Who's Next

After an absence of a quarter century, I've returned to music on vinyl. My kids think that records are completely awesome (which they are) for all of the reasons that I had forgotten.

If this needs ‘splaining, you won’t get any of what follows.

I have had a lifelong love affair with sound and light, capturing and manipulating both from an early age. I’ve done some professional photography, but audio is my jam.

My first pro audio gig was as the sound person for a high school musical. I pulled this off with crude equipment that I sourced from local department stores in my small hometown in the foothills of Eastern Kentucky. A few years later, in 1977, as soon as I saved enough money from my first real part-time college job, I bought an upscale Kenwood stereo system at a hi-fi shop in Lexington, KY. That system still resides in my living room.

Then, I got sidetracked. It was a long and winding road, but a few decades later, in the mid-1990's, I returned to one of my original passions by entering the world of professional sound reinforcement. During my time in pro audio, I accumulated around 500 production credits, both live and studio, many with well-known, award-winning artists spanning genres from rock to jazz to classical to dance.

Pro audio is completely awesome. There is absolutely nothing wrong with hanging out with Benny Green or Chris Brubeck after a show, having Eileen Ivers ask you to take a bow at a sold-out St. Patrick’s Day event, Joey Molland giving you a shout from the stage, or having Moses Pendelton ask if you wanted to fly to Italy to work on a show.

At one point, I owned enough sound, stage, and lighting to fill a pretty good-sized truck. It was ass-busting hard work for low pay with a fair number of nightmare gigs, but when it was fun, it was really fun.

Pro audio world is basically the opposite of audiophile world. The object of pro audio is to create a transparent experience for crowds listening to their favorite artists perform in generally imperfect acoustic environments. The object of an audiophile system is to create a critical listening experience in an intimate, controllable environment.

Pro audio is about power and coverage; hi-fidelity is about a superb listening experience. Outside of professional use, PAs are great only for sharing music with intimate gatherings involving 10,000 of your best friends; they are far from high fidelity. Most pro audio systems aren’t even imaged in stereo. There may be loudspeakers hanging from both sides of a venue, but the system is likely being run in mono. I don’t remember ever doing anything other than mild panning when running live sound. Most venues simply aren’t suitable for stereo imaging.

I’ve used my 1977 Kenwood home system every day for nearly 50 years until a few days ago, when I finally got the last pieces for my new system: a Cambridge receiver/amp, Zu Audio DWX loudspeakers, and a Klipsch sub. I turned it all on yesterday for the first time. It’s awesome. For the first time since the monitors in my recording studio were running back around the turn of the century, I can tell how far the upper high hat is opened up on a drum kit while listening to a well-recorded piece of music (like any Steely Dan record).

But the pièce de résistance was the last bit that the kids and I installed last night. After scouring the Interwebs for a proper stylus and cartridge, we fired up my five-decade-old turntable. And though we are still working to get it decoupled from the rest of the room, the sound, at the volume levels the present configuration will allow, is simply glorious.

I have always loved everything about vinyl records: the artwork, liner notes that you can actually read, and the sound of vinyl that is difficult to beat. Back in the day, we used to take virgin vinyl, immediately transfer it to a high-quality reel-to-reel for posterity, and listen to that until we wore the tape out. Vinyl has lots of dynamic range and is wonderfully uncompressed (as is high-quality tape). When the first CDs came along, anyone with half an ear could tell the difference. For many years, I transferred my records to CDs with my own equipment, just for portability. But I listened to records at home.

Then, two things happened almost at once. The first was that I got married to someone who objected to an audio system that took up half of the living room. The second was that really well-recorded albums became more of an exception than a rule (largely negating the need for a system that half of us wouldn’t appreciate anyway). So the turntable and its massive isolation mount have been in a closet since the turn of the century. CDs became the norm in my house, along with, horrors, MP3s. Nothing was ever the same.

The things we do for love. Happy wife, happy life, by the way, is bullshit.

These days, the commercial music industry is a shadow of what it was in the halcyon days. Ted Gioia, Rick Beato, James Barber, and my buddy Jim Trageser have all recently produced informative pieces about the evolution of music and musicians. One of the best things I’ve heard recently on this topic is an interview between Rick Beato and Steve Lukather, which I cannot recommend highly enough for your amusement and edification. Towards the end, Lukather, who’s one of the great guitarists and musicians of my lifetime, addresses this head-on: “There are a lot of great players out there these days. You know what there’s not a lot of? Great songs.”

True that. Why invest in an expensive hi-fi system if there’s almost nothing worth listening to with a high-end system? I actually have an answer for that: several decades of older pop, classical, and jazz recordings recorded by people who understood and cared about quality are out there, just waiting to be rediscovered. Bartók: Quartet, Béla Bartók performed by the Guarneri String Quartet. Aja, by Steely Dan. As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls, by Pat Metheny. The Nightfly, by Donald Fagan. Tommy, Who’s Next, and Quadrophenia, by the Who. Return to Forever by Chick Corea. Heavy Weather by Weather Report. Initiation, by Todd Rundgren. The later Reiner/CSO recording of Also Sprach Zarathustra is so perfect, you’ll want to rip your ears off so you can remember only that sound for the rest of your days.

The list goes on. That’s why.

So last night, my youngest son, MJ, and I got the turntable out and hooked it up. I grounded it properly while MJ installed the cartridge and then set the tracking and anti-skew. We did the best that we could to decouple it from the room (a work in progress). I picked out a record from my collection, and I let MJ pick one out as well. I chose Who’s Next just because of the memories. MJ chose Initiation by Todd Rundgren—an excellent choice, even if it was just because he liked the album cover.

Before we even dropped the needle the first time (something I let MJ do), he remarked about how cool it was that the albums were BIG. “Dad, these are cool, and they have lots of pictures!” Then came the music. Even MJ, who’s eight, instantly fell in love with the turntable. Since last night, he’s listened to Initiation a dozen times. “Sell your wife and pawn your heater. Buy the new Bhagavad Gita…”

Laying in bed last night, I was visited by a flood of memories of all of the wonderful times I had listening to records back in the day. I remember where I was the first time that I heard Reeling in the Years and Roundabout. I remember listening to Won’t Get Fooled Again at massive volume levels in my dorm room. And that reminded me of something else. I was 18 years old when I first heard Who’s Next? That was 50 years ago. A lot more time has passed since I first heard it than MJ.

It doesn’t seem possible, but it’s true. I’m old as shit. But there is some newfound solace. In addition to my kids, I’ll have a great musical soundtrack, one that they dig as well, to accompany whatever time I have left to spend with them.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.