High Fidelity

For the second time in my life, I bought the record album Hi Infidelity by REO Speedwagon. The first time was 1981 and it had just come out. I was twelve years old and all of my friends were listening to it, so I bought it, too. We could all sing the songs Take It On The Run and Keep On Loving You by heart whenever the songs came on the radio, or the 45 flipped onto the jukebox at the Twin Lakes Beach Resort, or on the turntable at home or the wood-paneled bedroom of a friend.

The second time was yesterday and I was flipping through a stack of records at a used record store in Kalamazoo with my two oldest kids, and I saw it and I remembered being 12 years old and owning that album and memories came rushing back of summer on the beach in Dowagiac and slush puppies and fireworks over the lake and a cute girl named Suzie who took over my brain for reasons I didn’t understand and couldn’t control when I saw her standing there in her REO Speedwagon tee-shirt. So I bought it.

This was of course the genius behind one of the most touching gifts I’d ever been given this Christmas season by a friend who has been around since I listened to albums the first time in my life. I was down in Columbus, Ohio to see Doyle and to visit with his dad in his elderly care home, and while there I needed to do a little Christmas shopping. Doyle took me to a record store owned by a good buddy of his, and when I walked in, the shop owner put a newly released album by one of my favorite artists right in my hands.

“What do you know about this album,” Doyle asked me. I told him it was good, that I had bought it on CD when it first came out. I had read that it was being released for the first time as an album as a special edition release limited to 5000 copies. A real collector’s item.

“It’s yours,” he said.

“That’s not necessary,” I smiled in reply. “That’s a really thoughtful gesture, but I don’t even have a record player to play it on,” I told him.

“Yes you do.”

I then learned that Doyle had planned with his record-store buddy to set me up with a new turntable, amplifier, and speakers: the works. “It’s time for you to listen to records again, buddy. We’ve been friends a long time, and this will be good for you. Time for you to get back to your roots.”

When I was twelve we listened to albums. Cassettes would follow soon after the Sony Walkman became popular and boom boxes were engineered to fit between elbow and ear, CD players were a distant dream, and a digital music device that carried thousands of songs and fit in your pocket was Buck Rodgers in the 21^st Century stuff.

But in 1980, the album still reigned supreme. My dad owned hundreds. My older brother owned a hundred, anyhow. I owned a couple of dozen. But man I loved them and listened to them every day. The thing about listening to an album was that it was about listening to a musical composition, set to wax in a certain order by the artist, with an A side and a B side (or the flip side!), and you had to be physically involved: taking the album out of its sleeve, dusting it, putting the needle on the record, and then not making sudden or heavy moves that would cause a skip. Once the record was on, you could wonder at the album cover art (along with the paintings of wizards on the side of vans and graffiti on subway cars, the best popular art of of the 1970’s, in my opinion), or you could read the liner notes with song lyrics and musician listings and sometimes special messages from the band itself. There was so much more involved than just pushing a button on a phone and playing songs on shuffle.

When I was eight or so my Aunt Linda moved into our house with my four-year old cousin Jennifer for a period of time until she got back on her feet. She had just gone through a divorce and didn’t have much to fall back on, so she moved in with us for the support. She brought with her all her worldly belongings, and that included the album Rumors by Fleetwood Mac. She played it all the time on my dad’s massive stereo system, and sang along to it at the top of her lungs. I didn’t know it at the time, but there was a freedom she found in that album at that time in her life, an escape, a joy, an expression of self. To this day I can’t hear that album without thinking of Aunt Linda and the joy it brought her during a tough time in her life. It remains one of my favorite albums, and it should be listened to from front to back, beginning to end, and should never be played on a digital device on shuffle or as part of a collection of greatest hits. It is a work of art, a Mona Lisa of music, a Shakespeare of 70’s desire and lost love.

My brother owned the Kiss albums in the house (though a I had a few of my own). In the 1970’s Kiss was THE band. They were on the turntable in both of our bedrooms, on our paneled walls as posters and magazine cut-outs, on our lunchboxes, tee-shirts, and imaginations. I learned to play air guitar in his bedroom listening to Detroit Rock City on the album Destroyer. I learned to sing songs like Love Gun and Rocket Ride (baby wants it fast/baby wants a blast/she wants a rocket ride/she wants a rocket ride) without having any idea about thinly-veiled sexual double-entrendre. It was a fun time to be buying albums, what with your favorite band blowing things up and smashing guitars and breathing fire and spitting blood. My brother and I had some epic fistfights in the 1970s when we were growing up, but we never fought about Kiss. They were the best. Yesterday I bought a Kiss album, too. The first in more than thirty-five years.

Eventually I needed to get my own favorite band, and since Skip owned Kiss, I turned to Rush. The first Rush album I bought was 2112, but the second one, Moving Pictures, changed my life. I would sit and listen to it for hours and hours and hours. I thought about the lyrics. They were amazing. I learned to play air drums this time. I learned to love the sound of Geddy Lee's impossibly high voice. One time my dad came into my room and asked me what I was listening to so incessantly. I put the album on and put the album cover in his hands. We listened to the songs as he read the lyrics. "Whoa," he said. "That's deep." (High praise!) My dad was an amateur photographer, and he asked me if I knew what a fisheye lens was, and then explained how it worked, and how it worked as a metaphor in the song Limelight. My dad, marine and state cop, was listening to my music and explaining metaphor to me and telling me my music was deep and philosophical and interesting and meaningful. I don't know when I became an official nerd and English major, but it was probably in that moment. 

So I brought my new record player home and set it up when I got back from Columbus. I played my new Geddy Lee album from Doyle and the new Charlie Brown Christmas album I bought for the holidays (so good!). I then went up into the attic where my wife had stashed a bunch of her albums from the 1970’s and 80’s. I brought down The Carpenters Greatest Hits, dusted it off, and put the needle on the record, without telling her what I was doing. In the kitchen she stopped in her tracks, then smiled and walked into my arms for a dance. It was so sweet and romantic (take that, Suzie!). She also remembered what it was like to hear the needle sink into the groove a favorite song.

This record player is a wonderful gift. More than anything it is an invitation to bring the past forward, and to bring the present into the wisdom of things we used to know. It feels good to listen to favorite music. It feels good to dust off an album and hold an album cover while Eddie Van Halen shreds his guitar in high fidelity through your speakers. It feels good to share an album with your kids, your brothers, your wife, your friends. High fidelity: it was what we said about listening to albums with great musical quality. In my fifties, I think it means being true to yourself at the highest level, and recognizing the past still lives in all of us, and it has a hell of a soundtrack.