Issue 104

The Columbia Street Waterfront District of Brooklyn is technically in Cobble Hill, but it is partially separated from the rest of the neighborhood by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Access can be had via overpass walkways or certain streets that are not intersected by the highway. Warehouses and similar industrial structures face the water, while further inland, a series of restaurants, bars, shops, and an Aikido school can be found. Halfway to the end of DeGraw Street, an outdoor sculpture garden with updated full sized takes on Egyptian, Chinese, and The Lord of the Rings-type fantasy art casts varying shaped shadows across the sidewalk. Several doors down, a nondescript, unmarked white wooden door with a buzzer is the only identifying signifier that it is the HQ entrance for the internationally acclaimed audiophile loudspeaker manufacturer, Ohm Acoustics. Upon entry, one can see that the open space embodies a combination of chaotic clutter with mad scientist practicality. To the immediate left, President John Strohbeen’s office space, surrounded by wide screen video monitors, files, computers, a gargantuan music library, and parts of various Ohm speakers, is guarded by his two rescue dogs from Puerto Rico. To the right, a number of boxes sit on the loading dock, with many more still folded and unopened. A 16-foot high rack holds large sheets of lumber for making cabinets in the rear carpentry area. History “We’ve been in this space for 20 years,” says Strohbeen in a calm, world weary voice rich with experience from being based in Brooklyn for the last half century. “We were originally in Bed-Stuy (Bedford-Stuyvesant). The area got very rough in the 1980s and there was a period when I was wary of going there without an armed guard. The building got sold in the 1990s to a new landlord, who decided to convert it all to high luxury residential units, so we had to move. We found our current space in 1999.” A listening area has been established in the left middle space several feet in, where a pair of medium-sized Walsh speakers is set up for audio comparison with Ohm’s latest project: a PA system designed for the Brooklyn-based Americana music club Jalopy. To the right, a wall of boxes and varying speaker components surround the office area of Strohbeen’s Vice-President and operations manager, Evan Cordes. The glows of computer screens, oscilloscopes, and phone lights festoon the area and cut through the shadows. From its beginnings in 1972, Ohm Acoustics was founded on the acoustic design and engineering theories primarily of Lincoln Walsh, and to a lesser extent, Neville Thiele. They have long been renowned for their sense of realism and “sweet-sweep,” which is the term Strohbeen uses for speakers that allow for a wider field area of accurate sound than with conventional box -type loudspeakers. Under President John Strohbeen, who took over Ohm in 1978, Ohm has continued to pioneer new ways to bring its unique quest for sonic accuracy and audio realism to what is at present 172,000 different customers worldwide. How Do They Sound? At John Strohbeen’s invitation, I was invited to a listening session and small factory tour as a follow up to my interview with him in Copper Issue 103. An Ohm component diagram mounted to a plywood sheet of roughly 12 feet x 4.5 feel served as a simulated “wall.” “Most speakers are in interior listening environments with walls,” explains Strohbeen, whose 1981 patent created a design to make use of the sound wave reflections off walls to enhance stereo imaging from a wider range of listening positions, i.e., the “sweet-sweep” effect. Although they also make center channel speakers, subwoofers and omnidirectional satellite speakers for 5.1 systems, Ohm’s best-selling Walsh Tall floorstanding speakers are their main products and are tailored for the room size configuration in which they will be utilized. See specs below: I had heard earlier versions of the Walsh speakers in private homes but had not conducted any focused auditioning on any of the latest models, so I was admittedly eager to listen and make comparisons.Evan lined up a pair of medium-sized Walsh Tall 2000 Speakers for the session. As a longtime owner of a pair of Ohm C2 speakers, I have been a fan of the Ohm sound for decades and have spent thousands of hours listening to music and even mixing records with them. However, as John Strohbeen has noted, while Ohm will service their older model speakers, they lack the “sweet-sweep” and enhanced voice articulation that are found in the Walsh Series loudspeakers. “Our landlord just made more space available for us to construct a fancier listening room, but we think this will do fine for now. Once we finish the new room, you’re welcome to come back,” said Strohbeen. A pair of wheeled office chairs were positioned about ten feet away. “We find that people who haven’t experienced the `sweet-sweep’ like to roll the chairs in different directions and distances from the speakers to convince themselves.” One of John Strohbeen’s proudest achievements with Ohm’s loudspeakers is what he feels is the greatly enhanced intelligibility and authentic reproduction of the human voice when used to listen to vocal music or when the speakers are part of a home entertainment system for watching movies, videos, and television programming. We thus decided to focus first on music with vocals. The compact discs that we used to listen to this typical Walsh setup included the following:

• As I Call You Down – Fistful of Mercy (Ben Harper, Dhani Harrison and Joseph Arthur; acoustic-based Americana roots music)
• The Best of the Alan Parsons Project (art rock)
• Graceland – Paul Simon (world beat/rock/pop)
• Vienna Concert – Keith Jarrett (jazz)
• Martha Argerich – Franz Liszt: Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6 (classical)
• The Dark Side of the Moon – Pink Floyd (classic rock)

“Eye In the Sky” by the Alan Parsons Project is one of their best known songs. Produced and engineered by the legendary Alan Parsons (The Beatles’ Abbey Road, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, Al Stewart’s Year of the Cat), the song was co-written by Parsons and singer Eric Woolfson. Featuring Stuart Elliott (The Who, Cockney Rebel) on drums, the record’s clearly-defined instruments leapt through the Walsh speakers. The shimmer of the chorus effect on the guitars, the pulsing bass and the soaring harmony vocals all seemed enhanced by the Ohm Walsh speakers and the “sweet-sweep” gave the music a natural three dimensionality of added depth that is usually only achieved with digital sound processing (DSP) delay and reverb effects. Paul Simon’s “The Boy in the Bubble” on the Walsh 2000s displayed subtle additional layers of multiple reverbs that are almost inaudible on consumer-grade headphones or loudspeakers. The blaring accordion introduction is punctuated with a cannon-like drum hit that physically impacts the listener with a body blow soundwave. On the a cappella “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes,” the wider stereo spread and magnified intelligibility of vocal phrasings finally made clear to me that actual words that are murmured in between the sung lines, and from which directions those snippets hailed. In my opinion, the claim that Ohm speakers sound as natural as if the sound source was in the same or next room is no hyperbole. I walked to the far perimeter edges of the “sweet-sweep,” which entailed a roughly 220-degree arc, and was impressed by the lack of artificial depth and narrow stereo range I’ve heard from many conventional box loudspeaker sound systems. Next, the thunderous attack of a then 19-year old Martha Argerich’s fingers on the keys as she performed Franz Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6,” punctuated through the cavernous factory loft. The sonorous concert grand piano debut recording from 1961 on Deutsche Grammophon introduced the mercurial Argentinian virtuoso to the classical music world, and she has continued to forge her own path and march to the beat of her own drummer for the last 60 years. The dynamic range is fully captured, from quiet inhaled breaths between passages and the faint depression of a sustain pedal to the impact of the hammers on the strings of the piano and the emotional climaxes Argerich builds and sustains in her interpretations of Liszt, who was himself the greatest keyboard virtuoso of his era. Conversely, the quiet elegance and improvised complex harmonic chord voicings of Keith Jarrett conveyed an intimate, private room recital sound with the Walsh 2000s. The 1992 Vienna Concert release on ECM, part of Jarrett’s series of totally improvised concert piano recordings that began with his bestselling The Koln Concert from 1975, showcases some of the more introspective moments in Jarrett’s playing, in contrast to his trio concerts from the same era with drummer Jack DeJohnette and bassist Gary Peacock. As a point of listening comparison, the mini Walsh speakers were also brought out from the area outside of the carpentry room. Ohm’s quality control is very impressive – as Evan Cordes explained, the sounds of the mini Walsh and medium-sized Walsh are indistinguishable close up and that the projection distance-capability of the two speakers is what differentiates them, which is how Ohm is able to maintain the overall sonic behavior of its speakers in a wide array of room sizes and space configurations. This is why Ohm dissuades customers from upgrading to larger systems unless the customer’s space configuration has also changed, since bigger will not necessarily be better when it comes to the Walsh design. All of the Ohm Walsh models are passive speakers. I was told they are agnostic when it comes to power amps and preamps. The Ohms we were auditioning were being fed with a rather humble Outlaw Audio 2160 receiver and a 25-year old-California Audio Labs DX-1 CD player. The speaker wiring was over the counter copper zip cord. Cordes and Strohbeen both stated that the amount of variability in the sound of the Walsh speakers with different power amps and preamp configurations “is about the same as if they were physically moved a few inches.” Strohbeen noted that Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon is the most often requested listening reference from Ohm customers. “More than half the time, just listening to a few songs from Dark Side is all they need to hear.” Alan Parsons’ meticulous mix of this timeless classic rock landmark simply sounded amazing on the small Walsh speakers, with the only difference from its larger cousin being the projection distance, where the volume started to level off after walking 20 feet back. The intelligibility of dialogue underscoring parts of “Us and Them” was superb, and did not demand cranking the volume to discern the words, something that’s often a requirement even with headphones. The “sweet-sweep” gave the wide stereo panning effects an almost cinematic surround sound-like breadth in spite of the source coming from the two lone Walsh minis. Live Sound: The Next Frontier? Ohm’s latest project is its first ever PA system. Specially designed for the Jalopy Theater and School of Music in Brooklyn, this prototype system, dubbed the PA-1, may be a breakthrough design for urban clubs and music venues where floor space is at a premium. Jalopy’s reputation as a premier venue for acoustic folk and Americana-based music in Brooklyn has been hampered by an antiquated sound system that was designed for punk rock tours in the late 1980s. The PA-1 is housed in three approximately 3-foot by 3-foot modestly sized wooden enclosures that look like “ramps,” with an approximate depth of no greater than 9 inches. Inside them is a center 15-inch Walsh shaped metal mesh dome driver mated to three high-efficiency super tweeters. The remaining panels hold eight 12-inch subwoofers powered by four amplifiers delivering 2,000 watts. The PA-1 has a point source radiation pattern. The unique aspect of this system is that it is designed to be mounted to the ceiling of the venue, thus preserving floor space for additional seating, dancing, or tables. The crisp clarity associated with Ohm products is ideal in my opinion for reproducing acoustic music, and installation and testing is scheduled to commence this month. Listening to the system at reduced volume, it appears that the Ohm characteristics are fully retained with the PA-1. Perhaps a follow up review post-installation will be published in a future issue of Copper. While on the subject of acoustic music: Fistful of Mercy is an acoustic team up of lap steel maestro Ben Harper, singer songwriter Joseph Arthur, and Dhani Harrison, son of the late George Harrison. They play Americana-influenced acoustic music with Beatlesque harmonies. “Father’s Son,” a bluegrass-type song with Harper’s Weissenborn lap steel slide riffs prominent in the mix, radiated a down-home presence reminiscent of a back porch acoustic jam. “In Vain or True,” with its Fab Four arrangement and lead vocal tradeoffs, was startlingly lifelike and listening behind a closed door or blindfolded could easily fool one into thinking that the performers were but a scant few feet away. Ohm Acoustics has carved out its own unique niche in the audio high fidelity arena. Listening tastes are as extremely subjective as musical tastes, and I feel that companies like Ohm, who have been able to create a product that a large-enough segment of the market will staunchly support, are worthy of the accolades they have garnered. John Strohbeen is one of those who continue to take their own path in forging ahead in the pursuit of audio excellence.

WKBW Buffalo Out of radio station CHAM and still living in Canada, I snagged a part-time on-air job for my former program director from Pittsburgh who had moved to Buffalo, at 50,000-watt WKBW-AM 1520. My trip from Canada to Buffalo was 65 miles one way. "KB," as they called it, had a nighttime signal that went from the Canadian Maritimes to halfway down the East coast (or maybe all the way to Florida – I'm not sure). I know you could get it in Virginia. Answering the phone was amazing...we got calls from Halifax, Philly, etc. After some time passed I figured I'd just move to Buffalo in case a full time job opened up at KB. The day the movers were in to give me an estimate, I got a call from Montreal and, anticipating a change of plans, asked the movers to quote moving me to both Buffalo and Montreal. I was flown to Montreal for an interview and they offered me evenings (7:00 pm – midnight) which I accepted. At KB I'd sleep in the ladies' room since it had a couch. I'd be on sometimes till midnight on Saturday, then on again Sunday at 6:00 am. I wasn’t about to do 130 miles for the quick turn. KB wasn't in a good place in town. How bad? I'd run down to the nearby McDonald’s when there was a very very early Sunday morning prerecorded public affairs show on. The manager there wore a gun on his hip. That should tell you something. WKBW was an institution in Buffalo radio. Later, at ROCK 102, I would help drive a nail in its coffin. CJFM Montreal I loved Montreal, fell deeply for it my first day, lived mid-downtown, and in the mid 1970s the media was invited to everything! I did evenings, then afternoons, and was eventually promoted to off the air after doubling, then tripling the ratings. This made zero sense to me, but I was soon made creative director. So I created stuff. Contests, promotions, etc. For example, on the hottest day of the summer I staged a snowstorm with tons of shaved ice. The resulting publicity included four newspaper front pages (two French and two English), with a full color front page on one of them. And we got onto national TV twice. Montreal was viewed as a special major market by many, and we were mandated by management to have some talk shows, which were hosted by Matthew Cope and Mary Lou Basaraba (now an opera star!). Matthew was diligent and went after anyone and everyone famous. I remember a young Donald Sutherland stopping by and hanging out after his interview. Bing Crosby on the phone singing just a few lines of “White Christmas.” From strippers to celebs, every day had someone on the station who was well known or should have been. CJFM was the little FM station upstairs from the big English AM station, CJAD. I was eventually promoted to program director and not long after the French-mother-tongue majority finally assumed power in the Canadian province where the station was located. it seemed like they were going to force all sorts of French on English companies, so I started looking for work elsewhere. I could read French signs and so on but could never speak French well enough to criticize what was on the air. Snapshots: Heard a funny line: "A social note; don't use the urinal while wearing open-toed sandals." The guy who said that replaced me in the afternoon slot when I was taken off the air. One day he came in so drugged out of his head he couldn't speak coherently. I called the PD (program director) who was at the bar across the street, and said, “listen to your station.” The PD was a young alcoholic, a great guy, but not a good PD. He asked me to remove the stoned and babbling disc jockey. I convinced The GM (general manager) to buy a piece of expensive equipment that immediately made us much louder. His gleeful call the night they turned it on was a high point. Once, another station broadcasting from the same antenna as we did, from the highest point on Mount Royal, (Montreal – Mount Royal – get it? A long extinct volcano) was way over their legal power limit, and it knocked our station, which was just down the hill, off of all our radios. I actually went on the air and announced, "If you can hear us, would you please give us a call?" The meters said we were cooking, but we couldn't hear ourselves. On my first day at CJFM I saw an old friend in the hallway. "DAVE!" I called out, "this'll be great, working together!" "Bob, don't you know? You are replacing me." Man, mixed emotions there. And we stayed friends! That’s a view of the kind of people who work in radio that continues to this day. Although...we were invited to the big Montreal company Christmas bash. And our little FM station upstairs completely upstaged the big AM station downstairs, and they didn't like it. At the time, the mayor was a colorful sort. We hired an impersonator, videotaped him comically mocking many of our staff and theirs, and brought in a big video projector (remember, video tape and projection screens were pro-grade only in 1976 or so) to play the tape at the party. Plus we had an after-party party in the big suite in the penthouse of the fancy hotel. Much alcohol was consumed. The AM staff attended. One of their newsmen had a fight with their program director. Hair was pulled out. Furniture thrown. Blood on the wall! Maybe not everyone in radio had the sense of camaraderie that others did.

Phonograph disc reproduction cartridges (phono cartridges as they’re known to you and me) all contain transducers consisting of coils of wire, iron and permanent magnets. They can be divided into three main categories: moving magnet, moving iron, or moving coil, based on their principle of operation. What differs is the actual configuration of the elements they’re made from. All do the same thing: translate the motion of the stylus and cantilever (the shaft the stylus is mounted on) into electrical impulses that correspond to the information contained in the record groove. Starting from the record surface upwards: all phono cartridges have a stylus (usually made of diamond nowadays) which rides in the groove. This stylus is shaped in forms as simple as a cone (spherical tip), or as complex as the multiple variations on the line-contact theme (elliptical, Shibata and others). Simply put, the spherical tip’s foremost advantage is low cost. Its main disadvantages are its inability to trace sharp curves due to high levels of groove modulation at high frequencies, and its inability to follow the exact same path inscribed by the cutting stylus when the record was cut, due to its shape significantly deviating from the shape of the cutting stylus. Both of these phenomena result in tracing distortion upon playback. However, if the playback stylus were to be shaped like a cutting stylus, it would actually cut into the grooves and ruin our records. So, the trick is to find ways to geometrically approximate the shape of the cutting stylus, while removing any features that would actually be able to cut and do damage. The result is the different approaches to line-contact styli. Not only do line-contact designs follow the same path as the cutting stylus to a much greater extent, they are also able to trace at higher levels at higher frequencies and shorter wavelengths, thus reducing the various forms of tracing distortion, including inner groove distortion. The latter occurs due to the reducing linear velocity of the groove at smaller diameters, resulting in smaller recorded wavelengths and therefore sharper curves as the record groove gets closer to the end of the disk. As an added bonus, although they contact a thinner section of the groove, the more elaborate line-contact designs increase the depth of contact and as such, the total contact area between the groove wall and the stylus. This has two beneficial, if somewhat not-obvious effects: One, distributing the vertical tracking force over a larger area results in lower pressure on the record surface, reducing record wear and distortion due to elastic (and sometimes even plastic) deformation of the groove under the pressure of the stylus. Two, it also reduces the noise floor by more effectively “averaging” the individual PVC molecules that make up the groove wall, which define the ultimate noise floor of the medium. Averaging reduces the statistical probability that a single discrete PVC molecule would be traced to translate into sound, thereby reducing the noise level. This same mechanism has formed the basis of many publications concerned with surface metrology (the measurement of small-scale features on surfaces), a subject of continuing research at national laboratories and standards institutes. The downside is that line-contact styli are considerably more difficult to manufacture and require precise orientation upon installation, which is why they cost more. The stylus is installed on the cantilever, a miniature beam which must accurately transmit the stylus motion to the transducer elements. This is often made of aluminum, boron, or more exotic materials. It must combine extremely low mass (to not impede the incredible accelerations encountered on record grooves) with extremely high rigidity (to not bend instead of transmitting the motion where it ought to). Any bending or vibrational modes in the cantilever would cause it to deviate from the required accuracy of reproduction. The cantilever is suspended, usually by means of an elastomer and/or wire spring, so it can move freely as required, while returning to its neutral position in the absence of sound and without any tendency to continue moving, pendulum-style, after the impulse setting it into motion is removed. The other end of the cantilever carries the moving element of the transducer system. This can be a magnet, iron, or coil, as the category names would imply. In any case, this element also contributes to the transducer’s moving mass, which must be kept astonishingly low to achieve a proper high frequency response. This assembly is mounted close to the rest of the transducer elements, which remain stationary. The transducer and moving parts are all attached to the cartridge body, which also contains some provision for mounting to a tonearm headshell. While the stationary elements of the transducer and the rest of the cartridge body do not contribute to the moving mass of the cartridge and therefore have no mechanical effect on the high frequency response, the total mass of the cartridge adds to the effective mass of the tonearm. This, along with the cantilever suspension compliance – the stiffness of the stylus cantilever (with high compliance being softer and low compliance being stiffer) – defines the low frequency response of the cartridge/tonearm system by shaping the mass/compliance resonance at a (hopefully) subsonic frequency, below which the low frequency response sharply drops off. The effective mass of the tonearm and the compliance of the cantilever determine the resonant frequency of the arm/cartridge combination. This is the frequency at which the cantilever will literally resonate or vibrate out of control. As a result, it’s necessary to carefully match the effective mass and the compliance so that the resonant frequency isn’t in a range where it will be excited by record warps or intentional groove modulation (sound). Not only does this resonance define the frequency response of the arm/cartridge at the low frequencies, but it also defines the phase response, which extends higher than the cut-off frequency itself. An incorrectly tuned system will ruin the phase accuracy well into the audible portion of the spectrum and will either kill the bass or boost it to the point where the stylus will no longer stay in the groove! Carefully pairing the tonearm with a compatible cartridge serves to tune this resonant frequency, placing it where it should be, usually around 10 Hz. The response and performance of a system are also affected by electrical and geometric factors. The electrical factors get more complicated and include eddy-current losses, wiring capacitance, coil inductance and other considerations. Eddy current losses, caused in a conductive material by a changing magnetic field, occur in the transducer components and reduce the high frequency response. They can be controlled through careful design of the transducer. Inductance and capacitance form a resonant circuit, which affects the frequency and phase response. An inductance/capacitance resonance causing a rising response at the high frequencies could be balanced out by eddy current losses through careful design, but the whole system can be thrown off balance if the total system capacitance (including the wiring and preamp) is not set according to the value given by the cartridge manufacturer. (This parameter is adjustable in many phono stages and preamps.) The arm/cartridge system is designed for a certain value of vertical tracking force (VTF), which is adjustable on the tonearm to suit a range of different cartridges. Incorrect VTF setting will result in distortion and response errors. A frequently misunderstood parameter is vertical tracking angle (VTA). This is not the angle formed by the stylus leaning forwards or backwards rather than being at exactly at 90 degree to the record surface; that would be the stylus rake angle (SRA). The VTA is the angle of the vertical plane of modulation that is cut on the record. This must be exactly matched by the cartridge’s vertical plane of tracking for accurate reproduction. The VTA is a dynamic parameter, not a static one. This means that it cannot be accurately measured statically, as a simple geometric feature of the cartridge. This parameter is affected by the dynamics of the revolving record, the moving tonearm and the vibrating stylus. Its calculation is not exactly straightforward and is usually accomplished by means of a special test record and laboratory measurement instruments. VTA and SRA are both geometric factors. The reproducing stylus rake angle must also match the cutting stylus rake angle for accurate record playback. However, since the reproducing stylus (of the cartridge) is permanently attached on the cantilever at a certain orientation, the cantilever is also suspended at a certain orientation and the transducer registers at a certain angle in the vertical plane, the relationship between SRA and VTA is fixed by the manufacturer for each cartridge and cannot be altered by the user. As such, changing one of these parameters also changes the other. In practice, these parameters were not intended to be user-adjustable, although there is plenty of discussion on tweaking them all over the internet. Since both of these parameters must match both equivalent parameters as these were set cutting the records, it would be vital for the cartridge manufacturers to have a solid understanding (if not first-hand experience) of how records are cut, so the correct values of VTA and SRA can be designed into the cartridge. So, what are the correct values of VTA and SRA? The answer is...I wish there was a simple, single, correct answer. In fact, the relationship of these two parameters was a bit different on each model of cutter head used to cut records. The exact value also depends on which lathe the cutter head would be fitted to, and how it would be set up. Especially VTA, being a dynamic value, is rather complicated to accurately measure. This is a big part of the reason why different cartridges of a similar level of quality, transducer type, stylus shape and materials, can sound so different to each other when playing back the same record. The VTA and SRA values of one cartridge may happen to more closely match the values of the equivalent parameters when the record was cut, so that cartridge sounds better because it is actually better matched for reproducing that particular record. Change to a different record and another cartridge might sound better. There are, sadly, also cartridges designed with little regard to how records are actually cut, and these cartridges simply would never stand a chance of accurately reproducing a record, regardless of the amount of unicorn hair used to manufacture them under the full moon on a particular night of the year. It is not just about the materials or the type of transducer used in cartridge manufacturing. A cartridge needs to be designed to reproduce real-life records, as they were actually cut. If the geometric parameters are sensibly designed into a cartridge, along with the use of high-quality materials, a stylus shape that accurately traces the record groove and an accurate transducer system, one can be assured that such a cartridge will be a worthwhile investment.

This is the first in a new series about my misadventures in setting up audio systems. I’ve been an audiophile since the 1970s and have done uncountable setups for myself, The Absolute Sound, other magazines, manufacturers, friends, Romans and countrymen. As such, I could do a series on setup optimization techniques, but...naah, there’s plenty of good advice out there already. I’d rather share some stories about the mayhem I’ve encountered. A Shock to the System Around the late 1980s when I was working at The Absolute Sound the late Mike Kay, former owner of Manhattan high-end dealer Lyric HiFi, brought over the then-new Carver Silver Seven monoblock amplifiers. They didn’t arrive without fanfare. Kay, not given to hyperbole, raved about how they were the best amplifiers he’d ever heard. (Note: this was the first version, not the Silver Seven 900 of today.) Each amp had 15 KT88 tubes, two chassis connected by a thick umbilical, granite bases, big glass meters and immense output transformers on the back. They cost $17,000. Don’t remember if that was for each or per pair. I don’t remember how much power they put out either, other than...enough! The amps sounded astounding. I remember the first time Kay and I set them up (with more than 30 tubes to plug into their sockets, it helped to have some help), sat back and listened, and were floored. We called TAS editor-in-chief Harry Pearson down to the listening room and his reaction was the same – completely wowed. These amps had it all – tight, powerful bass, a lucid, remarkably textured midrange, sweet highs, an epic soundstage, beautiful instrumental and vocal tonality, reach-out-and-touch-it imaging and most of all, effortless authority. The Carver Silver Sevens quickly became the reference amp for the main system, complementing the Infinity IRS V speakers, Goldmund Reference turntable and so on. In fact, Harry was so enthused about them that he began inviting a bunch of people to come and listen. One of them was David Denby, the esteemed critic for New York magazine. Harry had hosted plenty of industry VIPs before but Denby was as VIP as it got. The afternoon before the evening he was set to arrive, I did my usual pre-flight check of going over everything in the Big System to make sure all was working properly. David showed up a few hours later. Harry, ever the showman (and we were putting on a dog and pony show, after all), started the listening sessions in the second-room system, wanting to work David up to The Main Event – hearing The System From G-d. In the meantime, I was in the main room double-checking the main system. Except there was no sound coming out of the left channel. Complete adrenaline-pumping white-out panic. Shaking, I went through the components and determined the problem was one of the Silver Sevens. Sh*t! After doing the usual checking fuses, jiggling cables and trying to turn the amp off and on again I realized it was kaput. From then on things went something like this: I called Harry aside and told him I’d have to swap the amps. Oh no no no no. “WHAT!? David came here to hear the Silver Sevens, not some piece of crap other amp and HE’S GOING TO HEAR THE SILVER SEVENS! GET BOB CARVER ON THE PHONE!” Going from shaking to quaking, I closed the door to the main listening room – Harry and I doing everything we could to hide what was going on from David – fished Carver’s name out of my Rolodex and called, hoping he’d answer the phone. A cheery Bob Carver answered. “Hi Frank, good to hear from you! What’s up?” “I’m here with Harry and David Denby from New York magazine and there’s no sound from one of the Silver Sevens. Is there anything you can suggest I can do? They’re waiting to listen right now!” He asked me if I did the usual checking fuses and so on and I told him yes. He then asked, “are you good with a soldering iron?” I was. “OK, take the back panel off the amp and call me back. I think I know a workaround that’ll get the amp running. A resistor probably blew and I can walk you through fixing it.” I turned the amp upside down and took off the back panel. Meanwhile Harry stuck his head in and bellowed, “are we ready to listen yet?” “I’m working on it! Keep stalling David!" I called Carver back. “OK, look at the back corners of the amp,” he said. "Do you see a green and a yellow wire?” “No.” “Ummm, maybe it’s a white and a yellow wire. Do you see anything like that?” “Yes.” “Well, here’s what I want you to do. You see where one of those wires goes to a resistor? We’re going to remove that resistor and bypass it, and just connect the wire to what the other end of the resistor is connected to. Can you handle that?” At that point if he’d asked me if I could assist with open-heart surgery or run around naked in the middle of Sea Cliff I would have said yes. “Yes.” “OK, it’s not the greatest fix but it’ll get you through the listening session.” So, OK then. I heated up the soldering iron, went to unsolder the resistor, stuck the soldering iron to it and... WHAM! I got hit with a titanic electric shock. It was so intense that it threw me onto my back. It was like someone grabbed me and slammed me onto the ground. I let out a scream. David and Harry came running into the room. In unison, “Are you OK?” I couldn't answer and was completely disoriented. After a few seconds? A minute? I was able to reply. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just got an unexpected shock.” “You’ll be OK, right?” asked Harry, the implication clearly being, now that we know you’re not dead, you’ll be able to keep working on the amp and get it fixed and we can start listening already! After replying in the affirmative, I realized I’d left Bob Carver hanging on the phone. I picked up the receiver. “Hi Bob, I’m still here, just got a little shock, that’s all.” He replied, “You’re OK, right?” “Yes, and I’m going to keep working on the amp.” Which I did, in a state of near-incontinent anxiety. Was I really going to poke into the innards of this thing again? I felt like I was about to stick my head into the alligator's mouth...again. Well, you know what they say about being young and stupid... I managed to finish the soldering job, closed up the back, hooked up the amp and flipped the power switch. The amp lit up. After about a minute I hesitantly put on some music at a very low volume. The amp was working. The amp was working! Then Harry came back into the room. “I HEAR MUSIC! Does that mean you’ve fixed it and we can listen?” “Yes.” (Yes, we can listen to freakin’ music now, thought the person who just got the crap shocked out of him.) “Just let me call Bob Carver back and let him know everything’s cool.” Which I did, assuring him I was fine, which I sort of was at that point. Post-mortem – oops, bad analogy! Bob Carver and I realized that one of the capacitors must have discharged – into me. Either that or I had forgotten to disconnect the power cord. (I think I had done so, but I was so harried and nervous that I might have forgotten.) To be fair, I have to think that Bob, figuring I was the all-knowing (hah!) Technical Director of The Absolute Sound, would have assumed that I’d known enough not to make a rookie mistake like not discharging the capacitors in a tube amp or unplugging the power cord before working on it. Or maybe I had forgotten to disconnect that $)#(*%! power cord. David, Harry and I then sat down for The Ritual Listening Session...and the system sounded magnificent. The mood went from tense to celebratory and the wine flowed freely with, I confess, more than a little of it going into my glass. All was well with the world. It became one of those magical nights. With a little shock to the system in between. Postscripts: it should go without saying: do not attempt to service electronic equipment if you don’t know what you’re doing! The capacitors in certain electronic components can retain a possibly lethal charge even after the equipment has been turned off. The Silver Seven amp was taken back to Lyric, repaired and returned to Sea Cliff, where it worked flawlessly for the rest of the time I worked for TAS. I never found out what that dang resistor did, or if it was the victim of shipping damage or something else.

Way back in the very early days of the World Wide Web, there were things called Newsgroups. Remember them? There was rec.audio.high-end, for those of us who love this tweaky, consumer-oriented sort of thing. And for professional audio folk, there was rec.audio.pro. That’s where I encountered Jim Johnston (known as JJ) and Jim Snyder, who at the time worked at AT&T Labs (formerly Bell Labs) in Holmdel, NJ. Rec.audio.pro, as those familiar with it will remember, was, much like Facebook is now, a semi-unregulated place for interaction. In the just-post-mid-1990s, my band of the time, variously known as the Tuesday Music club and the Tuesday Night Music Club (but to us it was just TMC) was in a funny position. In 1995, Apple Computer had approached us about helping them release an Enhanced CD of our most famous work, the disc of Tuesday Night Music Club, nominally by Sheryl Crow.(The Enhanced CD format combined music with computer data). Of course, we didn’t own said work – A&M Records did. However, Apple had approached A&M about it and A&M either didn’t get it or weren’t interested – or more likely, both. So they came to us, the people that created it. Twenty-five years later it’s tough to remember all the details, but in my memory it went something like this: no money up front, but a contractual commitment to buy X number of E-CDs from us on completion, which we had a year to complete – and for which we would receive a minimum of $1.2 million. Apple planned to sell these through a series of stores they had planned to set up. Seemed worth doing to me. (1) But by the end of 1995, Apple was falling apart, along with our deal. Virtually everybody at the company was out. So, we moved on, so to speak. Somehow, in rec-audio.pro, Jim and Jim discovered that I was still interested in selling our music directly to our theoretical customer base, and Jim Snyder asked me directly if that’s what I wanted to do. I said yes, of course, and we went from rec-audio.pro to email communication. It turns out they had a method of producing the discs involving data compression, and the issue for all sides was the quality of the download. Jim and Jim put together a selection of known tracks, including the spectacular “The Grey Funnel Line” from Silly Sisters (Maddy Prior and June Tabor), each in three different compression ratios, and mailed it out to L.A (imagine – mailing!!). I was to listen to them and report back – which I did, after a few weeks: a detailed report. And heard nothing. And then, after a month, Jim Johnston called me with this (I’m probably paraphrasing): “We got your report, and it was all about small things that we didn’t hear. But then went to Germany to Fraunhofer (https://www.fraunhofer.de/en.html), and everything you wrote about was right there. So we’re really impressed with your ears.” Naturally, I responded that anybody would have heard what I heard, and also that they should be impressed with the resolving power of my speakers. (I’ve since revised that opinion in favor of encouraging those who want to learn to hear, as it turned out I had done, through experience and careful listening.) It turned out that AT&T had also accounted for how the recorded works on the disc would be paid for, which was contained within the software that did the download: a complete package. Exactly what was necessary. And then came 1999 and Napster, and the world fell apart. Postscript: I sent the preceding to JJ (Jim Johnston, who I’m still in touch with) to see if he had anything to add. If you’d care to learn a little bit more, he sent the following links: https://www.rarewares.org/rrw/atta2b.php http://www.a2bmusic.com/ https://www.cnet.com/news/a2b-music-team-leaves-at-t-for-reciprocal (1) I also sent the article to Bill Bottrell, who recalled: “Here’s what I remember. ‘The Kid’ (I remember him, though can’t remember who he was – DS) got us in touch with Apple; he was basically a fan and wanted to connect our scene with Apple or himself. I thought we could do more and better Tuesday Night Music Club stuff, as our own brand, by hooking up with Apple. I thought we could do a live ‘webcast’ on Tuesday nights, write a song in real time, accept submissions from watchers via email, finish the song that night and amass a bunch of those, then weed them out at the end of a year final-mix them and put out the album with support from Apple at the point of sale. They were offering us 50 percent of the retail sales if we would play the occasional corporate event (news to me – DS). They didn’t know how to fund it in their structure and wanted to start “Apple Studio,” their own designation. I made two trips to Apple in Cupertino to discuss all this. On the second trip, they had prepared demonstrations of their tech that would be used to get this done. I heard their sound for webcast and thought it was appalling, (this was 1994 or 1995). They had no idea how to get the bandwidth sufficient to webcast video, and we discussed this at length.”

More crate digs, and leading off with a couple of notable comedy albums. Yeah, I know, it’s not music, but still listenable, enjoyable, and very collectible. And some of it, like the Monty Python or Cramps, isn’t available on most streaming services. Monty Python’s Flying Circus - Monty Python’s Flying Circus Monty Python’s very first release, featuring the original broadcast versions of some of their silliest and most memorable sketches. Once upon a time, I had the Pye label LP for this title, but that was waaaaaay back when. At some point during the move to Atlanta in the early Eighties, a box of LPs disappeared, with this one among the lost. I was under the impression this material had never been released on CD, and while I’d occasionally seen a few really beaten and worn vinyl copies, nothing in terms of a digital format release ever showed up anywhere. I found this at a local Goodwill last fall; it was bearing the correct half-price sticker color, and shockingly, still in the original shrink wrap. I just about keeled over on the spot. And in the time it took to get to my car and pop it into the CD player, the out-of-control, mindless juvenile part of my soul that lurks just below the surface had gone into full-on, totally LMAO mode. I couldn’t believe how such skits as “Flying Sheep,” “Crunchy Frog,” “Nudge Nudge Wink Wink,” “The Lumberjack Song,” “Albatross,” and the “Dead Parrot Sketch” still had me rolling in uproarious laughter, just about winkling my shorts in the process. The execution by the Pythons in these classic bits is still remarkably effective, even without the visual element. As I said earlier, I was under the impression that this classic collection had never been released as a CD; that assessment is, in fact, completely correct. The “CD” I found is actually an “audio book”; come to find out, that’s how it’s been marketed all these years. There was the LP and the cassette, but at the point when it was finally released on CD (1985), for some reason, they decided to sell it as an audio book rather than as a catalog CD title! Hence the reason there was never any reference to it when I’d occasionally take a stab and try and order it from a record store. I should have tried a book store instead! Anyway, if you’re a huge fan, this outstanding collection is indispensable, and can apparently still be ordered (through the proper channels, of course) online. It’s a worthwhile addition to your music server, and fills a huge void in the early Python catalog. And the sound quality is miles beyond my recollection of my old Pye LP pressing. Unfortunately, you won’t find it on any streaming services other than Amazon. Still, should you stumble across it, this collection is highly recommended! BBC/Pye Records, CD (download/streaming from Amazon) Firesign Theater - Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers An absolute classic of surreal, stream of consciousness American humor, 1970’s Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers was the Firesign Theater’s first album that maintained continuity in the story line across both sides of the LP. And, surprisingly, flowed thematically in succession from the closing of Side Two of the previous album, How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All, and into the opening Side One of their next album, I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus. I still have pretty pristine vinyl for Don’t Crush That Dwarf, but the object of most of my recent searches has been to add more files to the digital music server—so I was really stoked when this CD turned up at a booth in an antique mall. Yeah, CDs are so old now, they’re considered antiques! The album basically chronicles the antics of one George Tirebiter, a ne’er-do-well, juvenile delinquent turned war hero and actor; his heroics weave in and out of a complex maze of storylines. Where it can be really difficult to determine when the story is actually here-and-now, or part of a really convoluted movie plotline that’s seemingly continually playing in various stages throughout the production. And, of course, there are plenty of the always-entertaining and off-kilter Firesign ads and commercials, along with religious and televangelist segments galore. There are copious helpings of plotlines drenched in totally crazed satire, and the dialogue is often about as juvenile, trashy, and quite literally “out there” as it gets! I was a teenager when I first heard this at my brother’s house over his Koss Pro 4A headphones (didn’t want my mom to hear the kind of trash I was listening to!). Regardless, my brother’s overprotective (soon to be ex) wife was convinced that I was going straight to Hell for listening to such garbage! I was aware of a very hard to find MFSL CD release of this title in 1987, but had no idea that Columbia/Sony/Legacy had also released a CD version in 2001—this one! The sound quality is really superb, and it’s a real joy to listen to the bizzaro/alternate reality the Firesigns created—now with the ease of digital technology. And it shows up on most of the major streaming services, so if you’re not familiar, have a listen. You won’t regret it, it comes highly recommended! Columbia/Sony/Legacy, CD (download/streaming from Amazon, Tidal, Qobuz, Google Play Music) The Cramps - Psychedelic Jungle The Cramps are one of the most storied bands of the Eighties; their raucous, distinctive brand of rockabilly was eventually given the moniker “Shockabilly” because they didn’t easily fit into any of the typical categories. 1981’s Psychedelic Jungle is technically their second album, following the EP Gravest Hits and their first full-length album, Songs the Lord Taught Us. However—and despite how entertaining the first two releases were—Psychedelic Jungle is definitely their first fully-formed and most accomplished album up to that point. And the over-the-top, on-stage vocal antics of lead singer Lux Interior are well documented on the album, along with incredible lead guitar work from Poison Ivy. Kid Congo Powers stepped in as the second guitarist on this release; his work is exceptionally effective. And drummer Nick Knox pounds out the heavy beats here; his drumming is one of the undeniable highlights on every Cramps release. Shockingly, The Cramps didn’t employ a bass player on any of their records or in their live sets until the mid-Eighties, but you don’t really notice the bass’s absence on the tracks here. As far as I can tell, this album was never released on anything other than on LP in the Eighties; this 1998 CD release, which I scored at a CD Warehouse nearby, is on the original I.R.S. label. Albeit from a European (UK) distributor, and it doesn’t appear to be available on the major streaming services, which seem to have lots of other, later Cramps albums available. Priced at $9, this is one of those unusual discs that I didn’t hesitate to grab—because I’d never seen it anywhere, at any price. Generally, the only Cramps CD you ever see in any shop is the 1984 compilation Bad Music For Bad People. Which isn’t a bad listen, but sometimes you want to hear the original album, right? This is also the first album where Lux and Ivy did a major share of the songwriting chores, although some of the most entertaining ones are the remakes of obscure oldies. Like bruising versions of “Green Fuz,” “Goo Goo Muck,” “ Primitive,” and an especially rousing version of Bobby Nolan’s “The Crusher.” The Lux/Ivy penned tunes like “Voodoo Idol,” “Don’t Eat Stuff Off the Sidewalk,” “Can’t Find My Mind,” and “The Natives Are Restless” don’t lag far behind in terms of entertainment value. The performances are incendiary to say the least! This disc is hard to find, but well worth the price. And with the virtual invisibility of the title for online streaming—no Tidal or Qobuz—worth grabbing if you stumble across one or see a copy online. Highly recommended! I.R.S. (UK), CD (download/streaming from Amazon, Google Play Music, Spotify, Deezer) Neil Young - Trans Things were really beginning to gel with my soon-to-be wife and I in 1982. Both of us were huge Neil Young fans, her especially—she was a student at Kent State University when the shootings happened, and the Neil Young-penned “Ohio” really struck a chord with her on a personal level. We’d never seen Neil live, and when I found out he was touring solo in support of the new album Trans, I got tickets for a show at the University of Georgia coliseum. I already had the album, which was unlike anything that Neil had ever done before—he was just beginning his phase of concept-related albums that spanned the Eighties into the Nineties and forward. Anyway, the concert was fabulous, and Neil performed Trans virtually in its entirety with minimal accompaniment. And when he performed “Ohio” accompanied only by his acoustic guitar, it was probably the most spine-chilling moment I’ve ever experienced at a live show. Although Trans came out at the dawn of the CD era, it was never released as a domestic CD. I had the album at one point, but had basically pretty much forgotten about it until I stumbled across this German Geffen Records import CD at an antique mall—for $2! It starts out with a kind of rockabilly number “Little Thing Called Love,” which was probably more in line with the upcoming album, the retro Everybody’s Rockin’. From that point, all bets are off, with computer and synthesizer enhanced numbers like “Computer Age,” “We R In Control,” “Transformer Man,” and “Sample and Hold.” And more straightforward rockers like the remake of “Mr. Soul” and the sprawling “Like an Inca.” This is one of those titles that I was happy to get a few years back, and a great addition to my music server and Neil Young collection. Because it was virtually impossible to find anywhere other than on an LP—try finding a decent, clean pressing with a pristine outer jacket. Nowadays, it’s available on all the major streaming services, so no need for the search, unless you just really desire having a copy. But if you stumble across one at a reasonable price, I’d definitely recommend grabbing it. And at least take a listen on Tidal or Qobuz, it’s a real blast from the past! Geffen Records (Germany), CD (download/streaming from Amazon, Tidal, Qobuz, Google Play Music, Spotify, Deezer) Header image courtesy of Pexels.com/Cottonbro.

During the 1970s I had an opportunity to teach a class of motivated fourth grade students interested in learning through music and the other arts. At least that's what I was told by the interviewer. This was at IS 233, District 6, Manhattan. The class actually consisted of about 15 students with behavior problems who had been removed from their previous schools. The students cursed at me, had little interest in learning, and no respect for a young Jewish guy from Brooklyn trying to teach a group of mostly Hispanic kids in the Washington Heights area of Manhattan. Their one consideration had to do with my name: I wanted them to call me by my first name, but because they were used to addressing teachers as Mr. or Miss they ended up referring to me as Mr. Don. (I always thought it made me sound like a hairdresser or the lead singer of a pop music group.) After several weeks of being cursed at, I decided to do something about it. I made a list of every phrase or four-letter word they had spoken in class, copied the list onto the blackboard (chalkboards were still black in those days), chose a few of the curses, and quickly composed a four measure piece in four parts built on four beats to a measure. Some of the curses were stretched across all four measures, some were spoken every other measure or only once, some spoken very quickly, etc. As a result everyone's favorite curse was incorporated into a kind of chant. I divided the class into groups, one group to a part, and we merrily repeated the chant over and over again varying the speed, timbre (from deep and broad to high and light), volume, and pitch to emphasize the sound quality of each word. I had their complete attention until the district manager, who had been touring the school, happened to walk in. I thought I would be fired on the spot and was ready to flee but fortunately he liked the whole idea after I explained what was happening. None of the students ever cursed at me again. The shock value was gone: Their words had become meaningless sounds used in a musical way. The students discovered I was able to curse just like them, even if I wasn't from their part of town. In fact, the rest of the year was totally enjoyable and productive. Instead of ignoring me they all wanted my constant attention, expressed wonderful creativity and did, after all, end up learning through the arts. Then there was the time I taught music as a visiting artist at ASCEND (an Arts-Integrated Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound) elementary school in Oakland, CA. One of the fourth grade classes I was assigned to also had a student with behavior problems. He didn't curse but was disruptive, called constant attention to himself, couldn't sit still, and more often than not was sent out of class for short periods of time to work on his assignments in the hallway or an empty room. If it was my class I probably would have done something like that, too, if one student was interfering with my teaching day after day. But as a visitor who spent very little time with the students I was able to see a different side of him. When I was carrying musical instruments back and forth, he offered to help. When I asked for a volunteer to lead an activity, his hand went up immediately. In contrast to Gertrude Stein's “there is no there there,” there was something there in Oakland: a boy with energy, enthusiasm, and needs that didn't quite fit into a traditional classroom setting. Disruptive, yes. But if I needed someone to conduct a curse-free chant composed by his classmates he was right there, ready to go. When the residency was over I visited the school one last time to say good bye. I especially wanted to say something to that disruptive student. He had been in trouble again and wasn't in class but I found him in the hallway, scowling as usual. I told him even though he had to learn to control himself and work with others he had terrific energy, was very helpful and careful when carrying the instruments, and always ready to try something new. I was sure he was going to do great things in the future. For a moment he seemed embarrassed. Then his face lit up and he smiled from ear to ear. A big, broad, beautiful smile. He was told he had value. And I'm not sure anyone had ever said that to him before. Header image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Taken at the Santa Fe Ranch, Nogales, Arizona.

As reclusive and protective of his identity as Owsley “Bear” Stanley had been, one can’t manufacture the purest LSD on the planet and personally turn on half of the state of California and parts of Nevada and remain unknown. Stanley’s lab in Berkeley was raided in 1966 and he was arrested. The police confiscated his stash of LSD, thinking it was methedrine, and also corralled all of his lab equipment. Stanley hired an attorney and because LSD was not illegal he was released. (My favorite part of his story.) On his release Owsley sued and got back all his lab equipment. But by December 1967 LSD had become illegal in California, so there was a new raid on his lab in Orinda, just north of San Jose. A headline in the San Francisco Chronicle, “LSD Millionaire Arrested,” prompted the Dead to write tongue-in-cheek a song titled “Alice D. Millionaire.” This pretty forgettable little ditty (bring on the e-mails Deadheads) was performed a few times and appeared on a reissue of the Dead’s first album. OK, make up your own mind. https://youtu.be/cQybXHI2W-A Best part is Pigpen on vocals. Before meeting the Dead, Stanley was already experimenting with sound systems. He had a 1900-square-foot living room in which he put together a sound system most audiophiles of the time could barely imagine. Featuring a pair of Altec Lansing Voice of the Theatre cabinets each the size of a washing machine, the cabs had a 15-inch woofer, a 4-inch midrange driver and a horn mounted on top. He ran his sound signal through a McIntosh MC240 40 watt-per-channel amplifier. Stanley was a perfectionist so this must have been killer. The gear he had amassed included tape decks and great microphones. By the time the Grateful Dead began living in the Berkeley cottage withStanley he had figured out the use of tape loops, a technique invented by Les Paul, and the band began using them to get songs going on tape then replaying the loops and improvising over them. Stanley and Tim Scully began experimenting with the band’s guitar sound by installing a transformer connected by low impedance cables to clean up the sound. Because the power provided by most venues was so unreliable (it’s better but still not perfect today) they acquired transformers so large they required sledding to get them into gigs. In the last column we were talking about Stanley damaging his right middle ear in a swimming accident. The damage was severe enough to cause real problems with any adult but certainly would not be an asset to a sound man. However, Owsley Stanley was no ordinary adult. As he would say later, “Both ears have an entirely different character. All the highs come in my left ear, which is connected to the right brain, where most art and creativity come from so I’ve been developing my right brain since I was 19.” He developed an approach to his hearing that deepened his art. Because he had to overcome the fact that pan pots – controls on a mixing console that move a sound from left to right in the stereo field – didn’t move the sound for him, he never put a single source into both channels. His hearing combined with his genius led to using innovative sound techniques, including doubling the stage microphones and wiring them out of phase with each other to cancel the feedback coming from the huge PA behind the mics. In early 1966 the Dead moved to Los Angeles, ostensibly to follow the Merry Pranksters, and Stanley not only funded the trip but rented the three story house on West Adams in Watts where the band lived and rehearsed. He also bought all the food. Since Stanley was paying all the bills he felt he could make the rules. He had a strict diet of steak, eggs, and milk. Since he was buying the food so did everyone else. Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann’s wife had to fight Stanley to get oatmeal into the house for their daughter. Kreutzmann said of this encounter, “Owsley was as stubborn as red wine on a white carpet.” Stanley also insisted the band rehearse constantly, believing they had to break out of the “Acid Test” movement where they made no money. During this period Stanley enlisted Rock Scully to be the band’s manager. Scully was a promoter and Owsley understood that one of the promoter’s roles was to get a band for as little money as possible so the promoter made money. Stanley convinced Scully that he could make more money as a manager and thus put him in a role where he had to get the Grateful Dead the most money possible. Methinks that worked. From a rare interview, ironically in the San Francisco Chronicle in July 2007: “Bear has always lived in a quite particular world. ‘He can be very anal retentive, on a certain level, on a genius level,’ says Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane. ‘I've seen him send his eggs back three times at Howard Johnson's.’ His all-meat diet is a well-known example. When he was younger, Bear read about the Eskimos eating only fish and meat and became convinced that humans are meant to be exclusively carnivorous. The members of the Grateful Dead remember living with Bear for several weeks in Los Angeles, where the refrigerator contained only bottles of milk and a slab of steak, meat they fried and ate straight out of the pan. His heart attack several years ago had nothing to do with his strict regimen, according to Bear, but more likely the result of some poisonous broccoli his mother made him eat as a youth.” I hear that. Poisonous indeed! Our mothers may have belonged to the same club because as a child I was a victim of similar abuse. The LA experiment lasted only six weeks and the band moved back to San Francisco into a house rented by Melissa Cargill and Phil Lesh’s girlfriend. Stanley moved back into his cottage in Berkeley. Whether they were chased out of town or the band couldn’t stand the living arrangements, the truth is the band and Owsley Stanley never shared a roof again. Stanley continued as the Dead’s sound man as the band began gaining in popularity. During performances Stanley would dance onto the stage doing what the band called “The Bear Dance.” Stanley liked being a part of the band and liked to remind the band of his dance training. That worked fine, but apparently not the new sound equipment Stanley purchased. He had sold his Voice of the Theatre boxes and bought bigger and even heavier gear. The Grateful Dead hated it since it took five hours (obviously these were the pre-roadie days) loading in and another five loading out. There was a lot of experimenting going on and as the band began getting more important gigs the sound became more critical and the resulting screaming matches proved too much for all. By Labor Day 1966 Stanley had worked his last gig as the Dead’s sound man. As part of the split Stanley agreed to buy the band standard off-the-shelf amps and he kept the system he’d bought for them. It would take some time and some reflection but the Dead and company would come to realize the debt they owed Owsley Stanley. He had funded their escapades and brought to them a sense of sound quality that would be a mainstay of the band’s persona. Stanley instilled in them a rehearsal regimen that would be critical to their stage success. He had hired their manager and made the band listen to the live tapes he had made of their performances to hone their craft. Plus he fed them steak. Come on. Owsley Stanley’s interest in the Grateful Dead helped make them who they were. Next: The Bear Part Three…Prison and the Wall of Sound Wall of Sound image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Mary Ann Mayer.

First Phone Call: “Let me speak to Mary.” “I’m sorry, wrong number.” I replied. The phone rings again. An agitated voice speaks.“Let me speak to Mary. I know she is there.” "There is no Mary here. You must have the wrong number,” I say. A third time. “I know you are holding her in the basement. Let her speak to me.” “For the third time I am telling you, THERE IS NO MARY HERE!” It was a Saturday night one winter and we were sitting around the living room reading and talking when about an hour after the phone calls, there was a knock on the door. Parked in front of my house were five patrol cars, two SUVs and an ambulance. I counted about 12 cops plus two detectives. One of them spoke. “We have had a report that you have kidnapped a woman and are holding her, tied up, in the basement.” Great Neck, where I live, is a small town and not does not have much crime. Until that moment, I didn’t even know the town possessed five police cars, let alone had 12 cops. But there they were, bathed in flashing blue light. “Can we come in?” This was more of a command than a suggestion. “I guess so.” I said with more than an ounce of trepidation. And all 14 of them entered. I presumed that this was to do with the phone calls and started to explain when, “Can we look around?” said the top cop. “Sure.” I replied and some of the cops went upstairs and the rest, following me, descended to the basement. To my great relief, Mary was nowhere to be found and we all ascended back up to the living room. They explained that they had received a phone call from the Freeport police about 20 miles away. A person called them claiming that his girlfriend had been kidnapped and was being held against her will. She had managed to get a message to him – with my phone number. Thus, the calls etc. Apologies accepted, this phalanx of cops left when my son, seeing all the commotion, walked in. “Good evening officer O’Brian. Good evening officer Brown. Good evening officer Pulaski…” In a chorus they replied, “Hello Ilan, how are you…?” “How on earth do you all know each other?” I asked, startled. “Well,” answered O’Brian, “officers in the precinct have picked up your son and his friends repeatedly for skateboarding at the train station.” Second Phone Call: “I would never let my kids stay home alone on New Year’s Eve.” We had been invited to a friend’s house to celebrate the arrival of yet another New Year. It was a jolly evening with lots of lively discussion when one of my fellow guests mentioned how untrustworthy her teenage kids were and that she would never leave them unattended. “On the contrary, “I interjected. “My 15-year-old daughter Tess is having a few friends up and I trust her implicitly.” At 11 pm, my phone rang. “Hello?” “Yes officer, of course officer, thank you, officer.” Admitting the obvious, “That was the police,” I said. The precinct answered a neighbor’s complaint about a large loud party. There had been more than a hundred kids at the house (not all invited, so my daughter said). As the squad cars rolled up, sirens blaring, people were darting through doors, down windows, out from behind fences, through shrubs into the night. All was quiet now; the cops just wanted me to know. The smirks on the faces around the table said it all. Header image courtesy of Pixabay.com/Gerd Altmann.

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum began as an idea, became a building, and is now an argument. There was only the idea, and it seemed a good one, when the first Rock Hall class was inducted in 1986. Requiring 25 years to have passed since their first recording, the debut class was the Pantheon itself: Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, James Brown, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, and the Everly Brothers. The bluesman Robert Johnson, primordial country star Jimmie Rodgers, and boogie-woogie pianist Jimmy Yancey were enshrined as early influencers. Three non-performers: music executives and producers John Hammond and Sam Phillips, and disc jockey Alan Freed, often credited with popularizing the term “rock and roll,” were recipients of the Ahmet Ertegun Award, named for the longtime Atlantic Records founder, and Rock Hall co-founder who wielded tremendous influence on the selections until his death in 2006 at age 84. I attended that first ceremony, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. (And committed the fashion faux pas of wearing cowboy boots with a rented tux.) While other living artists and VIPs were buffeted by entourages, I saw Chuck Berry sitting alone, taking things in, at the periphery of the room during the pre-show cocktail hour. I approached him cautiously, notebook in hand, and said, “Mr. Berry, when you were writing and recording “Johnny B. Goode” and “Rock and Roll Music” and “Roll Over Beethoven,” did you ever imagine that one day you and those songs would be honored in something called ‘The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’”? Berry stared at me, squinted his eyes, and said: “I have no imagination.” Ever since, I have wondered what he meant by that. Once Cleveland was selected as the host city for the hall, thanks to its affiliation with DJ Alan Freed and generous offers from the government and business community, the building itself was first class. The architect I.M. Pei, renowned designer of the Louvre Pyramid in Paris, the Bank of China Building in Hong Kong and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., created another pyramid, with a singular modern look for the Rock Hall that juts out onto Lake Erie. Whether or not you like Pei’s distinctive architectural vision, there is no questioning the enormity of the economic impact the Rock Hall has had on the economy of Cleveland and the rest of Northeast Ohio. Local entities invested $92 million, according a study written about by the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Cleveland.com website. Annual revenue for the city and region is $199 million. https://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/2018/03/rock_roll_hall_of_fame_study_r.html Beyond the spectacular return on investment, the Rock Hall itself is the anchor for a tourist economy that might not exist without it. The streets around the downtown shoreline were jammed with traffic and pedestrians, parking lots overflowing, the plaza outside the hall mobbed on the Sunday I visited with my wife in July 2019. (A Tall Ships Festival on the downtown lakefront was happening the same day.) We were in Ohio because my daughter was going to be marrying a young man from Cleveland. We met a lot of people that weekend, from clergy to her fiancé's many relatives, and every person asked: “Have you been to the Rock Hall yet?” Of course, in my line of work, that would be an obvious question, but the pride and enthusiasm were so infectious that it would have been doubly perverse to not go. It was an enjoyable afternoon. Despite the crowds, the hall is vast, so one could always retreat from the exhibition area. Some complain that rock and roll’s rebellious energy could and perhaps should never be captured in a vitrine redolent of high culture, but really: That game has been over for a long time. The Velvet Underground Experience had a successful three-month in 2018 as a kind of pop-up museum in Greenwich Village; Seattle’s Experience Music Project has morphed into the Museum of Popular Culture (MoPop) and presents exhibitions on Nirvana and Pearl Jam; a special exhibition on the Ramones in 2016 drew record crowds to the Queens Museum of Art, the emblematic punk band’s native New York borough. The Rock Hall has some nice things to look at: John Lennon’s 1965 Epiphone guitar; Prince’s ruffle-rich concert outfits, and some of his handwritten lyrics to a song called “Purple Haze/Jesus Saves.” I found fascinating documents such as the standard AFTRA performance contract between Jefferson Airplane and Dick Clark Productions, and a concert poster from 1951 featuring Jackie Brenston of “Rocket 88” fame performing with Ike Turner’s Band at a July 4 show at the American Legion Hall in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The main difficulty in the exhibition area is audio. I’m not as remotely choosy about sound reproduction as many readers of this probably are. But on a crowded weekend day and the close proximity of exhibits representing different artists, there are pockets of aural chaos, in which so many different kinds of music bleed into one another that it’s difficult to know what you are listening to. Prolonged exposure can be irritating and tiring. Better directionality and more space between the exhibits would help. But the gift shop is quite nice, and features a CD store so rich in musical rarities that the collector could easily patch numerous holes in ones collection at fair retail prices. I couldn’t think of anything particular that I needed. My wife bought a T-shirt; I bought a lined spiral notebook made with all recycled ingredients. But nearly 35 years later, the Rock Hall as an idea has become a repository for argument and controversy. Just consider the numbers: By one count, the Rock Hall has 719 inductees. By contrast, the stringent Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., which opened in 1939, has 333 members. The Rock Hall adds members like a hungry pothead on a Twinkies binge adds weight. Cooperstown has its own controversies, but no one can accuse it of promiscuously padding its roster. Every year brings its own share of sense and nonsense to the Rock Hall. One is that the definition of rock has become so as to be meaningless. And I’m not talking about rap or hip-hop, at its beginnings and at best fueled by an energy not unlike that of rock’s early days. I am in favor of Run-DMC and Public Enemy being in the rock hall for that reason, and for similar reasons see no reason to keep out more recent rebel poets such as Tupac Shakur and this year’s entrant, The Notorious B.I.G. I’m speaking more to the genre blur that occurs because the Rock Hall has a terrible optics problem due to its dearth of women. It’s hard to argue that women aren’t underrepresented. The scholar and critic Evelyn McDonnell, a professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, did some math and in an op-ed in Billboard in November 2019. https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/8543758/rock-roll-hall-fame-gender-racial-diversity-guest-opinion-evelyn-mcdonnell McDonnell determined that 7.7 per cent of individuals in the Rock Hall are women. She has written and lobbied hard for the Rock Hall to be more inclusive, and the TV show The View took up the topic. McDonnell quotes from that show: "What's the definition of rock and roll?" asked Sunny Hostin. "There could be a lot more women if we expand the definition." "There's a whole slew of people who are not considered rock and roll," Whoopi Goldberg said, urging everyone to start writing letters to the Hall. Well, yeah. That does appear to be a problem. It seems that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has already expanded the eternal of “what is rock and roll?” beyond the breaking point. Example: This year’s induction of Whitney Houston. The gifted singer was many things: the dominant pop and R&B singer of her era, one of the most gifted vocalists of any era, and one of the best-selling artists of all time. But when she was alive, if you asked had Whitney Houston if she was a rock and roll singer, she probably would have said no. I would have loved to hear her sing more upbeat songs; had she lived and repaired the damage she suffered to her magnificent instrument in her final years, I would have loved to hear her do an album, or albums, of gospel, blues and R&B that would have reflected her versatility. Is her monumental version of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” in any way a rock performance? Can you, and would you want to, stretch the definition that far? McDonnell, a longtime friend of mine, thinks that Dolly Parton deserves inclusion in the Rock Hall, and in that, I agree with her. I also agree that it’s absurd that singer-songwriter Carole King is in the hall as a songwriter, with her Brill Building partner and ex-husband Gerry Goffin, but not as a performer. Tapestry may be soft rock, but it reflected its time and style as both a popular and critical success. Earlier this month, NPR music critic Ann Powers, McDonnell’s co-editor on the anthology Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Pop, and Rap, named 41 women who would help redress the Rock Hall’s gender balance. Some make sense to me: Connie Francis, Lucinda Williams, Cyndi Lauper, Pat Benatar, Kate Bush, Sleater-Kinney Band, Emmylou Harris. I’d even go for Fanny, the first all woman band signed to a major label, even though Powers’ rationalization seems absurd: “Fanny captured the attention of important men like the Beatles and David Bowie, but its influence on these titans is rarely acknowledged.” Fanny influenced the Beatles and Bowie? Powers makes similar leaps of implausibility with Roberta Flack: “Her work in the 1970s and 1980s is as adventurous as Joni Mitchell’s and arguably as influential as Stevie Wonder’s.” Arguably not, I’d say. And how about saying of Carly Simon, “as witty a social commentator as Randy Newman.” Powers’ list also includes the cocktail cool of Julie London, African artist Miriam Makeba, bossa nova's Astrud Gilberto, folk singer Buffy Saint Marie, Karen Carpenter, and Barbra Streisand. The problem is that if you are going to stretch the definition of rock that far to accommodate women, you’re also going to have to include Harry Belafonte (who has helped induct both Public Enemy and Pete Seeger), Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mathis, Sergio Mendes, Stan Getz, João Gilberto, maybe Chet Baker...where do you stop? In 2018 Nina Simone was inducted into the Rock Hall, which may have bewildered this most passionate and versatile pianist, singer, and composer. I adore Nina Simone, but I don’t think she would identify in any way with the Rock Hall. Some people I know on social media disagreed, citing the Simone “stance” as a rock and roll stance. Nina Simone didn’t have a stance. She wasn’t acting onstage with that hard-edged sense of rebellion that some people idealize as unique to rock music. Nina Simone’s rage wasn’t an act: she was enraged and embittered by segregation, racism, unequal treatment, and all of the other sins of America since its founding. Her genius was in the way that rage permeated her music, which was sometimes jazz, sometimes blues, but always remained distinctly in a category of its own. McDonnell’s Billboard essay ended with a plea that the board and management structure of the Rock Hall “represent the demographics of the human race, not of the music industry.” But rock and roll is not about the whole human race; it represents a microscopic splinter of human accomplishment, and one that some of us have spent our lives taking seriously. But if you take any museum too seriously, it is easy to forget about what pleasure and value the art itself offers. Header image of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/MusikAnimal.

It’s come at last, after months of industry hype: the 250^th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth year. As you might imagine, I could devote this column to new Beethoven recordings for the rest of 2020 and still not cover all of them. So, I’ve decided to represent the maestro through his piano concertos; even so, I only have room here to discuss half of what’s come out in the past 12 months, and more is surely on the way. For those of you under the impression that Beethoven wrote five piano concertos, I come bearing gifts: two more concertos! Well, they’re incomplete, but there’s a lot to go on. Do they match the magnificence of the five canonical works? No. But even second-tier Beethoven is well worth a listen. Concerto No. 0 (also called WoO 4, a German abbreviation for “work without an opus number”) exists as a manuscript of the piano part with Beethoven’s own annotations on how he would orchestrate it. One recent attempt to reconstruct it is by Japanese pianist Mari Kodama and conductor Kent Nagano, performing with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester on the Berlin Classics/Edel label. The CD set includes Concertos 0-5 plus the Eroica Variations and the Triple Concerto, for which Kodama is joined by violinist Kolja Blacher and cellist Johannes Moser. As you can hear from Kodama’s recording of the opening Allegro Moderato, the Concerto No. 0 in E-flat major is a derivative work, although skillfully crafted. But when you consider that Beethoven was 14 years old and an ardent fan of Haydn and Mozart when he wrote it, this is astonishingly well done! httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1MainM2gJw&list=RDp1MainM2gJw&start_radio=1 Concerto No. 3 in C minor is a more mature work and a thing of intense beauty. Kodama shows that she has a grasp of its emotional complexity. Listen to this breathless rendering of the second movement, marked Largo: httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Em6Eop8LYT8&list=PLQt6ev5eI6q885PDuyu4I-LjdumQWqgaE&index=34 Despite the almost-existence of Concerto No. 0, not every pianist is willing to include it in the set. Note the title of Jan Lisiecki’s new 3-disc collection on Deutsche Grammophon: Beethoven: The Complete Piano Concertos. Yet it only includes the standard No. 1-5, with Tomo Keller conducting the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. The performance was recorded live at Konzerthaus Berlin in 2018 and released the following year. Lisiecki’s playing can be described with one word: powerful. While it can be soul-stirring, occasionally the power drowns out the grace so needed for the Classical and early Romantic periods. That might be an aspect of youth; at only 24, Lisiecki has the potential to grow in dramatic sophistication. The Allegro con brio first movement of Concerto No. 3 lives up to its name (brio means vigor). There’s no question that Lisiecki is a virtuoso, and the orchestra sounds rich yet precise. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MX5XENd0SeM In the largo from the Third Concerto, Lisiecki’s admirable rhythmic patience is not always compensation for the weight of his playing. There are some beautiful passages, though, especially when Lisiecki is shaping Beethoven’s winding 16^th-note melodies over the smooth sea of orchestral writing. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwh_Sv3hEE0 I’m not sure Beethoven would love this next example. Like all creative artists, composers often start works and then, for any of a thousand reasons, stop working on them and move on to something else. That’s what happened with Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 6 in D Major; calling it “incomplete” is an understatement. In around 1815, Beethoven wrote 70 pages’ worth of sketches for the first movement and orchestrated about half of its exposition. Then he put it in a drawer, where it remained for the rest of his life. But somebody found it. Sorry, Ludwig. Musicologists Nicholas Cook and Hermann Dechant completed an orchestration of the movement in 1987, and it has at last been recorded, on Oehms Classics, by Sophie Mayuko-Vetter. Peter Ruzicka conducts the Hamburg Symphony. A sign that this is a later work is the lack of orchestral theme or ritornello at the start. And the piano comes in with a swirl of filigree rather than a true melody. Even as the orchestra settles into a theme, it seems to wander without Beethoven’s clear sense of purpose. To their credit, both Mayuko-Vetter and Ruzicka work hard to give this movement a shape and goal, and the pianist’s light touch is a delight. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inIs3WE-kok Mayuko-Vetter’s playing of the Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-Flat Major is clearly phrased and confident. Ruzicka and the orchestra support her with stately finesse. Here’s the middle-movement Adagio, performed with longing and a bit too much sustain pedal for my taste. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjbyi0XMHgY Also included on this CD is the Concerto No. 0, which Mayuko-Vetter performs on a fortepiano made in 1806 by British builder John Broadwood. While that period-instrument choice gives the solo part an authentic timbre, the overall recording is not especially period-appropriate. Hamburg’s orchestral sound lacks the brightness and elegance of that Nagano and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester recording mentioned above. Instead, Ruzicka goes for a heavier tone and thicker phrasing, more like what you’d expect for late Beethoven, not the Mozartian studies of a nerdy teen. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOEKOMvfLW4 Last and far from least, there’s a spectacular new recording on Berlin Philharmonic Media by the great Mitsuko Uchida of Concertos 1-5 with the Berlin Philharmonic under Simon Rattle. You can listen to the whole album on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4iLhGksq5xF6gKVuIeARFy Without even mentioning Uchida, this recording is a gem. That velvety Berlin Phil sound! The opening second-movement statement of Concerto No. 5 (Emperor) is like gazing calmly into Beethoven’s soul. Then in comes Uchida, dropping a gentle rainfall of notes over the orchestra’s lush forest floor. Exquisite. And full credit to Beethoven, of course, whose greatness as a melodist we frankly take for granted after all this time. https://open.spotify.com/track/5KLXBrAC16lWoC66kxU7hf To end on a fiery note, here’s Uchida playing the Rondo: Vivace-Presto conclusion of Concerto No. 4. The orchestral writing is almost as virtuosic as that for the pianist, but every musician plays with a seeming ease that allows Rattle to maintain a dancing forward motion. https://open.spotify.com/track/2TzFRAz3aGXAAW3xi4conk After listening to all these recordings and more besides, one thing is clear: Ol’ Ludwig is on track for another 250 years of enthusiastic attention. What composer could wish for a greater legacy? Happy birthday, Beethoven!

Hard to believe, but it was 20 years ago when three brothers and a cousin from the Followill family of Oklahoma and Tennessee formed a band and named it Kings of Leon (KoL), in honor of their grandpa. They hit the music scene as one of the most original and talented new bands of their time, but the passing decades have seen them diminish to a shadow of their former selves. The brothers grew up mostly on the road with their dad, who was a traveling preacher. When as young men they settled outside Nashville, their cousin Matthew joined them, and they started the band. Caleb is on lead vocals and rhythm guitar, Jared on keyboard and bass, and Nathan on drums. Matthew plays lead guitar, and they all pitch in on backing vocals. KoL has produced some of the most interesting and complex rhythm tracks in 21^st-century rock. And this in an era when fewer and fewer music stars are even able to play an instrument, let alone sing live without digital help. I’m not alone in being impressed. Of the seven albums they’ve made, all of them for RCA, two peaked at No. 3 on the US charts, and the rest went to No. 1. Yet they really haven’t had many hit singles. That’s the sign of a solid fanbase, always willing to buy the album. Based on their first recording, Youth & Young Manhood (2003), it’s no surprise that the quartet started out hoping to play country music. But what they came up with instead was a quirky blend of traditional country blues with a large helping of Southern rock. The raw sound of “Dusty,” with fingers audibly scraping along guitar necks, is a good example of their early work. Caleb makes his vocal delivery match the lonesome lope of the instruments, while the metrical solidity of the accompaniment gives him the freedom to stretch the phrasing of the lyrics. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl_2FDoWmwo A more melodic use of guitars can be heard in “Talihina Sky,” released as a hidden track after the closing song, “Holy Roller Novocain,” on that first CD. This is one of their aching, wistful songs that has a modal sound to it, moving between relative major and minor keys. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCG8bb1bOCU The second album was Aha Shake Heartbreak (2005), featuring a grittier sound, with aspects of garage rock mixing into the Southern angle now. This record was produced live in the studio, without overdubbing, under the watchful eye of British producer Ethan Johns. The haunting “Day Old Blues” starts in traditional indie singer-songwriter style – just Caleb’s voice and acoustic guitar. But at 1:17, the rhythm section comes in and Caleb switches to his distinctive falsetto/yodel voice, a trait that keeps him tied to his Americana roots. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kStzzS6n3dA Jared lays down a hard-driving bass line at the opening of “Razz.” There’s not so much a melody as a frantic blues-rock chant over the chord changes. Matthew gets to show his stuff in a short solo. The energy is reminiscent of ZZ Top. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6FOJ1HCgBM Because of the Times (2007) was the band’s first No. 1 album, yielding the hit single “On Call.” There are a lot of unusual songs on this record, but maybe the most curious and intriguing is “Ragoo” for its distinctive lead guitar riff and off-beat accents in the rhythm guitar, as the drums snake around both all the while. This rather mystifying song seems to deal with the exuberance of youth, the impotent wisdom of aging, and, at one point, possibly the Civil War: “My pawpaw's slave had to go and fight the war/He beat them all, then he took them all to court.” Nobody can accuse this band of tin-type song lyrics. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsvK40NVwI0 KoL’s professional life changed after Because of the Times thanks to the relentless demands of fame. They were, for a moment, the biggest band in the world. The 2008 album Only by the Night shows unfortunate signs of a more standardized sound. Under what was doubtless pressure from RCA, managers, newer fans, and their own ambition, KoL became less daring and odd. The album’s biggest single was “Use Somebody,” which won a Grammy, as did the song “Sex on Fire.” The non-single track “Cold Desert” might have a radio-friendly pop glaze drizzled over its country mournfulness, but it’s still a solidly built song. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=797eGnbSopc Come Around Sundown (2010) starts ironically with “The End,” a nod to post-punk contemplation (The Cure, for example) built from a series of contrasting textures. And the harmonic choices are characteristically strange. The only chords used are B major, C# major, and D# minor. The dominant or “V” chord you’d expect at a cadence (F# major) is nowhere to be found. Very unusual in general, but not for these guys. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4B-t-WDRuXQ By this point, there were issues with substance abuse to contend with, not to mention the stress of the brothers having to be constantly together instead of leading individual lives. Plus, they had enjoyed being a niche band, a cult favorite, for the first few years, and now they were just plain rock stars. Critics started complaining about the change in the band. Mechanical Bull (2013) sold well, but the press called it “woeful.” Reaction was widely divided for the 2016 album WALLS (standing for “We Are Like Love Songs”). Some hailed it as a return to the sound of their earlier days, while others labeled it “forgettable.” It went to the top of the charts anyway. The song “Conversation Piece” contradicts the theory that this album is somehow a return to KoL’s past. This is a pleasantly poignant number with a heavy country-pop influence, tonal and consonant to a degree that used to be unthinkable for this band. The approach to production is also like that of a whole different group, with a dense sea of sound enveloping everything. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXN2mpShsCQ So, are KoL still active? Well, they ignored their 20^th anniversary, which is not a promising sign. Currently only a handful of tour dates appear on their website, and there seems to be no new album in the pipeline. It’s been over three years since the last one. A review of one of their 2018 shows described the lackluster performance as “proof that both the world and the band have checked out for good.” They haven’t so much quit as fizzled away. Header image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/https://www.flickr.com/people/69880995@N04.

When did Beethoven become Beethoven? That is, when did he decisively put aside student exercises and astonish listeners with something quite different? A lot of us think we know the answer: In 1804, with Symphony No. 3, the “Eroica.” And that’s not wrong. The third symphony, longer, grander, altogether more powerful than any earlier orchestral work, made a splash that still resonates. But that wasn’t the only moment Beethoven took on a new, more personal identity as a musician. It wasn’t even the only 1804 moment. That same year he wrote two keyboard sonatas, the first of which, Op. 53, is known as the “Waldstein,” dedicated to a longtime friend and patron. And it’s a wild ride: (Our first-movement clips come from Ronald Brautigam, playing a Paul McNulty fortepiano “after Conrad Graf c.1819.” BIS-SACD-1573, now available in a budget-priced "complete" box.) Rhythm dominates the first movement. The hushed dynamic of the opening only concentrates its throbbing energy. We feel that energy more intensely because there’s nothing else to feel. No counterpoint, no provocative mix of textures. No theme, really. Just a three-note ascending scale, answered by a much quicker three-note descending scale, immediately capped by an even quicker five-note descending scale. (Which kinda, ya know, combines those two three-note motives?) Lather, rinse, repeat, down a step; push to a quick climax. Begin again. Soon Beethoven brings in a second, contrasting theme area, a move right out of the Official Sonata Rulebook: This new theme is marked dolce e molto legato and all, but there’s a catch: although the notes are longer, the tempo stays the same. In a good performance, you’ll keep feeling that insistent pulse. Also, this is not a new theme! It’s just the five-note descending scale tricked out in longer note values. That’s typical of #RealBeethoven. As we know from the “Eroica,” #RealBeethoven grossly expands the development and coda sections of his sonata-form first movements, which also happens in the “Waldstein.” This creates an infinitely more dramatic narrative, full of cliffhangers and wrong turns, letting deceptively simple materials deliver some surprising wallops. Beethoven originally wrote a different slow movement for the “Waldstein,” but he thought better of that, and separated it out as the Andante favori, WoO 57. Good move: it had more conventional features than the other two “Waldstein” movements, so it didn’t really fit. In its place the composer created a quasi-operatic Introduzione, ruminative and searching: (That clip is from Paul Lewis, whose Beethoven Complete Piano Sonatas, Piano Concertos & Diabelli Variations from Harmonia Mundi is a complete steal. Strongly recommended.) The rondo finale begins with a welcome sense that calmer seas—C-major seas, taken at moderate speed—lie ahead. But the intervening episodes provide plenty of choppy water. Toward the end Beethoven abandons his careful Allegretto for a dazzling Prestissimo that will knock your socks off, more than justifying this movement’s ten-minute length. Here is the complete sonata, performed by one of my favorite artists in this repertoire, Alfred Brendel. (To skip directly to the rondo, head for 15:10, as indicated in the Comments section. Ignore the links given by the poster; they’re just timings.) httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwdiH9MQZHs When I was casting around for modern piano works to match up with the “Waldstein,” I quickly discovered just how special Beethoven’s 1804 sonata is. Few 20th- or 21st-century works combine barely suppressed intensity with absolute motivic (melodic) control and outbursts of manic joy. More often, what you get are rhythmically driven sonata finales in which motivic control is “achieved” by simpler means: (That’s Alexander Melnikov finishing off Prokofiev 7 for Harmonia Mundi; my recommendation of his dazzling set of Prokofiev Sonatas still stands.) Or you may encounter ostensibly manic movements that want to give the impression of total chaos, but are in fact tightly organized. Here is György Ligeti’s “Désordre”: (And that’s from Yuja Wang’s phenomenal Berlin Recital, which I’ve probably mentioned here before. It’s an electrifying survey of pianistic riches: Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, and Scriabin in addition to Ligeti.) For comparisons’ sake I finally settled on selections from El Chan, an album of music created for and/or with Katia and Marielle Labèque, piano-playing sisters who know exactly what they’re up to by now—and they’re having the time of their lives doing it. What you may not know is that for years they’ve been promoting and collaborating with young bands and individual musicians: Katia was formerly married to guitarist John McLaughlin; she’s now involved with composer/singer/guitarist David Chalmin, featured here in a stunning quartet piece, Haven, by composer/guitarist Bryce Dessner, who wrote all the music on El Chan. Have a listen: httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Krv1A15wto (There’s also a live, shorter video, here.) Besides Haven, you’ll hear Dessner’s Concerto for Two Pianos, with conductor Matthias Pintscher and the Orchestre de Paris, and the title work, an enchanting set of vignettes that speak to the sisters’ continuing fascination with music and image, film, landscape, and folk tradition. They write: This album is dedicated with love and admiration to Alejandro González Iñárritu and his wife Maria Eladia Hagerman. Nestled in the canyons outside their hometown of San Miguel de Allende, “El Charco del Ingenio” is a pool of water which has been the source of popular legends for many centuries. . . . “El Chan” is its guardian spirit, a mythic being from the underworld who dwells in the mysterious waters and shows its terrible powers to those daring to approach. The pool changes colors throughout the year and is fed by a spring which is one of the last sources of natural water in the area. Let’s hear some of El Chan. First, “Four Winds”: httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOAXep1Y_FI “Mountain” rounds off the series: I thought I hadn’t heard much of Dessner’s music (I do have a promo copy of Sō Percussion’s Dessner disc), but I was wrong. I’ve seen The Revenant, for which Dessner composed music with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto. And I’ve probably stumbled upon Dessner in other collaborations, since—besides being one of the leaders of The National—he’s worked with nearly everyone else in the new-music universe. You can read about it here. So, what’s the biggest reason to link Bryce Dessner’s keyboard music with that of 1804 Beethoven? Simple: he is everywhere, and so is his imagination. What better tribute to Ludwig Van could possibly exist? httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=md_LSw5Hydk Next up: Beethoven Plus One will have another go at music and landscape, featuring a new recording of the “Pastoral” Symphony. Before that, however, we may wander over to LvB’s late piano works. Stay tuned.