silver Dual turntable, but don't recall an amplifier. Even in Maine, I can't remember what I had for a stereo, although I did buy a Tascam 4-track cassette machine and a dat recorder and a Digitech Echo+ sampler when I lived in Maine, forming my first home sound studio. I got involved with the University of Southern Maine's radio station WMPG and hosted a show called The Plagiarist, where I subjugated the audience to my sampling experiments.
After four years in Maine, I spent two months in Russia as a visiting artist and musician, as guest of Leo Loginov, with whom I had done some combined musical exploration. When I returned I moved immediately to California. I'd had enough of winter. I eventually settled in Berkeley, California.
In Berkeley I was able to find a lot of stereo equipment. There was a used stereo shop called The Sound Well, which made a lot of good vintage gear available. I bought a Carver Sonic hologram preamp, something I had seen at the stereo convention in Washington as a kid. The Carver was amplified by a decent Sony solid state amp and I also found a pair of ESS AMT-1 speakers in immaculate shape. The Carver preamp through the ESS speakers, particularly as it presented live recordings, was an astounding combination. I listened to loud music, trying to hear every sound in the sound field. Eventually the Heil ribbon tweeters in the speakers fatigued or even hurt my ears. I decided never to use ribbon tweeters again; the shrillness, while exciting at first due to the detail of the sound, began to exhaust the ear and even destroy their ability to listen.
I also found some good cheap Japanese receivers in Berkeley. There is the Sansui 771 receiver, which I wanted so much for its cool design back in high school, and I found one at a little shop called Rockridge Electronics for $85. It needs work, the right channel doesn't play in STEREO mode, but I still have it. At the Ashby flea market I found a very good Yamaha 820 receiver for around $50, a great deal.
I had an office studio in Berkeley for about 4 years where all my filmmaking and music equipment was set up. The ESS speakers lived in there. I had tape recorders and a soprano sax. The film group, Wet Gate, that I was part of rehearsed in that studio. I bought a Mac computer and the first ProTools LE system. I composed a new soundtrack for Luis Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou in time for his 100th birthday (2000). I tried to make a short feature shot on super8 and blown up to 16mm. I bought a Steenbeck 16mm editing flatbed when 2 filmmakers imported about 10 of them from the BBC. Charles Kremenak and I did some recording, me playing sampler instruments and he playing back from his huge archive of found sound recordings and ephemera.
Charles invited me to be part of a group that played one night in the Exploratorium museum. Wet Gate also performed several times in the Exploratorium, one of those nights using my low power FM transmitter to broadcast our soundtrack to the other end of the building, where it was played back on another system, creating a football field length delay. Talk about stereo!
I helped David Sherman and Rebecca Barten open the little theater in their basement on McCoppin St. in San Francisco, not by doing any heavy lifting or cleaning, they had done all that. But I helped brainstorm the idea, in particular by giving the name of "microcinema" to the place, using the word in a conversation with Rebecca one night. We also made a soundtrack for Guy Debord's Hurlements en Faveur de Sade, where I poorly mimicked a French accent and spun Francois Bayle records. Hipsters (who are they, what are they? I dunno, but people seem to agree it was they who) lined up outside the TOTALMOBILEHOME microcinema to see the rare Guy Debord film (had he just killed himself?), which was really a new reel of black and clear leaders arranged by David Sherman.
In 1998 I moved temporarily to New Orleans to try to make a TV pilot of some sort called Jalopy Hour. We set up a low power FM station as a backdrop for the project; we intended to improvise script ideas on the air in free associative sessions, but that work method didn't materialize. Instead we cobbled together several existing ideas with several pulled from thin air, fleshed it out a little, et voila! I brought my recent love for antique music to Jalopy Hour and did some sampling from early records. Fremeaux and Associates was starting to release its great sets of early recordings. Jalopy Hour was largely an homage to the time just prior to recording: earliest cinema, photography and phonograph.
I returned to California with a load of Mississippi River silt in my car. I lived in San Anselmo for a year and took a vocal class with the master at Ali Akbar Khan School in San Rafael. Then I moved north to Mendocino County, where I got involved with a small, rural public radio station. And that's another chapter.
