The last random memoir was about when I purchased my first copy of Destroyer by Kiss. This one is a bit of a continuation.

Opening a new record was always a great experience. It was a treat for all of the senses and never the challenge or disappointment that opening a new CD can be today. By the time I purchased my copy of Destroyer, I had mastered the proper technique.

The procedure you follow to open a new album depends upon whether you’re right-handed or left-handed. Assume for our purposes that you’re left-handed like I am. Turn the album over so that you’re viewing the back cover. Grasp the top left corner firmly with your right thumb and forefinger. Now, slide your left thumbnail along the cellophane in the channel between the front and back of the album jacket. Most cellophane wrappers on record albums part after only a couple of up and down passes in this fashion. When the plastic has been split, you can get a better grip and remove it completely from around the record jacket. Some who imagine that they’ll be preserving the cover leave the cellophane intact except for the slit, which still allows the record to be removed. This preservation is a myth. Failure to remove the cellophane is a pretentious move that completely eviscerates the experience of opening a new album. The pretension is in the offender’s belief that his record jacket will remain pristine as everyone else’s becomes worn and faded from being stored and retrieved over the years between two other jackets in the record rack. In truth, the cellophane will tear irregularly and eventually wad against the cover at an inopportune time, creating unsightly gaps between the spines of the records in your storage rack. The cellophane preservation fallacy breaks down even sooner when dealing with a double album with a folding jacket.

The second most important stimulus I came to associate with a new Kiss record, aside from the sounds in its grooves, was the smell. The smell of a new Kiss record was one that I ranked on the high side of paradisiacal, competing with the smell of new Star Wars figures. As far as I can imagine, the smell of new Kiss records had something to do with the ink used to print the covers and sleeves. Though this is completely unconfirmed, in my mind that smell is associated with the black ink specifically. The first whiff of that smell was always the best, but it was strong enough to remain long into your possession of the record. That ink smell would linger in my nose as I played the record for the first time and stared at the cover art, listening hour after hour.

The best cover art, and this is something that has been said by many people but bears repeating anyway, created the perfect mood for the music you were hearing for the first time. This was especially true for Destroyer. CDs offer very little in the way of graphic art. CD art is often too small to appreciate in a tangible way like an album jacket. Even with larger CD insert designs, the art is obliterated by those unsightly folds across the center of the flimsy paper. Some of the print on CD inserts actually holds a permanent finger print. What a mess. Having little or no access to video footage, what could’ve been better than a picture of your favorite band, huge in your five-year-old hands, suitable for framing? Not much by my estimation.

The Magnavox

The only place for me to play records in my house was in the dining room, where my parents kept their Magnavox console stereo system. It was one of those self-contained jobs that looked more like an oversized sideboard or serving piece than a piece of hi-fi equipment. It housed an AM/FM radio and a turntable with jacks in the back for connecting tape recorders, if you were so inclined and were of sufficient means to own one. They were probably designed for a reel-to-reel that ran quarter inch tape at 71/2 inches per second. We never had one of those.

Across the top of the enclosure were two sliding panels. (Unlike the picture I found, they all dark pine.) One revealed the turntable and radio tuner, and the other, a compartment which was supposed to be for a tape machine lying down. Next to the tape machine compartment was a slot that held a stack of LPs.

The glass radio tuner scale pointed straight up at the ceiling. You could spin the Tuner dial and the wiper would glide behind the glass telling you what frequency you were tuned to. The measure of radio quality to me in those days was whether or not the tuner would hold momentum when you gave it a spin. My little pocket radio required that you edge the tuner wheel along with your thumb, but this one had mass to it. It would continue spinning after you let go of the wheel.

In the front and sides of the stereo cabinet were speakers. Four of them, protected by a scratchy brown weave of grill cloth. The front grill cloths were layered like shutters. Why two speakers were mounted in the sides of the cabinet, pointed to the left and right was beyond me, but the two in the front, near the floor over the casters, always sounded the best to me. When you turned the beast on, the speakers would pop and the radio tuner pilot would glow to let you know that you were powered up.

So I’d mount a new LP on the record changer post and move the support arm into place, suspending the record over the turntable. When the time was right, I’d snap the spring-loaded twist switch to start the changer. Sweet anticipation would well up inside me as the tonearm went into its all too familiar series of mechanical sounds whose rhythm I could still tap out on the table today if called upon to describe the sound of our stereo starting. The motor would start and the record would drop onto the spinning platter. If the stars were aligned, the tonearm would come to rest on the edge of the record with a rumble and I’d wait for the first sound, wondering how loud it would be and what this amazing new record would be like.

~

Becoming a record freak as a little kid in the 70s, I was spoiled by good records. Every new album I managed to buy was potentially another force that would change my life permanently. I still use the same barometer for quality. In the years since I bought my first copy of Destroyer, the barometer has been activated for such albums as Born To Run, Something/Anything?, Innervisions, Minute By Minute, Houses of the Holy, Court and Spark and Music From Big Pink to name just a few. It happens more seldom now.

Last week, on two completely unrelated occasions, in two totally disparate situations, someone told me that they didn’t know what they would do without me. This gave me pause. How could it be that I would hear that twice in the same week?

The first time I heard this confession, it was coming from a man that I didn’t care for in the slightest. I don’t respect him at all. The second time, I was speaking to someone for whom I have the exact opposite feeling.

How is it that I managed to make the same impression on both of these people? With one, I struggle not to give in to my disdain for him on a regular basis. It’s all I can do not to give in to that negative energy that he so often inspires in me. With the other, I’ve made it a point to be the kind of supporter I would like to have myself. I do it not for what it gets me in return, but because I get good feeling doing my best for someone I respect and admire.

I did what I believed was the smartest thing to do in both situations. I didn’t let it go to my head. By that, I mean that I didn’t allow myself to be validated by the compliment. Just as it’s destructive to let negative comments affect you, it can be destructive to let the positive ones affect you. I appreciated being told that I was indispensible because of certain abilities that I have. I think it’s fine to be proud of skills that are hard-won. But you can’t let someone else define your value. People are talking about themselves, even when they’re talking about you. I was just doing what I do. It was those two other people who decided how to feel about it. I’ll have to remember this experience when the opposite happens and two people in the same week tell me that I suck. I know it will happen, but they won’t be talking about me.

Something else occurred to me as I considered this extraordinary coincidence. I’ve never told anyone that I didn’t know what I’d do without them. I don’t believe the condition has ever existed. The answer has always been that I’d simply do it myself.

I wonder which is the better way to live. Is it better to depend upon others or only on yourself? Have fewer dependable people shown up in my life because I didn’t welcome them? Perhaps as I give more of myself, more people will become indispensible to me. It might even be a good thing.

I’ve made it pretty clear that I’m a great admirer of Todd Rundgren and Utopia. I came across some great photographs on the Todd Rundgren Connection forum that I couldn’t help but mention here. These photos were taken by a user named Lys. I’d have linked to them, but you have to be registered on the forum to view it.

The photos to which I’m referring are of Todd Rundgren’s old house and property on Mink Hollow Road in Lake Hill, New York, which is two towns away from Woodstock and just outside of Bearsville, which was the home base for Albert Grossman’s entire operation. (Grossman managed Dylan, the Band and Todd, ran Bearsville Records, etc. Look him up…)

For those of us for whom music is religion, the act of making a pilgrimage to a location where a hero has lived or worked is quite commonplace. Though I don’t do those things anymore (I wrote a song about it called “Wasting Away” that will appear on my next record), these shots inspire my imagination. Though they included images of Todd’s house, what interested me most was the smaller building he used as the recording studio, which he called Utopia Sound.

I make my records at home too. When I’ve recorded something that truly moves me, my reaction is always the same. I play it back and just bask in the thrill that I’ve created something that transcends the little room that I’m in, that creates not only the emotional manifestation of the music’s intent, but also the illusion of a place that does not exist anywhere but in my own vision. When someone listens to my work, my hope is that they are immediately transported to that place too. In that is the elusive connection that a recording artist (and specifically one who produces his own records) longs to have with those who listen.

The phenomenon must be real. Why else would so many people think that their favorite musicians “belong” to them? Todd Rundgren fans are famous for that. They get protective of Todd and even suspicious of newly discovered fans, since Todd is so under the radar. From one perspective, they would like Todd to be more well known, but from another, they’re glad to have him all to themselves.

For me, listening is an active experience. It’s one of the best ways to learn how to produce records. I’ve spent countless hours listening to records on headphones, just scrutinizing every conceivable sound. How much ambience there, how much layering is too much, to double or not to double? What the hell was that sound?  I never get bored, even though I listen to the same albums over and over. There’s always something new to hear.

A bunch of my constant rotation albums were made in this building. That outrageous lead guitar throughout “Bat Out Of Hell” was recorded right here. I’ve lived those parts and gotten into that head space and learned the licks note for note. This place doesn’t look like what I saw in my mind. Somehow, I can imagine hearing Meat Loaf just howling “For Cryin’ Out Loud” inside these walls. You know you would have heard it outside from the vantage point of this photo.

Some of the records recorded in this building?

Meat Loaf – Bat Out Of Hell

Todd Rundgren – Hermit of Mink Hollow, Healing, The Ever Popular Tortured Artist Effect

Utopia – Ra, Oops! Wrong Planet, Adventures In Utopia, Deface The Music, Swing To The Right, Utopia, Oblivion

XTC – Skylarking

The Tubes – Love Bomb

~

It should be noted that despite all of the dreaminess I have associated with this place, Todd moved out because he and his old lady and some friends were tied up in the house and robbed at gunpoint in the 80s. So much for the artist’s life in bucolic New York State. Meat Loaf got married on this property and is now married to someone else. The house is vacant and the studio is occupied by exercise equipment.

Does magic wear off? Does it simply move on? Does it only glow long enough to be captured in the grooves of the records that affect us so profoundly? I can’t tell. I’m too damn close to it.