So I went into the basement the other night, back a long
stretch of weeks ago, before my father died, and started rooting around in the tall
metal stack of junk amps I have there, most of them found at the side of the
road and hauled home in my trunk. I dug for
a while and exhumed this really lovely Kenwood amp, the same kind I used
through college, but this one was my Dad’s and had been shorted it out at the
speaker wires. My dad really never
understood how anything mechanical worked.
His wiring mistake had killed the power supply section. It was powerful its prime (dual mono power amplifiers), rugged and mechanical all the way through (no computerized
functions and twitchy delicacies like that). It was amazingly heavy, an anvil of an amp,
and I rescued it from his house years ago when he moved into assisted
living. When I got home to New York I just
threw it into the basement. Too nice to
toss, too damaged to use, too expensive to repair. So one day, given that I had tons of papers to grade,
recommendations to write, emails to send and bills to pay, pulling the amp out of the basement and
plugging it up — just to test it, purely out of curiosity, won’t take but a
minute — seemed like a sensible choice.
I’ve been messing around listening to old music lately,
mostly because of Pandora.com. I can aim
my musical compass at one band or guitarist or song, letting the invisible algorithms
shuffle songs all day long. My wife and I
set it to play on autopilot while we were preparing for Thanksgiving. Cleaning the kitchen was done to a flock of
songs in a Tommy Bolin vibe; the living room was vacuumed to Walter Trout and The
Black Keys; the dining room got Bach and those guys. We argued intensely through a Neko Case playlist
and made up to Peter Green. You cover a
lot of ground that way. Sarah Vowell
says in her book on the Puritans that the Indians of the time – the ones the
Puritans exterminated, of course – were in the habit of calling any excellent
thing “Manitou,” the name of their Higher Power. Any form of excellence would count: A great
mountain lion (they were everywhere back then), a storm, a true speech, surprising
immunity to smallpox – all Manitou. I
think of it as saying “There is spirit moving in there.” So that’s what I heard while we were prepping
for Thanksgiving – a lot of songs with the spirit moving in them. It doesn’t seem a bad way to think of a Higher
Power’s manifestations, as well-wrought tones, not stentorian voices. As displays of power and grace in motion, not
diplomas or assertions. It was fall and
the hillside behind our house was still senescent and the light was weightless and fair, coming
in now at quite an angle, the cusp of the season, the place between two worlds.
Tracing my mind over old songs is strange because they were
first embossed in my mind when I was between 14 and 30. I bet the same is true for most of us. I heard somewhere that some species of birds learn
songs not from their DNA, but learn them from their own species – which means
birdsongs would change slowly over time.
Would we even recognize the call of a medieval North American meadowlark,
singing to the oblivious mammoths and saber-toothed tigers? What a delight to even contemplate the tenor
of that ancient accent. We are desperate
to know the lyrics of our own species, that I’m sure of. I remember ritualistically, intently, writing
all the words to Neil Young’s “Needle and the Damage Done” on the side of a
yellow forklift at some low-paying high-ceilinged warehouse when I was eighteen
and working in Chicago. I suspect these
tribal songs perform a biological role, locking us in to a people and a history,
marking us as members of a particular village or tribe. It’s a watermark on
your heart that you can still see if you hold it up to the light just right. Although the songs I know best were in fact
distributed by mega-corporations trying to get rich, it doesn’t matter. It’s still my history and it’s still the moment of history that shaped me.
I’ve tried to be cool and avoid looking like I value things that might mark me
as an nostalgic fuddy-duddy, but I don’t care about that any more. I can listen to most old songs much better
than I can listen to, say, the Black Eyed Peas. (I have no idea how one would actually sit down and listen to that music. I think it is meant to play in the background while you aerobicize with weights or dance with drunk girls. Neither of these occasions presented itself recently at my house, so I have to admit to speaking without experience). Traffic’s Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys,
I can understand. I know how to pay
attention to the pacing and the suffering, their amateurishness and
wonder.
So I carried the heavy, dark, glinting, arcane, stainless-steel
amp upstairs. I flicked it on, waited
impatiently, and turned it off. Dead as
a doornail. But then it occurred to
me. Though the power amp part was dead, I
really liked the front section of this machine, the part called the "pre-amp" that that controls the volume and tone, the expensive feel
in the massive volume control, so I looked around online and found a post from
someone who was thinking like me. He said
that he was able to open up a similar amp and cut the right wires, solder in a
connection, and pipe the signal to an external power amp. This is just the degree of Macgyvering and
hacking that so appeals to me. Nifty
bypass. When I find a piece of furniture on the side of the road, it becomes mine
only when I can take it apart and rebuild it, repairing it with paint, compression
clamps, solder, glue or solvent. If I
just carry it indoors and set it down, what’s the point? Unless it involves me in some way, why
bother? How can you care about something
if you don’t have a history with it?
Finding the schematics for the Kenwood wasn’t easy. People want to sell that sort of electrical information
to you, not give it away for free, so I searched until I found a discussion
list where I caught wind of a Russian website that might still carry the
info. I went to Russia from my living
room, got a password, and started searching for my particular amplifier’s
info. During my time following down
clues on the computer, sitting there as I do for many hours a day at work,
watching the screen, I was thinking about a conversation about music I had with
a friend a few years ago (you can tell that by now this minor project of just
“plugging up the amp” has become a side project). This guy—a good singer, very knowledgeable
about bands, songs, artists, dates, instruments—he and I were listening to
some Wal-Mart-quality blues guitar – no one memorable. The guitarist would make some runs in one
key, then make some runs in another with all the grace of someone setting a
table – fork here, knife there, all correct – but there was no development, no
call and response, no storyline to
the music. The tone was generic, the statement was muddy even if the notes
were clear and I complained about this to my friend – the guitarist was hitting
the correct notes, but not really saying
anything. If he were a writer, we’d say he had no
“voice.”
But my friend, he had no idea what I was talking about. He doubted all this “development” or
“storyline” stuff. He had no concept of the
blues “completing” a statement or coming back to reiterate a point. It was all
just a package of notes, just sound, a notch above noise. He reminded me of my college kids who read a
poem and think the figurative language is just padding to the poem’s Real Point. The guitar, to my friend, was padding, a bridge
back to the singer. So I’m thinking
about this, amazed that this guy didn’t get it, and wondering what he did hear when he listened to guitar music. And I’m thinking of the guitarists who can
haunt, celebrate and testify with their guitar, vindicate with their guitar, quote
Scripture with it. They can carry on a
conversation and yet assert the Noble Truth that human suffering is undeniable and demands to be confronted. What is and what should never be – that is what Mr. Page laments as
eloquently as Mr. Plant. What Dicky Betts and Walter Trout understand.
So I got the schematics. They were in English, not Russian,
but it hardly mattered. They were still a
maze. They had the same abstract relation
to the actual amplifier wiring as subway maps have to the subway tunnels, but
without labels, colors, or people sitting around to give me advice about taking getting off at the next stop. The schematic diagram was simplified, and, of course, two dimensional. The actual wires dove into and under printed
circuit boards, thorough obscure knobs and switches. They emerged unpredictably as a snake popping
out of a woodpile. But after a while it
started to make some sense. I sought and
found the three wires, right, left and ground, that passed through a gap
between the front and back of the amp, between the controls and the power, three
thin threads that carried the decisions about tone, volume, balance and such to
the primitive cerebellum of the machine, the power amp section. They
were thin as nerves, and I was thrilled to find them. I could almost touch the solution. As I closed in, I noticed how well made this
whole thing was inside – neat and thought through. The source selector was on a
long rod that ended in a delightful device in which a ball bearing rolled inside
a ring under a taut metal tongue; to make the right connection, the bearing
would snap into a little indent in the inside of the ring, held there by the tongue. The ball bearing was a perfect conducting
surface – it was metal, it rolled, so it wouldn’t get gummed up, and it would
be impossible to break. Very cool. Some Japanese guy thought of that while in
the shower one day and probably burst from the shower shouting “Eureka” and running
naked through the streets of Fukuoka. I would
have done the same, I’m pretty sure, but might try shouting “Manitou" because an eloquent jig like that definitely reveals a spirit moving through it.
So on Craigslist (another apostrophe dies) I found this old
Onkyo power amp to take over for my Kenwood’s power amp, a huge monster with
giant VU meters that glow yellow while the huge capacitors are filling and then
changes to green when everything’s ready.
Powerful, yeah, but it’s those old-school meters that I wanted, big as a
billboard and expensive. I called the
guy, talked him down, figured it was hot, and before I went over to buy it, I
decided to give the Kenwood one last chance.
With a pair of little bookshelf speakers, I plugged the amp in and
turned it on. Nothing.
As for my dad’s death, there are rivers of words and plains
of silence to explain that, but in the end, I can’t really. This is what it felt like, though: "nothing
you can say." I feel silly for even
mentioning it since I’m not exactly the first child to lose a parent and
because the event was, any way you look at it, a tiny bit more tragic for my father
than for me. But somewhere in this
narrative he died, and it might well have been here, while I was standing in the
room, in an empty house, listening closely.
Waiting patiently, playing with my childhood toys.
For at least a minute, nothing. But deep into the second minute, deep inside
the steel box, a loud “ping” sounded. After fiddling with it, the room was
filled with music. There is no way this
can be, but it works [now some weeks later, it still works.] It works!
Wonderful! I suspect it always
worked — I was just never patient enough to wait for it. In my rushing, forcing myself through the
last few years of raising kids and watching my parents decline, buying houses
and falling in love and climbing the ladder at work, I assumed the amp was broken
because at no point could I stand still like that, in an empty house, listening. So I unplug it all, find some stainless steel
polish, Q-tips and a steel wool pad. I
clean it meticulously. It shines like a
wet rock. Ok, I know it might be slightly
wishful thinking, but right now I’m listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and the detail and
separation are great. Here is what I
think: the past sounds better through this amp than any other. I think: it’s a machine for reverence. Against the backdrop of dark chords I quietly
sing:
Far away across the field /
The tolling of the iron bell
/
Calls the faithful to their knees /
To hear the softly
spoken
magic
spells.
spoken
magic
spells.
My memories are getting watery. I think I recall long ago sitting in the
basement room of my parents’ house listening to that song in the middle of a
winter night, my back to the sliding glass doors, thinking about the future and
the past. I seem to remember the pattern
on the couch, the taste of the cigarette, the way the light played on the wall
across from me. As a young man
everything was the future, and the future was opaque. It was like driving into
fog on an unfamiliar road, and you’re late, and you’re not very sure you even want to be there. And then one day, after enough people die and you start to see the mortal
rhythm, after you sense a time signature emerge from the noise, you see that the
latest wave of musicians — those generations at their song — have grown old and
failed to prove themselves immortal. And
you’re surprised! —which itself seems
strange to you, since you saw this coming, even then, even now as you are standing
there in an empty house in one season or another, waiting for some sort of
resolution, for your life to fall into place and start making sense. And do you at that solitary moment sense the
way ahead coming clear, more clear maybe than you want it to be? Do you know when you pass over that
moment? When you hear the spirit moving through it? Is that where the belief starts, when you start to suspect that learning to play the blues, learning to bend your oh-so-suffering
heart to the living day seems not so much a cheap cliché as a schematic for living rigorously? And with joy?
