I JUST SPENT EIGHT WEEKS working on a screenplay ten hours a day while listening to the same three albums—Popol Vuh, Einsjäger & Siebenjäger (1974); The Six Parts Seven, Casually Smashed to Pieces (2007); and the Jerome Moross soundtrack to the 1958 film The Big Country—on infinite repeat. All the tracks were AAC files that I had downloaded from the iTunes Music Store, and I was listening to them through a pair of small, attractive podules that connected to my iMac through its FireWire port. This is, roughly, the setup that I have been using for a long time now, since before there was an iTunes, or an iPod, or a Napster, back when the only MP3s available were those you had ripped yourself. And though I also listen to music in the kitchen, in the car, on airplanes, and while running, given the amount of time that I spend at my desk, and the fact that I listen to music constantly while writing, over the past ten years I have probably listened to more music in the form of MP3s playing through cute little pods placed about three feet from my head than in any other way. So I was surprised, last week, when for no apparent reason, while writing a big Martian air battle scene, I looked up from the iMac’s monitor to one of those cute little FireWire ovoids, as Vuh lead guitarist Daniel Fichelscher attempted unbelievably intricate and beautiful things on the title track of Einsjäger, and thought: Dude, what’s with the Fisher Price speakers?
You might suppose that repetition would have dulled my powers of aural discernment—this must have been the fiftieth or sixtieth time I’d listened to the track over the past two months— but on the contrary, it abruptly seemed to have heightened them, to have broken through the dam of convenience, simplicity, and ready access to the music, to have flooded my jaded ear with sudden understanding. I’m no audiophile; I want to say that right off. I have no idea what impedance is, or how to set the levels of an equalizer with any confidence or panache, and I still find infantile amusement in saying the word “woofer.” But it struck me all at once that the sound quality of the music I’d been listening to so heavily, with the indirect attentiveness I give music when I’m writing, was thin, brittle; all sheen and no depth. It was tinny, tiny, and pallid. It sounded like shit, in fact; and not only did it sound like shit, but it had been sounding like shit for years. Shit in the kitchen, playing from a big hard drive attached to an old PowerBook, through a couple of small, flush-mounted wall speakers. Shit in the minivan and the Prius, patched from an iPod through factory-installed speakers greased over with a scurf of children and their miasmas. Shit through the endless, vaguely rattling series of earbuds—that nauseating term, with its suggestion of Van Goghesque mutilations—accompanying me on morning runs and onto airplanes. The digitized music itself “compressed,” “lossy,” reduced to a state of parity with whatever system I consigned it to. With the possible exception of books, I love music more than I love anything in my life that is not a person or a dog. At one time, I now realized, I had known how to express and indulge and nourish that love: with iron-heavy black records, a fifty-watt amplifier, and a pair of speakers that were themselves pieces of furniture, far too large for any desktop. I hit the space bar, stopping the music, and observed a moment of silence for my own lossy life, and thought about a man whom I had not seen in almost thirty years.
My mother’s ex-boyfriend took me to buy my first stereo system, her present to me for graduating with the Howard High School Class of 1980. He was studying electrical engineering at the University of Maryland, his name was Bill Warriner, and I loved him. Bill was quite a bit younger than my mother, who was herself not yet thirty-eight that spring. He wore his lank, sandy hair long, and he took me seriously in precisely the same measure as he found me amusing. He was a wide-eyed, soft-spoken Midwestern guy who had been in the Army and played in local dance bands back in his hometown. I seem to recall that he was a drummer, and I remember his telling me that the only time he ever stepped to the microphone during a gig was when the lights went down and it was time to sing “If,” by Bread, with its line about all the stars going out one by one, and how that would not necessarily be such a bad thing, in the right company. I never hear that song without picturing it being sung by Bill Warriner. He was the first adult I ever knew who felt, and knew how to express, if only through the passion of his talk about changes in band personnel and hidden meanings in song lyrics and unexpected chord progressions, the central truth I was then only just beginning to grasp: that my life was compounded out of discrete particles of time, and that those moments were built, in turn, out of the matter of rock and roll.
Bill accepted his commission from my mother with characteristic gravity and aplomb. He drove me down to an audio equipment store in Laurel, Maryland, half an hour away, that catered to men who knew how to be grave about their audio equipment. It was a no-frills kind of place, tangled cables and metal shelving and a smell of ashtray, harshly lit except for the radiant dark luxury of its banks of tuners, amps, and speakers. I stood quietly to one side, a candidate for some kind of experimental surgery, while my fate as a listener was determined by Dr. Warriner and his team of consultants. Like the planet Alderaan, a record (it was Boston’s debut album, as I recall) was selected to serve as a demonstration of the destructive capability of various audio Death Stars. I pretended solemnly to be able to distinguish among their highs, lows, and middles, when in fact all I heard when listening to them was might, a kind of amplitude that seemed to emerge not from the speakers or the shining grooves of the record but from the mind or thews or rumbling belly of God himself.
“I like that one,” I said, repeatedly.
I came home with a Yamaha tuner-amplifier, a Technics direct-drive turntable, and a pair of modestly sized Genesis speakers, and Bill helped me set everything up in my bedroom, with the turntable and tuner right beside my bed and the speakers at two corners of the room. It was a business not merely of decor but of engineering, of pliers and wire cutters and heavy strands of cable on spools. Then it was time to put something on. At this point, my collection consisted of a number of 45 rpm records, many of them painfully embarrassing (“Convoy,” “The Streak,” Grand Funk’s cover of “The Locomotion”), and the complete works to date of Queen. The bulk of the records to which I regularly listened on the old family Dual were part of the family’s collection—Dylan, the Beatles, Godspell, There Goes Rhymin’ Simon—or they were things I checked out of the public library, discs of passage. I had a feeling that “Bohemian Rhapsody” would probably be an amazing experience on my new system, but as with all the records I liked, the house copy of A Night at the Opera was illused, scratched and dusty, incriminated with the prints of my adolescent fingers. Having just spent an hour at the audio store, where the records were handled like fissionable material or founding revelations, I felt acutely conscious of my records’ unworthiness for the pristine Shure stylus that Bill had decided upon. So I delved into the small reserve of classical albums that my father had left behind when he moved out of the house and chose a Vox Box set of Bach organ music that appeared never even to have been opened.
I slid the first record from its sleeve, touching only the label, and eased it like a pan of nitro onto the black rubber turntable pad. I pushed the chunky button, and the gears engaged with a whir, and like a sentient thing, the tonearm lowered the stylus right into the outermost groove of the record. Walter Kraft began to play some toccata-and-fugue or other, erecting giant structures of sound, the music itself a kind of invisible pipe organ, a madness of stairways and arches and tubes that reached down to deepest valves of the earth itself.
“Whoa,” Bill said. He blinked his mild eyes and bobbed his head in time. “Well, that’s rock and roll.”
“It’s like being in church,” my mother observed. She had come in to observe the dedicatory proceedings, standing just behind the man whom she had determined to be admirably suited to certain tasks in her life and yet woefully lacking in other key ways. The criteria for her decision to break up with Bill remained a painful mystery to me, and yet I did not question them. I trusted my mother to know what she was about. I had known, I suppose, that Bill was not husband material, though it was another painful mystery that he should so clearly be cut out for the job of a stepfather. She had made sure that they stayed friends, and now here he had remained in our lives just long enough to make me the happiest human being in Columbia, Maryland.
“It’s like being on Captain Nemo’s submarine,” Bill said.
I told him that was it, exactly. And then we stood there, Bill, my mother, and I, listening to the mystery.
“Well, now you got everything you need,” he said finally, with the simple profundity of the engineer. “Enjoy it.”
I thanked him with a hug and a handshake, and then my mother walked him back downstairs, where he made what turned out to be more or less his final exit from my life. I closed my door, and turned up the volume, and sailed my bed through the monsters and wonders of the music and of life as an adult, heat vents and black caverns at the bottom, sun sparkling across the surface. The sea of Bach—it was so rock and roll—enfolded me, alone in the middle of it all as Nemo at his keyboard. A stereo system, properly configured, is precisely that: a Nautilus of solitude, a vehicle for conveying one, alone, through the deep and all its raptures.
And now here I sit, with a new set of 2.1-channel desktop speaker sticks plugged into my computer’s sound-out port and a space-invader landing craft of a subwoofer parked under the desk, listening to a lossless recording of Fragile by Yes, and Steve Howe’s guitar is growling like a ship’s klaxon, and Chris Squire’s bass line is rumbling like a whale. The sound quality is probably still not anything close to what I used to get from the vinyl copy of Fragile that I picked up a couple of weeks after Bill took me shopping. And it’s definitely not everything that I need. Nothing is. That’s part of rock and roll, too, I suppose, and something that Bill and my mother and I all understood that day, without understanding it. And like Nemo at my keyboard, I will sail on, through 20,000 leagues or pages, chasing that mystery, and all the others that I can hear, once again, in the music.