Chris Preston and New Aquarius Online

I had a peculiar thought last week. It occurred to me that I have been an adult for longer than I was ever a child. By child, I mean in the purely chronological and legal sense. I find more often now that I can use expressions like “20 years ago…” and be referring honestly to some bit of personal experience. I’ve begun to take more notice when my friends and acquaintances talk about “getting old.” This condition is still not something that I consciously claim. Perhaps it’s because my health is not failing and I still have all of this hair, but it might also be that I’ve yet to give up on my life and its untapped potentials. When I hear someone my age talking about “getting old,” I immediately leap, perhaps erroneously, to thinking how that person must be seeking affirmation, even forgiveness, for accepting his lot.

Far from accepting my lot, I’m loathe to think of any condition as my lot. Nor have I ever been one to state that I’m “getting old” while I shake my head ruefully about something that I perceive to be outside of my control. I don’t believe I’ve ever claimed that I was “getting too old” for anything. I’m not in denial, for surely enough, I’ve aged, but the expression has not leaked into my personal lexicon. It’s as alien to me as it would be to preface a sentence with “Back when I would take on rabid black bears three at a time…”

My attitude on having lived almost two score years is never more than whatever wisdom I’ve managed to accrue. I’m much more likely to say something like, “I’ve come too far” to be averted by some odd situation or “after everything I’ve learned” I can’t possibly be discouraged by this or that. I can ease most losses of my innocence by reminding myself that I still have no idea what a beer costs. When I consider symptoms of age that may affect me on a primal level, the most prominent is probably a waning sense of invincibility. Perhaps that’s part of the wisdom too.

I was considering writing about these contemplations last week. Then, by what could only be described as a cosmic tidal wave of the universal mind, I received a message through Facebook. It was a “friend request” from a woman I didn’t know. I went to the page and tried to find out what I could by looking at the tiny profile picture. Had I met this person on a gig or something? We shared a single friend, someone I went to grade school with. When I glanced down at her other friends, I saw her sister’s name. That name was very distinctive. I hadn’t heard it since her sister was born, when I was around 9 or 10. The requestor was using her married name. When I discovered who it was, I felt for a moment the same way you feel atop the largest hill in a roller coaster, when the car is creeping over the crest and you feel your weight shift.

This was a girl I knew back in the 70s. (I can actually say that. It refers to real experience.) She was literally the girl next door. (OK, she lived behind my house, but you get the idea.) She is the first friend I can remember whom I believe in some small way influenced the adult I became. I could speculate for volumes, but suffice it to say that she was the first girl of which I was constantly aware. We had not communicated for almost 30 years (another real number), because her family moved to California in the early 80s. Being from Jersey, I never had occasion to drop in.

In my mind for the last few decades, this woman has been nine years old. So as we wrote back and forth tossing about amusing memories, it was difficult not to visualize her as the little girl I remembered. That cloudy timeline suddenly had an endpoint, but the start of it was still quite vivid. I tried to think of defining events in my life that my old friend pre-dated. Nearly all of them. How incredible! All through the vagaries of my childhood experiences, into high school and beyond, hearing now from this person I knew for a comparatively short period of time brought me a rare joy. This overwhelming exercise in reflection might cause someone else to feel “old,” but I found instead that I experienced a kind of compression of time. More recent events seemed far more dusty and distant.

I hesitate to conclude that I had been considering my life in two phases, before and after my friend moved, but what was it that made my nine year old mind capable of preserving experiences with a sparkling newness when my twenty nine year old mind seemed more content to overstuff a very large closet? In the mounting wisdom of my age, I think I’ve arrived at the lesson, though it wouldn’t be accurate to call it a revelation: Nothing is mundane at nine, so maybe we get off cheap then, but with age, we have to make a greater effort to preserve what we want to remember and we must actively choose what we allow to shape us. The next time I sit back and contemplate my lifetime as a gestalt, maybe I won’t be so surprised.

I was so glad to hear that my old friend was doing well, and as I wrote to her mother days later, I knew her family was out there somewhere. I was happy to have been remembered fondly and as a “passionate” person at the age of nine. Though I may never fill in all the blanks on that timeline I mentioned earlier, I’m fairly confident that I won’t “get old.” I’ll change. And I won’t.

…that I may never get a chance to make. It’s a sound that many people who record music find abhorrent, but it fills me with such a sense of warmth and beauty that I will always delight in hearing it whenever it shows up at my ear. In it, I can hear every instrument and voice, raw and unadorned. The rawness of the sound combined with the complex nature of the compositions, harmony and arrangement produces a perfect balance, a mature innocence, a grand understatement.

I can only guess about how to get this sound. If my records were to have this sound, I fantasize that I could transport myself to that magical place the sound always creates for me. But the place only exists in my mind. This mythical nowhere is not even just a place. It’s also the feelings, the people, the technology and the color for which to me the sound is responsible. It’s as much about what happens in the room as what’s happening outside, though I don’t think I could ever paint that picture well.

This sound has probably shown up on thousands of records. The records were made when all you had was your mind to supply the images that went along with the music. If you’re a headphone person, like I am, you can disappear into the sound for hours. The records I’ve heard it on most recently were Barbra Streisand’s Stoney End and the Godspell movie soundtrack.

The way I think of them, records with this sound were made in New York between 1970 and 1974. Here’s what these records are in my imagination:

The room is padded up with earth tone walls that don’t reflect any sound at all. There’s a slightly musty smell in the air. The lights are dim, creating a yellow-brown hue. Tube amplifiers are set up behind gobos many times repaired with tape. Guitars are Gibsons. Basses are Fenders with block position markers and flatwounds on them. Some of the drums have sparkle shells and they are all taped up to sound like cardboard boxes. The bass drum has wood hoops, a felt beater and a blanket in it. The cymbals are heavy and gongy, with the same dirt they had on them in the 60s. The piano is covered with a packing blanket to deaden and isolate the sound. In contrast to the string players and the horn section, the rhythm section players are all young rock musicians reading handwritten charts. They all have lots of hair. The guitarists have beards.

They’re cutting to 2 inch 16 track tape, which scrapes softly against the aluminum take-up reel in a dim control room with a brown carpet. VUs glow above the transport. The controls on the tube console facing the glass are large and clunky. Every instrument is totally deadened and isolated on its own track. Ambience is added using the echo chamber in the basement, mostly to the vocals. Pointing at the engineer at a 45 degree angle to the ceiling are large Altec monitors with honeycomb dispersion horns. To his left is a rack full of 1176’s and Pultec equalizers.

The engineer says “rolling” over the talkback. No one in the room has any idea how extraordinary the sound they’re about to make will be. They couldn’t conceive of how it will resonate within me long after the tubes have cooled for the last time and the studio has been dismantled. They are old enough to be my parents, who are somewhere in New Jersey, discussing how quickly I’m learning new words and betting that I’ll be left-handed by the way I hold a crayon.