Why Topaz the Cat is Better than an Ivy League Professor

As Ivy League professors advance into their 70's, they become weird, opaque and unhelpful. Some reach that point even earlier.

Topaz the cat is 19 years old and lives with us. She is weird, opaque and unhelpful. However, she is warm and fuzzy and cleans herself, and what Ivy League professor can claim that? Only a couple.

New Rush Monograph Validates My Taste Community

Review: Rush, Rock Music and the Middle Class: Dreaming in Middletown, by Chris McDonald (Indiana University Press, 2009)

This brand-new book has been available from Amazon.com only for about a month. A long time went by without a single customer review appearing, which is perhaps understandable, since the book is a bit dense. (No one even wrote to say they found the book dense.)

I did notice, however, that the number of used copies available of the book is growing, which may be a review in itself.

So I wrote a review of my own, and I'm excited to say that it's the first one to appear. Here it is:

This book is a high-level academic monograph, and thus some lay readers may find it difficult. But it is rich in ideas and well worth the read. The author's appreciation of Rush comes through clearly (he remains objective while not attempting to hide that he is a fan), and many of his insights into the band's work are fascinating. Moreover, through the excellent summaries of other scholars' theories about North American and middle-class culture, it has a lot of sociology to teach. Even readers who don't particularly like Rush can learn a lot about the place that "progressive rock" (a label the band itself never cared for, but the least objectionable one there is) occupies in music history, the role that the middle class has had in defining cultural tastes in twentieth-century North America, and the brand of individuality that many of middle-class North Americans were reared upon. McDonald's examination of the Ayn Rand fiasco is particularly revealing about discursive differences between North America and Great Britain. (It explains why British critics took umbrage at Rush's particular expression of individualism, while most Americans were nonplussed.)

It was all the more gratifying for me, as a fan of Rush since 1982, to have Rush's devotees examined seriously as a "taste community." I hazard to say that many Rush fans will see themselves described in these pages. The elements that made Rush appeal to many - the fantasy-escapism, the fierce individualism, the interest in technology, the love of complex musicianship - is all put in a larger cultural context. This book not only taught me a lot of sociology, but helped me put my own tastes, and those of my class and generation, in a meaningful perspective.

The White Album: More Credible than 80's Music.

Over at Hey Dullblog, there was a link to a podcast containing an interview with Nik Cohn, about his feelings towards the Beatles' White Album, both almost forty years ago, when he detested it, and today, when he merely dislikes it. It's a great listen, both for the interviewer, Ben Ratliff, and the interviewee, who are both articulate and persuasive about their points of view, and are on opposite sides of the fence about the White Album. I posted the following comment to Hey Dullblog, before deciding to post it here, too. (It's my bloggy and I'll post if I want to!)

Listening to this podcast helped me understand the point of view of critics like Nik Cohn. But it also helped me understand my own point of view towards the White Album, which happens to be nearly identical with Ratliff’s. I am about one year younger than Ratliff, and had a similar experience to his. Though the White Album was not “played in the house” from a young age (my parents had Beatles ’65 and Sgt. Pepper’s), I did have the White Album since around the time I was 11 or 12 (bought with my allowance money), and I listened to it constantly. To me, to listen to the White Album was to enter the diverse community of its images. I still remember a day I was home sick from school, and I listened to all four sides of the album straight through, while reading all the lyrics as they were sung, on the unfolded poster before me on the bed. As an 11-year-old boy in a spiritually impoverished New York suburb at the beginning of the 1980s, the creativity, the surprises, and the mystery of the album could only draw me in and hypnotize me. It couldn’t possibly strike me as arty middle-class pretension.

Nik Cohn’s reaction to the White Album did remind me, however, of how I reacted to trends in pop music a few years later. As virtually every mainstream band succumbed to 80s production values, I felt the whole world of rock music was not only falling away from me, but falling away from its own past, and from taste itself. And it wasn’t just the grooveless sounds of electronic instruments; it was the cheap emotionalism and operatic pretensions of much of the music. Just as Cohn had no patience for the White Album’s “middle-class” conceits, I experienced 80s music as self-important and wimpy.

Cohn may still find Obla-di, Obla-da “not credible,” but I always did, and still do. I know that Paul McCartney believed it when he wrote it, and even if I sometimes prefer to skip past the song, I genuinely hear Paul’s belief in his words and the music that carries them. And his accidental inversion in the lyrics—along with “Cry Baby Cry,” later in the album—give me a more compelling message that adult relationships are not always what they seem than any other pop songs I can think of.

Likewise am I convinced that John Lennon meant it when he sang “the sun is up, the sky is blue, it’s beautiful and so are you” (also criticized by Cohn), not just because I happen to know the story of why he wrote it, but because I feel it in the track. And the fact that this song is followed immediately by “Glass Onion” (the gentle, fading guitar picking followed by the abrupt CLUMP...CLUMP of the bass and drums) shows that Lennon could invoke genuine naïveté and then slaughter it, too.

If you want not-credible, how about Don Henley singing “I can tell you my love for you will still be strong,” or Mister Mister singing “Take these broken wings and learn to fly again, learn to live so free.” Does anyone think that when Simple Minds sang “don’t you forget about me,” they really hoped that someone wouldn’t forget about them? I don’t. I don’t even believe that the Bangles wanted to walk like Egyptians.

One interesting aside: I was excited to discover that Cohn’s medieval-historian father, whom he mentioned in the conversation, was Norman Cohn, who wrote a book called The Pursuit of the Millennium, a study of millenarian religious cults in medieval Europe. I read this book in my freshman year of college, for a course called “End of the World Movements.” It’s a book about groups of people who began feeling that the culture of the Papacy was not credible.

Leonard Cohen in NYC, October 23, 2009

My GF and I had the thrill of seeing Leonard Cohen perform last night at Madison Square Garden. Rather than try to top what she had to say about it on her own blog, I've chosen to begin by importing her very entry, below:

I knew very little about Leonard Cohen until recently, and BF had never seen him live, even though he owns most of his albums on vinyl and has been to Leonard Cohen's childhood home and met his sister.

The night was unforgettable. He played for three and a half hours to a totally packed Madison Square Garden. It was the longest concert BF had ever been to, and he's seen RUSH live. I think it was the longest I've ever been to as well; I think Springsteen in 1984 topped out at three hours.

Leonard Cohen's voice sounded beautiful, and his wit, energy, and showmanship were superb. He's 74, and anyone who thinks old musicians shouldn't perform hasn't seen him. I think his age was an asset to him -- he filled the place with warmth, humor, and the sheer quality of his years and years of experience.

Notwithstanding the performer's age, another notable aspect of the concert was the apparent mean age of the audience. For the first time in a while, GF and I felt we were among the youngest people in a large crowd. Notable too was how many of the male audience members bore a physical resemblance to Leonard Cohen. (GF thought so, too.)

The show opened with "Dance Me to the End of Love," the song with which Cohen has been opening shows now for many years. The first half comprised mostly songs from his second period - the keyboard-oriented period (from 1984's "Various Positions" to the present), in which Cohen has been using the keyboard, rather than the guitar, to compose his songs. A memorable exception was "Who by Fire," which began with an extended, mesmerizing solo by Javier Mas on the archilaud. The second half, however, began with a generous clump of older songs from the guitar period, including "The Gypsy's Wife" and - most unexpected - "The Partisan."

The physical setup of the show was tasteful. The band performed in front of a massive ruffled curtain, onto which various muted colors were projected, and, just occasionally, Cohen's image of the two intertwined hearts. Two modestly sized video screens hung high above the audience at the far right and left edges of the stage. As far as I'm concerned, this handling of screens is far preferable to having a screen directly behind the performers, because it gives the audience the freedom to decide whether to look at the performers or shift their eyes over to their magnified screen images; with a screen directly behind them, performers and screen compete against each other the whole night.

The audience was surprisingly quiet during most of the songs, not including the applause, which was very enthusiastic, but contained to the beginnings and endings of songs, and not including moments of laughter at some of Leonard Cohen's more sly lyrics (for example, "You told me then you preferred handsome men / But for me you would make an exception," from "Chelsea Hotel"). But I suppose the quiet is typical for a Leonard Cohen audience. (Since my other MSG experiences were Roger Waters, Bob Dylan and Tom Petty, and - when I was a small child - the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, I can say it was the quietest experience I've ever had or am likely to have inside Madison Square Garden.) There were some exceptions to the quiet. One very loud man somewhere in the stands behind us belted out a request for "Death of a Ladies' Man," the title song from the one studio album that was not represented in the evening's program. The other exception was an Irish couple sitting next to us who arrived late, plopped down heavily in their seats, never stopped chattering, and never stopped peering down at the screen of their cell phone. It felt too odd to ask them to quiet down. Technically, this was an arena pop concert, not Lincoln Center. But it could have been. On his next tour, it would be entirely appropriate for LC to consider booking LC.

Taking It to Village Hall

This summer, our town has been hosting a series of free Tuesday night concerts at the gazebo in the village green. At the last one, on August 25, an oldies band performed rousing standards to a crowd mostly of older folk, but also to scattered clumps of teenagers and perhaps a dozen mothers with children and toddlers. Towards the end of the set, the lead singer made a series of remarks that my girlfriend and I found disturbing, not to mention crude and inappropriate. So I decided to write a letter to the village government about it. My girlfriend read it over and helped me tweak it, and we sent it off to Village Hall this morning, with both our names signed. I paste it below. (Since these are times of extreme political polarization, I have taken out our names, the name of our town, and the name of the band whose singer made the remark.)

Perhaps this letter is an overreaction. But I think that when a performer at a public, family-oriented event in a quiet northeastern suburb intentionally makes certain audience members feel unwelcome with an extremist political screed, it should at least be commented on.

August 26, 2009

To the Mayor, the Deputy Mayor, and Trustees of the Incorporated Village of A__

Dear Mr. Mayor, Mr. Deputy Mayor, and Trustees:

We write to thank you, but also to express a reservation, about the August 25 “Concert Under the Gazebo” in A__.

The show was wonderful, and the band was excellent. We appreciated the lead singer’s remarks that praised veterans, and that reminded the community of the sacrifices these veterans have made on behalf of the safety and security of our country. The lead singer also admirably called for a round of applause for veterans of the Vietnam War, who deserve better treatment and public acceptance than they have gotten. Certainly these are sentiments that nearly all sensible people agree upon, and community events such as the Tuesday Night Concerts are good opportunities to express those sentiments.

We were deeply troubled, however, by one of the singer’s remarks. At one point, he spoke of how our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are “fighting to keep us free”, and he said, to the best of our recollection, “and if you don’t believe that, get the hell out.” Leaving aside the question of whether the language choice was appropriate for a family event, we wish to point out that this remark pushed the singer’s message from one in support of veterans, to a hostile threat to people who hold certain political opinions. We feel this was highly inappropriate for a public event in a community such as A__, a community which is blessed to have unusual ethnic and social diversity, and probably has diversity of political opinion as well. It was very disturbing to see and hear a man with a microphone convey clearly to a large public audience that members of that audience were unwelcome if they held certain political opinions. Furthermore, it was disappointing that the singer seemed to accuse audience members who did not adhere to his political beliefs of being disrespectful to United States veterans.

We hope that future public events in A__ will maintain the atmosphere of community warmth and acceptance of diversity (ethnic, religious, political and other) that most of the Tuesday Night Concerts have had, and of which the village of A__ is rightly proud.

Sincerely, [etc.]

Questioned by the Hound

About a week and a half into our artists’ retreat in Costa Rica, Laura and I decided to leave our casita and head into the town of Ciudad Colon for a decadent lunch of roast chicken, tortillas and Diet Coke. We went to the roast-chicken shack that Laura remembered from two years before, bumblingly ordered our food (neither of us speak Spanish), and sat at a little metal outdoor table. The food came in plastic baskets, and we began eating it with our fingers. After a week and a half of healthy, home-cooked, largely vegetarian meals, the succulent chicken was a great pleasure.

As we ate, a dog trotted over and began watching us. He was a medium sized, short-haired, tan dog, possibly a stray, but clean and well behaved. He stared intently and expectantly as we ate. This didn’t, at first, bother me. The dog’s expectancy was not the least bit unreasonable, considering our shared history. And he said so. “Four thousands of years, you toss me bits and scraps. In return, I hang around your settlement, even in the dead of night, when I stand ready to bark and howl to ward off potential threats.” As he finished, he continued looking, as if this reminder were all I needed to get with the program and throw him a morsel.

Dumbly, I reached an empty hand over to pet him, but he backed away. “Not so fast, bub,” he said. “Where’s the grub? Food scraps for my services as a canine! For millenia, that’s been the deal. What’s the problem now?”

I didn’t have a credible answer ready. Many things have changed in those millenia. Not to mention that giving the dog food would be disrespectful to the establishment. But Laura and I were too focused on our chicken and soda to tackle expressing all this in words. So I copped out: I pretended not to hear him. Fortunately, just as the whole situation was starting to feel uncomfortable, the lady from the chicken stand stepped out, made a couple of sharp hand claps and whisked the dog away.

Creatures of Ciudad Colon

It is now our third day in the artists' colony in Ciudad Colon, Costa Rica. The colony is a small clump of houses and cabins on a steep hillside outside of the town. The colony is surrounded by lush forest with a wider variety of inhabitants than I've ever seen since my childhood weekends in the Catskill Mountains.

A partial list:

Bushes with purple flowers sticking up like ice-cream cones, bushes with red thorn-like flowers that hang and expose downward-facing sex organs.

Bamboo trees, tall and lanky, that lean gracefully and creak in the wind. Coniferous trees that drop pine cones like ours. Squat palms with great oval leaves that could shelter us both in a rainstorm. Palm trees with green coconuts nestled at the top. Colossal mango trees that drop their softball-sized fruits by the dozens on the path, where they're quickly devoured by ants and beetles.

One banana tree, with a single broad hand of bananas, too high up for me to reach. Plaintain trees: Yesterday I took a plantain, cut it, eased the flesh out of its skin (it can’t be peeled like a banana), diced it and fried it in hot oil – the pieces came out delightfully crisp but mushy on the inside. Stalks of corn, neatly and tightly planted, just over a barbed-wire fence in the neighboring property.

Last night, an enormous toad (not a frog, I was told) with a body the size of a bread bowl. It didn’t hop, but climbed a ledge and slid under a gate with slow lumbering movements like a forest primate.

Humming birds, and blue-grey birds with reddish breasts.

The butterflies. Orange butterflies; yellow butterflies; pale-green butterflies. Red and black butterflies; red, white and black butterflies; and black and yellow butterflies flying around each other in pairs (mating?).

Moths disquised as bark, moths disguised as leaves, a moth on my girlfriend’s shirt, disguised as her shirt.

An ant, over an inch long, that I spotted outside through the window. It was black with soft yellow waves on its gaster.

A line, over forty feet long, of leaf-cutter ants, transporting materials along the path in front of our cabins. We spotted this parade in the evening. By morning, they were gone without a trace.

In our cabin, miniature ants (about two milimeters long) scouting alone over the tiles. When one finds a crumb, they snap into action. A clump of ants descends on the crumb like a rugby scrum, while hundreds of others run in both directions along the straight invisible line from the crumb to the crack in the wall that leads to their colony.

A milipede sat high on our bedroom wall, near the join with the ceiling. When I flicked it onto a dustpan, it curled tightly into a disk, and held that position as I carried it outside and flung it into the grass.

Spiders – all black, and ranging in size from half an inch to an inch and a half, and malevolent seeming in their stillness. When I miss them as I swat them with a shoe, boy do they dart fast. When I get them, they lie prone on their back with legs curled in the air. One night I got one just before bedtime, and left it on the floor to clean up the next day. In the morning it was gone – come back to life, or taken away by something for a meal?

Thankfully, gnats and mosquitoes are scarcer than I feared, and pester me only around sunset, and only when I’m outside.

They can’t get in through the screens, and don’t seem to try, even when the lights are on. And then there are the insects we just hear, especially at night – crickets and cicadas, and a creature that whines endlessly at night like a policeman’s whistle, and almost as loud.

The dogs – all are friendly, all are greasy to the touch. A slender dog with jackal-like ears that prances about playfully. A big brown labrador, aging and arthritic, with a body like a barrel and sad round eyes that hope for company and attention. After petting his head for five minutes one evening, he thanked me with a single wet and heavy lick.

One cat, the owner’s. It sits loaf-like, and its cream-white face stares blankly as you approach the house.

And the people. Two painters from Tallahassee, a busy woman and a relaxed and mellow younger man, in neighboring cabins, “travelling together,” they say, though their relationship status seems uncertain. A memoirist from L.A., not writing but “doing revisions.” A retired businessman from Dallas, nursing his sciatica. A columnist from California who, we’re told, is a manipulator. A woman studying peace at La Paz University. My girlfriend and I, writing.

The Mystery of Jesus Christ Superstar

I remember when I was exposed for the first time to the whirling, swirling, emotional journey that is Jesus Christ Superstar (hereafter, JCS). It goes without saying that it didn't matter what my religious background or convictions were. With JCS, religion never mattered, because great music is great music, and a great story is a great story. The characters were so well wrought, and the storyline moved forward so skillfully, that I wonder if even devout Christian listeners of JCS were tempted to forget that they were hearing a story derived directly from religious narrative, and got just as caught up in the humanness of the characters as anyone else might.

As a youth of 14 or 15, one aspect of the record that compelled me to listen to it over and over again was the interaction between the characters. (I listened not to the film soundtrack, but to the original "album musical," known as the Brown Album, and only years later did I learn that the Brown Album was not connected with an actual performance of JCS, and many of the singers never even stood in the same room with each other during its making.) Thinking back on it now, I realize that JCS is an album made up of conversations. Judas and Jesus, the high priests with each other, Simon and Jesus, and on and on. The soliloquys - Mary's "I Don't Know How to Love Him" and Pilate's "Dream" - are as much with the audience as with the characters themselves, and Jesus's "I Only Want to Say" is, of course, with God. Judas's opening "Heaven on Their Minds" is a plea for being listened to (but Jesus "won't listen..." laments Judas), and it's nicely book-ended with "Superstar," in which Judas, in spirit, asks Jesus questions that most mortal people would like to ask, but cannot, about Jesus's motives and prominence. (It also brings to a climax the general motif of the questioning of Jesus by the high priests and Pilate.)

I started with the "album musical" version, the one with Ian Gillan, Murray Head et al., known as the Brown Album, and my copy was a taped cassette derived from my friend's borrowed LP. (I obtained a second-hand copy of the vinyl album years later.) Only when I was in my twenties did I see the film, and I recall that it did not particularly impress me. Classical music listeners know what it's like to fall in love with the first performance of a piece that they hear, and to refuse to warm up to any other. So it was with me and the JCS film soundtrack. Ted Neeley's Jesus just seemed too weak-voiced for me, the Priests and Herod were way too caricatured, and the whole thing was badly mixed - it sounded as if the actors just sang their lines over the Brown Album's backing tracks, and their vocals, besides being too loud and "dry" (recorded too up-front and without any reverberation or ambiance), also seemed poorly synched: it felt like each line came in a second or two too late. (It still feels this way to me.)

Now, it turns out that my girlfriend L. also discovered JCS at a young age. (This indeed was one factor that drew us together.) But the album entered her life at the age of ten; far earlier than it did mine. On a long drive to a family gathering in New Jersey, we sang nearly the entire book in the car. We knew, and sang accurately, not only all the words, but the particular inflections of the singers as we remembered them from the record. Each of us had the same aural memory of how many of the lines were sung. But for some reason, other lines we remembered differently. There were even some textual differences. I asked L. if she had listened to the film soundtrack as a kid, not the original album musical. No way! she said. It was always the Brown Album.

Around the time of my and L.'s discovery of our common interest in JCS, and our rediscovery of JCS itself, I got interested in Bible history. I'm like that. Hearing an old record, seeing an old film, or reading an article in the newspaper will inspire me to pursue some scholarly subject obsessively. I'll start with Wikipedia, then buy books, then rent films on the subject for weeks until my appetite for it feels satiated. (This habit has actually helped me a great deal as an academic and a History teacher; I adopt obsessional interests suddenly and arbitrarily, but I often feel compelled to read up on these interests until I have a fairly well rounded picture of the state of knowledge about them.)

This time, my interest in the the Bible led me to Edmund Wilson's book of essays by about the Dead Sea scrolls. A great deal of the book is devoted to questions of textual transmission. I was fascinated by the question of the differences in wordings between the Septuagint and the Masoretic text, by the so called "Synoptic Problem" (the mystery of why three of the four Gospels of the New Testament are so similar - did they stem from a, now lost, common source?), and how the Dead Sea scrolls points to a new timeline of Jewish/Christian holy writing, in which Old Testament books, Apocrypha, and Gospels form a continuous, evolving tradition, rather than two discrete traditions separated by a gap of several centuries. When I read about these things, I actually saw in my head little men in caves huddled over parchment scrolls, copying texts by candlelight. I imagined them making little errors as they wrote, errors which then became preserved for all time, to fuel the scholarly mysteries of the future.

My interest in this history bubbled as something else important was happening: L. and I were setting up home in our new apartment. As teachers, we came home each weeknight too exhausted to do much work, so, after the major items of furniture were put in their places, the secondary tasks of putting up pictures and assigning storage places for linens and such had to wait for the weekends. One Saturday we spent cleaning, unpacking, and putting things up, and we decided to put on Jesus Christ Superstar. Though I now have a copy of the Brown Album on vinyl, and L. has the film soundtrack on CD (which she has almost never listened to, being also a fan of the original album musical), we decided it would be fun to forgo these and put on L.'s taped cassette of JCS: a ninety-minute TDK Maverick cassette ("high reliability" it says on the shell) taped by her in July 1978. We know this is when it was taped because this date is handwritten on the paper slip inside the tape box; the other side of that slip is colored with a brown crayon, apparently in imitation of the album cover, with the words "JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR" written in both pencil and pen, and a small cross drawn underneath.

Would this thirty-one year old cassette tape work? At first, we hesitated to put it in the deck. Besides the fact that the sound of old cassette tapes tends to decay, cassettes themselves seem to age poorly: the little reels develop friction and start to resist turning on the spindles, until the delicate ribbon of tape stretches or snaps. If we slipped this cassette into the deck and hit play, would this precious object from childhood be broken forever?

To our relief, and delight, when the tape began playing, the reels turned without resistance, and after four or five seconds, the opening rumble of the overture began, then the fuzz guitar playing the doom-laden opening notes (to the melody of "Good Caiaphas, the council waits for you..."). By the time it got to Murray Head's Judas singing "My mind is clearer now..." we got up and went back to our work, as the tape played happily.

But after about twenty minutes, something odd happened. After the Priests finished their "Jesus Must Die" song, the song "Hosanna," that opens side 2, sounded different. The voices rested more loudly in the mix and sang much more staccato than I remembered. When Caiaphas came in singing "Tell the rabble to be quiet, we anticipate a riot..." his voice had changed. Instead of the cello-voiced Caiaphas of the album (Paul Raven), this Caiaphas was more like a giant bullfrog. Plus, he had an American accent. By the time Jesus came in ("Why waste your breath moaning at the crowd...") and it was not the rich voice of Ian Gillan but the thin wiry voice of Ted Neeley, I knew what was going on. We were hearing side of the film soundtrack, not the album musical.

I told this to L., who was incredulous. How could that be? she asked. This tape was made directly from her vinyl copy of the album musical - "you know, the brown one with the two angels on it - I taped it myself!" she said. She added that she had never even owned a copy of the film soundtrack before someone gave her the CD of it, many years later. But I knew my JCS Brown Album, and I knew that thought we had just heard side 1 of the Brown Album, we were now hearing side 2 of the film soundtrack. To prove it, I stopped the cassette and put on side 2 of my vinyl copy of the Brown Album. Sure enough, my old familiar Caiaphas came in singing "Tell the rabble to be quiet..." followed by Ian Gillan singing "Why waste your breath..."

L. was horrified. Understandably. This cassette was a childhood artifact, and childhood artifacts are among the most intimate artifacts a person can have. To learn that it wasn't what she thought it was, that it was corrupted in this bizarre way, was a shock. And it wasn't only that the cassette was not what she thought it was. For years, this was the JCS that she listened to and memorized: the words, the sound of the instruments, the inflections of the voices. Suddenly, she was faced with the fact that this music that had formed such a prominent place in her life, had all along been a JCS with an inexplicable mix up. And how could she not have realized that from side one to side two the actors' voices had suddenly changed? Her eyes began to tear, and I felt all the closer to her, because such a revelation would frustrate and sadden me as well, but it would not, I imagine, sadden most other people.

But as we were feeling these feelings and attending to them, I couldn't control my urge to investigate. What was on the rest of the tape? I fast-forwarded to the end of side A, flipped it over and pressed play. After a few seconds began the picked guitar notes of "The Last Supper." But it was again the film soundtrack, not the album musical. I started formulating a picture in my mind of what could have happened during the making of this cassette, and announced to L. my prediction that side 4 would finally return to the album musical. Why? Double albums used to be pressed with sides 1 and 4 on one disc, and 2 and 3 on the other. This was done to accommodate record players with spindles that held multiple discs and automatically dropped them on the platters as they played. You could experience the modern luxury of listening to sides 1 and 2 of a double album without having to get up from your easy chair. Then you could get up and flip both discs over at the same time, put them on the spindle and once again sit passively for forty-odd minutes through sides 3 and 4. (Once these automatic spindles went out of fashion, double albums began to be pressed with sides 1 and 2 on the first disc and 3 and 4 on the other. And, of course, nowadays, who wants to sit still for forty minutes through anything at all?)

So I suspected that thirty-one years ago, there had not been one, but two JCS double albums, one of the musical and one of the film. Somehow the second disc of each one, containing sides 2 and 3, had been swapped. The resulting cassette was what historians of textual transmission would call an interpolation of two diverse sources.

I fast-forwarded the tape. Sure enough, side 4 began with Murray Head, the Judas of the original album musical, singing "Damned for All Time." So the theory was correct that the second disc was swapped. But the question remained, how did it happen? L. insisted that her family never owned the film soundtrack. I asked L. if she could have lent the record out to someone who then mixed up the discs. She had no memory of lending it out.

The next morning, L. called the one person in the world who could shed some light on the situation: her sister. She explained the whole story to her (it took some time), and asked if she had any idea if the family's JCS discs were ever switched. L.'s sister is three and a half years younger than she, and therefore was only seven when the tape was made. Not surprisingly, she could shed no light on the mystery, and seemed minimally interested in it anyway. The family's record album itself, of course, is long lost.

I, meanwhile, did some internet searching, hoping I might find testimonials of some kind of glitch in the record-pressing plant that might result in a double album having one disc each of two different recordings. (Such glitches are not unknown. An example is the Pink Floyd double album "A Nice Pair", which was meant to contain the band's first two albums, but included an opening track wrongly taken from a third album.) But I found no complaints on the internet of mixed JCS albums: so far as I know, there has never been a JCS double album issued with mixed discs from the album musical and the film.

So whenever we listen to JCS, or get the film on Netflix (which we recently have done), we continue to enjoy the music, the story, the characters, the conversations and the conflicts. But the mystery of the bizarre cassette recording remains, a private little mystery to be added to the much greater mysteries of the Synoptic Problem, the Dead Sea scrolls, the Septuagint and the Masoretic text.

A Room of Their Own

An audiophile once told me that records were superior to CD's because, "there's more music in them." Hmmm... If this is true, what does one have to do to bring that music out? Being an audiophile, his approach was to buy the most expensive equipment possible. But I think I've hit upon another solution.

My girlfriend and I recently moved into a two-bedroom place, and we made the exciting decision to devote the extra bedroom entirely to music and books. There's a sofa, bookshelves (full of my old SF and fantasy paperbacks), a couple of guitars and, most importantly, my stereo and collection of about 300 LP's. (That's a modest collection compared to what some people have, but I believe it's a good collection.) Now, people spend a lot of money on components to get great stereo sound, but I'm now convinced that what matters more than anything is the room. Simply put, this medium-sized room brings out the broadest, most immediate, most detailed and richest sound I've ever heard from my records.

The first thing we put on - a bootleg of a Pink Floyd concert from the Atom Heart Mother tour (Atom Heart Mother Goes on the Road [Oscar Records, 1971?]), a record I've owned since the mid-eighties - sounded more expansive and real than I'd ever heard it. After a brief drum fill from Nick Mason, David Gilmour's glassy guitar notes kicking off "Embryo" rang high, deep and hollow. The acoustics of the concert hall seemed to replace the acoustics of the room we were in. I could imagine Pink Floyd playing four feet in front of me. I realized that if this pirated mono LP sounded so refreshingly new, and so immediate, then a wealth of new discoveries lay before me. In an age of competing high-definition formats, my record albums have gotten a new lease on life, just by being played in the right room. What wonders await!