A Partial Chronology of Butchered, Bruised, Worn, Defective, and/or Repurposed Recordings I Have Known

Analog, sigh. It was a time of cobbling, of gaps and seams, of defects as a matter of course. A combination of economy—blank cassettes cost an order of magnitude more than blank discs—and technology—the culture of obsolescence that arose around the inability to manipulate damaged discs. Now, discs have given way to a shadow-world of music without material form, without fingerprints.

It’s true that a recording is always to some degree a ghost. But as the technology has changed, and with it the recording artifact, so our relationship to music has changed as well. It’s less intimate, I think, than it used to be. Less personal. The once-obvious seams and crooked hems, the weird silences and truncated ends, the nicks and quirks and tics and scratches and skips: there were just so many spaces we could fit ourselves into. So many things could go wrong without scuttling everything, and there was so much room for us to screw up. And then we had to learn to live with it, like we had to learn to live with the imperfections of our friends and siblings, our parents, our lovers, ourselves. Accident or defect (occasionally a happy one) or a history of wear marked recordings as ours, and marked us in turn. It didn’t make them obsolete; in fact, sometimes it made them that much more valuable, that much more endearing. An old scar, a maimed rescue. A paperback held together by rubber bands. Jeans you couldn’t wear out of the apartment—we used to be able to wear our music that way.

This is not intended as an exercise in nostalgia, personal or historical, though nostalgia does have its place here, of a weirdly masochistic sort: for the sometimes maddening way our music misbehaved, and that we misbehaved with it, wrestling with the plastic-yet-resilient media in which it was embodied, and which we quite consciously took for it. Our suffering and our struggle created a relationship, a bond. A mutual devotion.

Without further ado, then, a very partial chronology of my three-legged dogs.

*

1981. When David Z. got Moving Pictures and Dirty Deeds for his thirteenth birthday, we played “Tom Sawyer” over and over until the kid who lived on the other side of David’s semi-detached house, who was a year or two older than us and wore a gold chain, told us to stop. That day left a groove in my ear. Or maybe a skip. Before I ever got a chance to tape Moving Pictures, this same neighbor got hold of it, and—so his story went—his little sister whacked the needle while the record was playing, right at the beginning of “Tom Sawyer.” How convenient, having a younger sibling, particularly a younger sister, for a patsy. Maybe it was his way of getting revenge on us, for killing that song before it even had a chance to be born. Maybe he was calling attention to the fact that we were acting like a scratched record, picking up the needle and carrying it back to the beginning of “Tom Sawyer.” Anyway, when I put David’s record on to tape it, the opening synth swoosh had been chopped in half; the record jumped right to a heavily-truncated first verse: “A modern day war—” and then into the main chord progression. That was the Moving Pictures I taped. I listened to it relentlessly. It was the only version of “Tom Sawyer” I knew, unless I happened to catch the song on the radio, or hear it at another friend’s house, until I bought Moving Pictures on cassette a year or two later.

1982. My store-bought cassette of 2112 was defective. In the last section of the side-long title track, Alex Lifeson is supposed to intone “We have assumed control” three times, and then whammy-bar the low E until the feedback rings out the song. But on my tape he said it only once, and then the music, the climactic, cataclysmic roar of “VI. Grand Finale,” abruptly stopped, followed by the tape itself, Click—this being a time when the technology of recording was not so far removed from that of mousetraps. On side 2, “A Passage to Bangkok” picked up with the last two notes of the “oriental riff,” and Geddy Lee started right in with “Our first stop is in Bo-gota,” etc. The opening unaccompanied guitar riff was entirely missing—which makes sense, as it was the other side of the same chunk of tape that should have contained the end of “2112.” I always figured that tape was fucked up, but never had the gall to return it. I mean, what if the much older, much cooler record store clerk looked me in the eye and said, “Retard, it’s supposed to end that way?” Could I really risk being that much of a loser? About my favorite band? And so I didn’t hear how “2112” really ended until I bought the live album All the World’s a Stage the following year. But that is an abridged live version, so how could I really say they hadn’t changed the ending for the concert? Here’s the real kicker: When I finally bought 2112 on record and heard the “real” end of “2112,” I was disappointed. In terms of endings, it’s by far the weakest of the three side-long suites the band produced, utterly deus ex machina, as abrupt and contrived in its way as my defective tape. At least the cut-off ending had a certain daring, an admission of failure, like one of those “O! Something!” Melville endings. Suffice to say it’s become quite precious to me now, all that missing music. Or at least “2112” has. “Bangkok” really suffered. The problem is I couldn’t put one back without the other.

1983. I’m still tight with Billy Joel’s Glass Houses, but there was period when I believed I should disparage it, a rite of passage, you might say, and what better way to do so than to record Iron Maiden’s The Number of the Beast right over top of it? I mean, steamroller that Billy Joel shit into oblivion. I remember the thrill of learning you could actually do this by stuffing wads of toilet paper into the square notches (a.k.a. love handles) in the corners of a cassette. Blank tapes had little tabs over these notches; after you made a recording, you were supposed to break them—the ends of scissors worked well for this—to safeguard the product. But it turned out that even if you broke the tabs, you could reverse the process with wadded toilet paper. And so you could repurpose any store-bought tape. In fact, you could record over anybody’s shit, if you had that sort of a mean streak in you. Man, I loved popping Billy Joel into the cassette player and having Maiden come out the speakers. Instead of “You May Be Right,” “In-VA-ders.” Maiden, my mighty Norsemen, severing the limbs and burning the corpse of that wretched Saxon Joel.

1983. I copied my friend’s Screaming for Vengeance record over one of my dad’s classical piano tapes. I’m sure I had his permission. (I’m not being ironic.) When I put the tape on, there was this lovely little piano lick—seven or eight climbing notes, lasting maybe a second and a half—and then, Bwaaaang!, “The Hellion,” SFV’s instrumental prelude, landed on it like an atom bomb. Here’s my best guess how this happened: Cassettes have about five seconds of lead before the magnetic tape begins. When you taped a record, you had to make sure to start recording after the lead; otherwise, the music would start before the magnetic tape did, and you’d miss the beginning. (In fact, since the piano lick starts in the middle of a phrase, this is likely what happened to my father—which was maybe why he gave me the tape to use.) The easiest way to skip the lead was to turn the wheels of the cassette manually, with a pen or your fingernail, until the black magnetic tape appeared, then insert it in the recorder, set PAUSE and RECORD, drop the needle, and un-PAUSE. But if you forwarded past the lead, and there was something already recorded on the tape … well, there it stayed. I still can’t listen to “The Hellion” without hearing that scant piano lick—it adds so much to the song it’s a shame the Priest didn’t think of it themselves. It probably helps that, in all these years, I’ve never been able to figure out what the piece is.

1985. I spent a lot of time this year copying classical records from my parents’ collection, including one of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra. The ppppp introduction of the “Freude” theme is, as you may recall, bowed on the basses; and the dynamics of the symphony are such that, unless you’re blasting the whole thing—which I wholly endorse—you can’t even hear this introduction without turning the stereo way way way up. And even then you’ve got to crouch beside the speakers and hold your breath, feeling about as deaf as Beethoven. On that old record—or rather, the tape I made from it—the imperfections in the vinyl are louder than the basses; the theme is almost lost in the hiss; the music seems so insubstantial that the medium is straining to capture it, like neutrino tracks caught in miles of lead. There is something about being on the cusp of not hearing the beginning of that theme, those yearning basses so deeply buried in the hiss and crackle, rising as the theme develops and is distributed throughout the orchestra, that (for me) cannot be disassociated from the symphony itself. As though the limits of the medium reflected the the very distance from which the theme had to travel to reach us, and the impossibility of our yearning as we try to reach through the material that stands between ourselves and the music, an otherworldly visitor. Such hamstrung listening was also about creating the figure of Beethoven for this impressionable and romantic teenager.

1986. When Judas Priest sold out with Turbo, I threw the jilted fan’s tantrum and recorded over all my Priest.* Or almost all. A lot of it, anyway. I kept two ninety-minute cassettes’ worth—I wasn’t quite so betrayed, I guess, that I couldn’t carefully preserve my favorite material: Unleashed in the East in its entirety, and select songs from the rest of their catalog—like an enraged divorcee stumbling out of the house with her favorite lamp tucked under one arm. The challenge was to keep certain songs on albums without using more tapes (one doesn’t squander precious resources on the Judas, the scab, the snitch). So I had to find equivalent-length songs to squeeze into the gaps created by the songs I was deleting. Of course, though I tried every possible mathematical combination, there were no exact matches, and three sides of those tapes (that is, the sides without the untouchable Unleashed in the East) are marked by unnaturally long gaps where I had to let silence fill the space until the next previously-recorded track. There is also at least one glaring error (“The Last Rose of Summer,” I think, partially retained). (N.B.: I had taped my Priest off a friend with whom I no longer spent time; he had taped my Maiden; this was typical of the symbiotic relationship that defined music trading in those days, i.e., pooled money, shared resources.)

1987. My record of Permanent Waves had a skip right where “Natural Science” moves into part 2, “Hyperspace,” so Geddy Lee would sing “Our causes can’t see their e-ffects,” followed by a short tom roll, and then the song would go on: “e-ffects” (buddulup-bup-bup) “e-ffects” (buddulup-bup-bup) “e-ffects,” etc. And not even on beat: the tom roll ended a little early, not quite a full measure, which in itself was tricky and sort of cool, at least the first few times, and, in hindsight, points the way toward a detour to some other relationship to my music, a perilous road not taken, at least until some years later.** Whenever I listened to that record, I had to remember to walk over to the turntable and knock the needle gently out of its groove so I could hear the rest of the song, and save myself and my band from the limbo of e-ffects (buddulup-bup-bup). Since I no longer had my store-bought cassette handy, just as happened with “Tom Sawyer,” I got used to hearing “Natural Science” this way until 2009 or so, when I found another copy in a crate of records someone was getting rid of in the basement of my Harlem co-op. The super had already taken his pick.

1991. The year of the Police Squad! mix (in color!), among the finest mixed tapes ever made. I hope its recipient, Patrick U., has kept it, with the intention of eventually bequeathing it to a museum. It paired choice late ‘80s/early ‘90s rock with snippets from the TV show Police Squad! (e.g.: “Who are you, and how did you get in here?” Leslie Nielson: “I’m a locksmith, and … I’m a locksmith.”) But as with so much of this time, it is also a recording of a process: walking down the stairs to where the TV/VCR was; setting the tape up in the little portable tape deck (the sort with the retractable handle in front of the deck and the single speaker behind it, the generation before the boombox); getting the VCR ready; waiting for the house to be quiet; recording open-air. Then trudging back upstairs to the living room, where the stereo with the CD and turntable was, to record a couple more songs; then back downstairs, etc. Of course it sounded good, the way the berries you pick taste better.

1993. At the end of my first year of grad school, I got a tape of An Anthology of Tom Waits from a friend; it was taped over a Vanilla Ice cassette that her Japanese students had given her as a gift. She had turned the label inside out, matching her purple cursive against their green print. I value the names of Vanilla Ice songs written in the hand of Japanese students I will never meet almost as much as my friend’s cursive … though neither as much, it must be admitted, as hearing “Ol’ 55” or “Diamonds on my Windshield” or “The Piano Has Been Drinking” or “Burma Shave” for the first time.

1998-9; 2002-3. An ambitious project of making salsa mixes from Latin music shows on Columbia’s WKCR 89.9—initially “Caribe Latino,” which used to air on Monday nights from 10-12, and then Friday Night’s “Mambo Machine,” as well as occasionally the cumbia show on Wednesday eves, and the Sunday-afternoon Latin shows on WBAI, although their yield was considerably lower. I wouldn’t hear the tapes until the next day or weekend, like they were traps set for crabs. (When the show was on I was usually grading papers with the volume all the way down, or out somewhere.) Had I (or my partner) flipped the tape without missing too much between sides? Had I gotten so lucky as to record the part of the show where the DJ rattled off names and artists? It was, to say the least, an imperfect process. There are tracks that cut off in the middle, and tracks that start in the middle, and tracks with gaps in their middles where the tape had to be flipped, though the bits I got, whether beginning or end or beginning and end, were too good to throw back into the sea. There were tapes that caught the first half-hour of the graveyard experimental/ambience program “Transfigured Night,” which was the first way I ever heard Runes, for example, and speaks to the happy accidents and contingencies that come of casting the net widely—you’d be surprised at the sort of things that lurk in the abyssal deeps of radio. And then there is one whole side of a 90-minute tape (I think it’s volume 7 of the 22 I managed to finish) where the radio signal was coming in … poorly. It was the Machito festival—KCR specializes in marathon broadcasts to celebrate artists’ birthdays and passings—and they were playing all this son stuff from the thirties, and where the fuck was I going to find that again, back in 1999? There are places where the static is so bad you can’t even hear the music. Maybe I was a fool to keep it. But there it is, Machito, fading in and out, and me like a ham radio operator, catching the electromagnetic waves from some Siberia of time, an echo-wave reaching me from deep in the past.

*

Enough. But I’ve barely scratched the surface. All those tapes glitched by the faulty connection in the white jack in the back of the receiver, so that the lefthand speaker crackled and made bands stutter (e.g., Maiden, “Die With Your Boots On”: “No point a-a-asking who’s to blame.”). The Forbidden Evil tape that would garble and unspool, a loop like a hernia, that my friend Pat F., who worked in the local video store, helped me to cut and splice, so that it worked again, but a couple of seconds of “Through Eyes of Glass” were lost, right as the song is leading into the second verse, “My mind is one, now has the crystal power,” etc. An entire post could be written about mixed tapes, audio letters and sentimental objects par excellence.

But to return to the issue of materiality. It might be argued that music exists somewhere beyond the medium of the recording, in some essence apart from it, and to seek perfection in technologies of reproduction is to allow us to better approach and perhaps capture its spirit. My Beethoven example above seems to suggest this, although it is encased in metaphor.

Yet, I would tend to the opposite: the recording is the music, or all we can have of it. Or, perhaps better put, the recording as a physical object exposes the essentially and inescapably material nature of music. And never moreso than when a recording is mangled or otherwise faulty. A music-phobic way to listen to music, then, to try to purify it of the very stuff from which it is made. To imagine bathwater and baby so essentially different. I think that we have lost a certain solidarity with the material world; and, lacking it, we have come to lack something in our relationship to art, which is, first and foremost, material.

And so, when I hear people talking about their high-fidelity systems, their 180-gram mint-condition vinyl, their thousand-dollar needles, their surround-sound speaker set-ups, their subwoofers that make the glass of water set upon their marble countertops shudder as if Jurassic Park’s T. Rex were walking by … how can I help but sigh? Give me ink smeared thick as frosting across a smooth white page. Give me a typewriter with a broken TAB key and a ribbon you have to rewind by hand, like the magnetic tape of a cassette. I want to be able to feel the way the nibs of different pens slide across surfaces of different kinds of paper, feel the ridge of the slight dent made by the typewriter keys, as though it were braille, hear the din of language being made in the smoking factory of thought. Give me a music, as much as a language, that I can touch. Speakers bowing under the weight of sound, smouldering oil lamps, sawdust and stale beer, the creak of old pews, or of an old guitar when a string is torqued one step higher.

Spirit, spirit, spirit. Haven’t we had enough of that? If I can’t touch it, can’t smell it, does it deserve to be called music?

* I have heard this sort of thing was widespread in 1991, when Metallica released the “black” album, and betrayed fans everywhere responded by etching out the Metallica from their collections. Two points follow. One, betrayal is, of course, a powerful way to create cohesion, and it might be said that Metallica’s apostasy produced the genre of thrash metal as a discrete historical object—that it couldn’t have become so without that boundary-forming betrayal (as, earlier, thrash bolstered its identity by defining itself against the apostasy of hair metal). Second, consider that Metallica’s apostasy is perched on the cusp of metal’s splintering into a number of subgenres. I have compared the circa-2005 thrash revival to the Second Great Awakening (“Burned-over,” 8.3.11), and now I wonder if a similarly fruitful comparison couldn’t be made to 1991: the mainstream deemed to have fallen away from the true faith, and the subsequent (or concomitant?) splintering of the genre into sects.

** Not to suggest that my relationship to music was entirely devoid of irony or humor. One of my first great mixing projects (with a friend) was to create a song composed of lines from Rush songs in combinations that made them ridiculous, like an audio version of those channel-changing cartoons in Mad magazine (e.g.: “We will call you Cygnus, god of/ [click] The hypocrites.”). And talk about seams: this mix was so primitive that it was pretty much nothing but seams. That said, there’s no question that we often need to be pushed out of our listening grooves, and, as at least two of the entries above suggest, such defects can open up new ways of listening. Not to add to hip hop apocrypha, but it’s not difficult to imagine that damaged vinyl played a role in the origins of sampling, just as scratching re-purposes the recording artifact for ulterior musical ends. (… But then where to put Steve Reich?)

Addendum, 5.25.16. On reflection, I think there is another reason why I tend to privilege recorded artifacts over streaming music from the web. It goes back to a comment sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris made about listening in the internet age, which I discussed in “T-shirts and Wittgenstein” (5.24.13): that the instant availability of music creates a “crisis of abundance,” leaving the listener without the time necessary to process, or engage deeply with, or fully reflect upon, what he or she hears. Recursivity and focus is replaced by breadth, and—this more an echo of the recent stream of publications about cognition and the net—the listening mind comes to mimic the web. In this regard, the artifact serves as a kind of stopper, the proverbial finger in the dike holding back the sea of music raging behind it; a means to manage the rate of access to new music that would otherwise deluge us. We might say this is a subsidiary role of all media: not just to provide access, but to limit, to act as a screen. To some, such a choice of listening habits may sound parsimonious, even Puritanical. I would prefer to think of it as Hellenic: the ideal of moderation, a means of maintaining or restoring some measure of (in this case) aesthetic health in an age of decline.

      Among my handful of sacred places in New York—those cafés, gardens, and institutional spaces where I can best study, write, meditate, mosey, and otherwise get in tune with the Am and Is—I would include the music library of City College.

The library is housed at the southwest end of that beautiful neo-gothic monument Shepard Hall, a block away from my old Convent Avenue apartment. Shepard is shaped like an anchor, or a flexing cross, with the tall tower at the crown, the Great Hall for a shank, and the library in the half-rotunda where the shackle would be. (In cathedral terms, the hall would be the nave, and the library located under the apse.) The library has two floors, with listening carrels on the second, entry level, and the stacks and reading room on the first, accessed by way of a narrow staircase that turns twice, to the left on the way down, to the right on the way up. The stairs are wood, as is much of the work around the doors and upstairs windows. What with the woodwork, the two floors, and the cathedral environs, it reminds me, fittingly, of an organ. Unlike an organ, however, the library tolerates a charming amount of illogic—the improbably narrow staircase, for example. I don’t think you could get a cello down those stairs, let alone a bass.

I love this library for how small and self-contained it is. I loved the Marriott Library at the University of Utah (where I went to grad school) for the latter reason, and for the same reason feel little connection with the New York Public Library: none of the individual branches are adequate to themselves. The Performing Arts library at Lincoln Center is better in this regard, but still too diffuse … and, perhaps, too well-traveled. The music library at City can get a little busy during exam time, probably spillover from the Cohen, City’s main library. During the regular semester, though, there are rarely more than ten people there at any one time. This space filled with recordings, with notes, and with words about music basks in a near-monastical silence.

The Marriott had the kinds of stacks that rewarded careful, curious, passionate browsing. I would always go in looking for one or a few books, and walk out with a pile. I never wrote down call numbers very clearly—I couldn’t, not with those nubbins of pencils, on those business-card-size bits of scrap paper. So I could only ever get into the general vicinity of a book. And then I would have to browse, not by call number, but by title. Digging around, I would find a dozen other titles, some better than the ones I believed I’d come for. (It’s always more pleasant to ballpark, isn’t it, to have to ask, to get turned around, to play Marco Polo with wisdom. Every good book has a measure of serendipity about it.)

The music library multiplies the rewards for such browsing because it is organized around a single subject, and its collections are the cumulative reflection of the taste, wisdom, and judgment of the librarians and the faculty of the music department at City College, of a century (more or less) of thoughtful scholarship and librarianship.* And so, unlike at the University of Utah, where I used to set off with a half-legible call number for a compass and a walking-stick, a trip downstairs in the music library requires no call number at all—just a good bit of time, a bunch of questions you haven’t quite been able to formulate, and a lot of tunes that never leave your head.

Some days I would pick a stack at random and go through title after title, pulling books off the shelves, opening to the table of contents, or to a random page, in an odd, secular gesture at bibliomancy. After I had gone through a few shelves this way—sometimes all the way down to the floor—I might bring a few books over to one of the carrels under the arched, barred windows looking out onto the quad. For a sort-of basement, it gets nice light, particularly in the spring and early fall, when the sun has begun to go down behind the clock tower, and the light splashes across the tables, sometimes too warm and bright to work in. On those days, at that hour, from the steps of the North Academic Center, Shepard Hall looks like the Cathedral of Ys risen from the waves.

I have sat on the floor amid the stacks, too, my books piled in the space past the metal bookends, stumbling upon bits of musical esoterica—connections between Renaissance music and bird songs; the story behind the naming of Damrosch Park—scribbling down titles for future reference, occasionally taking books out, racking up enormous, humiliating, bankrupting fines, to be paid only after much arguing and whining and weaseling.

At least, at the Cohen. Never here. One must stay on good terms with one’s sacred spaces.

I return my books with pencil marks in them, after I have reached the limit of possible renewals, or have been threatened with losing borrowing privileges, knowing that in a few months, or years, or a decade, when I need that book again, I can go back to the same place in the stacks, find my old copy, and my marks again, and perhaps, finally, take notes, and erase the marks, at least some of them, and so return a clean(er) copy, and begin to set my accounts right with the universe.

I have spent afternoons there, too, my unsanctioned coffee thermos hidden in one of the nearby carrels, diligently plugging away at counterpoint homework, or parsing examples from Aldwell and Schachter, or writing out the first draft of some piece bound for the Pit Stop, or copying articles I am thinking of using for my Writing About Music class … or, of course, grading papers, while students paced up and down Convent Avenue and the shadows of the bars started to creep across the carrels.

And then before I knew it, it would be almost five o’clock: the closing announcement is made, and the blind man—the one I used to see walking to school, arm locked with a friend’s or good samaritan’s—emerges from one of the labs and rings the elevator. At Johns Hopkins, where I did my undergraduate work, the main library would close at midnight; and, if you happened to be there at that hour, you could participate in the pilgrimage across the quad to the “Hut,” the all-night library on the bottom floor of Gilman Hall. Gilman is the only academic building I know that held a candle to Shepard—held, because it was renovated a few years ago, and many of its most fantastic quirks removed. Leaving the music library at five, I could have relived (as farce) this memory by turning left, heading over to the Cohen; the flukes of the anchor may be buried in St. Nicholas Park, but the shackle points toward the Cohen, as though the newer structure were a vessel tethered to the older one by an invisible rope. Instead, I always went right. This much hasn’t changed. The difference is that I don’t live a block north anymore, but a thousand. I can’t see Shepard Hall out my window. But I can still imagine it, tiny and far below me, I tethered not by rope, but by a string, as the kite I cling to dips and flaps.

I suppose part of what made the music library sacred was that it allowed me to try on another identity. If I always crossed the upper floor quickly, making a bee-line for the stairs, maybe it’s because I felt a little like a charlatan, and was trying not to be noticed. Once, when I borrowed the score for the “Waldstein” sonata (for “Of Liszt and Other Ghosts”), the librarian, who directed me to the right area in the stacks, counseled me that these were mini-scores—fine to read, but not to play from. I assured her that I was in no way capable of playing the “Waldstein,” that I merely intended to read it. But even that was a bit of a ruse. I was like a man with a third-grade education walking around with a copy of Ulysses, just so he could run his finger along the lines and mouth the strange words to himself, marveling at the incantatory nature of the language.

For a writer, that edge—between two identities, two modes of representation, two disciplines—at once inside and outside—is the most natural of places. The erotic gaps between, as Barthes might have put it; the places where knowledge gapes. The music library is the space where, for me, those gaps appear, in the fantasy that always accompanies the word.

* And, of course, the realities of public school budgets. Still, I remember the first time I realized that I, as a faculty member, could request that the library order books. It was a dizzying confluence of responsibility and irresponsibility. I was helping to direct the purchases on which the future of an institution depended. I was standing with a shopping cart at the entrance of a fantasically large bookstore, watching the man with the starter’s pistol.

Billy Joel’s Glass Houses and The J. Geils Band’s Freeze Frame were the first two albums I ever bought, and I bought them on cassette. A few years later, I switched to records. I’m still not sure why. Maybe I heard somewhere that vinyl sounded better, but I doubt it. I hardly listened to my records; I would immediately tape them onto one of those TDK SLII-90 blank cassettes. An LP would fill about one side, together with an EP B-side if the album was a little short. If it was maddeningly long (say 48 minutes … just too long for the extra two or so minutes you always got on a “45 minute” side), it went by itself onto a TDK SLII-60, with EP fillers again, if necessary. The records would then go into a milk crate, my version of a reliquary, where they became proper objects of devotion.

If records were sacred relics, tapes were the opposite: relentlessly personalizable, a place to practice band logos, doodle scenes of medieval violence, crack private jokes, and list all sorts of useless information on those very inviting lines that appeared when you flipped the label inside-out. Man, we worked on those cassette labels like prisoners sculpting in soap.

Like a lot of people, when I hit my mid-twenties my taste in rock music froze. I stopped trying to keep up with the constant flurry of new bands and splintering scenes. Besides, there was this whole other genre of music called jazz that I was eager to explore, and which sated my desire for the “new,” even though the vast majority of it seemed to have been recorded before I was born, and most of the practitioners I was listening to were dead. My taste moved on from there, to modern chamber music, flamenco, free jazz and salsa. If I wanted to listen to rock, I could always put on something I’d listened to in high school, or college, or early grad school.

By my mid-twenties I had also moved into buying music in the relatively new medium of compact discs, and for several years I didn’t bother to buy anything on vinyl, except for the occasional dirt-cheap classical record at a garage or library or radio station sale. Then two things happened. First, I started listening to new(er) rock music again—metal bands that had popped up in the mid-to-late nineties, as well as non-metal acts that attracted my attention (Calexico, Radiohead). Second, for whatever reason, I decided to reinvestigate the roots and branches of “my” music from the seventies and eighties. And this meant, somewhat inscrutably, going back to vinyl.

My collection of rock records from the seventies and eighties had always been supplemented by my friends’ collections, and theirs by mine, so that if, say, Andrew had X album by band A, I would buy Y album, and then we would tape them off of each other. As a result, my record collection was maddeningly incomplete, although I probably never felt it as such until I had lost touch with those friends with whom I had shared this music. I had a lot of Rush and Voivod and Testament and Metallica and Maiden, but little Zeppelin or Priest or Slayer or Megadeth or Floyd, which I had mostly taped. There were also certain bands and artists that I hadn’t gotten into until late college or post-college, like (believe it or not) Black Sabbath, when I was already buying everything on CD. Looking at my record collection was like looking in a mirror and seeing only half of my face.

Now, there is no logical reason why, when I started to pick up the old albums I didn’t have on vinyl, I couldn’t just buy them on CD. Most of my friends happily re-bought all their vinyl on CD in the ‘90s. But somehow, when I went to buy the ‘80s metal, ‘70s prog rock, and ‘60s classic rock I never had, or never wanted—again, inscrutably—I had to buy it on vinyl.

Hang in there, now—I know this all seems a bit too navel-gazing, and you’re wondering at this point whether you should actually give a shit. But have you ever stared at your navel so long that it starts to look … well, a little funky? Like maybe it’s not even your navel? (You can mentally italicize either “your” or “navel” in that last fragment-question.) Have you ever fallen into your navel, like Alice into her rabbit-hole?

Until about five or six years ago, my record collection represented a period of vinyl-buying that lasted from about 1984 to 1991. Over the last several years, however, I’ve started adding to it again—buying those missing records I only had on home-mixed cassettes, yes; or that I had only bits and pieces of from friends’ mixed tapes, and never, for whatever reason, got around to getting in their entirety—Exodus’s Bonded By Blood is a good example; or albums that I didn’t like in their entirety, and so, according to the endlessly-malleable analog world we used to inhabit, I had recorded edited versions onto mixed tapes myself. But then I’ve also started buying records by bands I didn’t listen to at the time or the moment, but feel like I should have. Example: given my prog rock-classical music background, it took me a while to break down and start listening to the more noisy, minimal thrash bands. I resisted Metallica until after Master of Puppets, Slayer more fiercely, arguing with myself about the un-musicality of it all, arguments that continued even after I had begun listening to them regularly. This is one reason I only ever had 1988’s South of Heaven on vinyl. But how can any self-respecting middle-aged metalhead have a record collection without Reign in Blood, the most pummeling, aggressive, hate-cathartic album ever recorded? That TDK SLII-90 I used to tape Arjun’s record back in 1986, black-pen blood droplets and a pentagram on the spine, just didn’t cut it. I was like a cardinal with a styrofoam crucifix.

These are dangerous things to say publicly. I risk losing a rather hard-fought identity. Because I was always identified as a metalhead, and so got used to calling myself one. In those days, once you listened to one metal album you were sort of lumped in with the crowd; the idea that you actually discerned among music in a genre that the bulk of the population regarded as “noise,” as “just screaming,” or that you listened to other things, too … well, that was preposterous. And so a sort of chute is formed for you, and you embrace whatever is at the end. I imagine most people’s identities are forged in just this way, via these complex negotiations between resistance and acquiescence.

By buying up all those records I didn’t have—not just the Judas Priest and Nuclear Assault and Death Angel albums I had taped in part or in whole off of friends, but also the Black Sabbath and AC/DC and Dio and Slayer albums I resisted, or didn’t much care for, or even outright disparaged—I am correcting my past. I am flexing my consumer muscle in order to create a version of who I might have been, perhaps should have been, according to who I have become. That I am doing this materially, via a consumer artifact, is crucial; for this way I can mold my memory, and hence my identity, to fit the evidence before me. Because if I became a metalhead partly by dint of being identified as one, then the external evidence is that much more persuasive. To others, yes; but first and foremost to myself.

And what a perfect choice of commodities: records! Grooves in pressed vinyl! It partakes of both the permanence of the engraving and the malleability of the material upon which the grooves are made. It is arguably a better metaphor for memory in the age of mass consumption than Freud’s mystic writing pad. It can even be played at varying speeds, and spun backwards …

As I said, in truth—in truth—I came to some of this music reluctantly, even kicking and screaming, arguing with myself about the aesthetic paradox and poring over Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in my very early twenties for guidance and solace, before abandoning the paradox and embracing the aesthetic, so to speak. But it doesn’t matter now, because the vinyl is right there, and it speaks more clearly than memory ever could. It admits no paradoxes; it is uncontradictory, self-identical. And it says otherwise. I have become the image of what people always believed I was—a musical scoundrel—and perhaps what I most wanted to be for them, in whose eyes I needed to complete my identity, rather than what I truly was—what I truly was—which was surely more slippery, much much more slippery—what never exists in such a clear consistent outline as that persona we adopt in others’ eyes, the impressed circle of a record on a paper sleeve—and which is what, for all the emendations and distortions inherent to writing, or rather because of them, these words are here to correct, or perhaps more accurately, to counterbalance, to undermine, to goad …

I’m being a little facetious, of course, a little unfair; I’m having fun with myself at my own expense; the writing begs it of me. And then there is that part of me that imagines I am trying to assemble a collection that is “representative” of the genre, that is in some way “canonical,” that reflects a more “mature” vision … but representative of what, precisely?

All this is why I can never buy new vinyl—those beautifully-packaged, carefully weighed-and-measured re-pressings (mind the pun) of old records, weighing twice as much, “mint,” perfect-sounding (as if there were such a thing as perfect vinyl). I still have the hundred-dollar Pioneer turntable I bought on Route 22 in the mid-eighties. I’ve replaced the needle a few times, sure. But if my records sound a little old, all the better. After all, I’m constructing an illusion of my taste at a particular time; how would new vinyl help? Better to have a bit of scuff and dogeared corners … but not too much! Remember, I taped my records and then put them away, so the ones I bought new are in very good condition. I listen to them more now than I ever did then. And with each spin they become that much more persuasive.

*

Ding-dong! “They’re here? Quick! Hide the Norah Jones! Hide the Macy Gray! Hey, hey! What? Elton John? Elton John! Oh Jesus, for the love of God—hide the fucking Elton John!”

“Did you guys ever write a song so epic that, by the end of it, you found you were influencing yourselves?” – Steve Colbert, interviewing the members of the band Rush

The other day I listened to Rush’s “By-Tor and the Snow Dog,” from their second album, Fly By Night (1975). This was the first song where the band showed an interest in moving beyond the straight-ahead rock they had been playing around Toronto bars for the previous half-decade, and into the proggier style that would come to dominate their sound for the next half-decade: from the first concept side (remember sides?) “The Fountain of Lamneth” on Caress of Steel later the same year (not to mention the 13-minute suite “The Necromancer” on the same album), to the last one, “Hemispheres,” in 1978, and the two half-side masterpieces “Natural Science” and “Camera Eye” in 1980 and ’81. “By-Tor” is a hair under nine minutes long—only a minute and a half longer than either the ballad to restlessness “Here Again” or the pipefitter anthem “Working Man,” both on the debut album Rush (1974)—yet utterly different in tone, structure, and subject matter. The lyrics are a Tolkienesque fantasy narrative; and rather than an extended jam, the song is a suite, divided into four subtitled sections, the last two of which do things with time and timbre that the band would not have attempted a year earlier, and which crop up on some of the shorter songs on Fly By Night as well.

Listening to “By-Tor” today makes me think of the ribbon of woods running behind the houses along the street where I grew up. The actual wooded area was never more than 50 yards wide; in some places, it petered to a row of trees along someone’s split-rail fence; it was a quarter-mile long at most. None of this mattered; we (the kids on the street) called the network of footpaths traversing them “The Trails,” and gave different sections epic names according to their geography, like “Spider Mountain” for a hill that was covered with brambles. The Trails were a sliver that fell, somehow, between property lines—as if anything in our society actually could—and so we appropriated them: they became our property, in the same way rock ‘n’ roll was our property, if only because our parents disclaimed it.

Going back there today is like going back to your old grammar school and looking your first-grade teacher in the eye. There’s noplace where you can’t see the back of somebody’s house … noplace where “The Trails” don’t reveal themselves for anything but what they actually are. So it is with “By-Tor”: Across the Styx. Of the Battle. Bombastic names for bits of a nine-minute piece of pretty simple music. Even the “suite” just masks an elongated verse-chorus-bridge structure.

Yet, there is a difference, and it’s part of the magic of music that I can still so easily fall into a more youthful view. I can’t see The Trails anymore the way I saw them when I was ten, but I can hear music at least something like how I used to. My ear is easier to trick than my eye, and my memories—as well as my imagination—lie much closer to the surface in sounds, scratching, hammering at my eardrums from the inside.

Which is not to say I don’t listen differently than I used to. I do. “By-Tor and the Snow Dog” is a song I never much cared for when I was younger. Today, it charms me like an old music box. The easy rollicking chords of the verses, the youthful energy, the directness of approach, the naïve faith with which the music approaches the story (“Of the Battle” features a duel between a growling bass (“By-Tor,” according to a note under the picture of Geddy Lee) and a squeaking guitar (“Snow Dog”))—all these things resonate with me today in a way that the elements of the song that are supposed to signify art-rock complexity (e.g., the time-screwy riff from which the band subtracts one note at a time to end “Of the Battle”; it could have come right out of a Bartok quartet) don’t. For all its pretense, “By-Tor” is indeed just a long rock song, the kind of song a very young band writes when they’re dreaming of epics-to-be.

But then perhaps all epics are relative. And if so, then it should be conversely noted that the grandest symphonies can sometimes seem paltry, the work of children playing at the sublime, as much as an art-rock “opera” or “concept album” can sound like kids who think that, by mussing their hair a little, they’ll sound like Beethoven. If the essence of music is (as E.T.A. Hoffmann so forcefully contended) that Romantic yearning for the infinite, then by definition music comes up short. “By-Tor” may be like the woods behind the house where I grew up, but Beethoven’s Fifth is hardly the Alps in fog, no matter how many of those old Kultur videos I watch. (They were, and perhaps still are, notorious for interspersing performance footage with either pastoral or sublime landscapes.)

Epics are always also retrospective: they exist to inflate events from the distant (and sometimes not-so-distant) past, to “realize” them in mythologically-pristine form, and so loom large in cultural memory, in the same way the woods behind my old house do in individual memory. Epics, then, are a particular mode of looking backwards, and as such it’s only fitting that they themselves should be outgrown, should themselves be looked back upon from a vantage unimaginable to the time in which they were composed. I remember staring at a map of the action of the Argonautica and marveling inwardly at the way the narrative had magnified a trip from the Greek isles up the Hellespont and along the southern coast of the Black Sea. Perhaps Apollonius thought the same of Odysseus’s travels; and the explorers of the sixteenth century surely thought it about Jason, and the men on the moon, too, about Vasco de Gama, each old cosmos folded inside a newer one, like Russian dolls. And yet, just as quickly as we outgrow epics, we happily shrink ourselves to fit inside them again. It’s one promise music makes, and occasionally keeps: that we can return to inhabit the epic imagination, in a way we can’t really return to the woods behind the houses where we grew up, except in dreams.