My Back Pages

In the spring of 1969, as an aspiring jazz drummer of 15 pretentiously and largely uncomprehendingly drawn to the music's difficult avant-garde, I learned that Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman's alter ego during Ornette's starvation years and an icon of free jazz himself, had recently moved to the village of Congers in my native Rockland County, New York, just north of New York City. Ornette was putting together a group drawn mostly from his early cohorts, and the call went out to Stockholm, where Don had settled—to the extent that he settled anywhere—with his Swedish wife, Moki. Hence his arrival practically on my doorstep.

Step 1. When I was in my mid-20s, an older editor at the Dutch current-affairs magazine I worked for told me he wanted to write a piece about audiophiles: He had been bitten by the audio bug himself. Because I often wrote about rock and pop music, he asked if I had a quality hi-fi system, and if so, would I be willing to be interviewed for his article

I was surprised to see, in the window of my local charity shop in a corner of north London, a display of 1980s Melody Maker magazines featuring some of my favorite bands. Nestled alongside second-hand frocks and pieces of crockery were The Redskins, Scritti Politti, Johnny Marr, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

The Redskins produced one rather fine album, which attempted to marry left-wing politics with northern soul. Frankie was seen as outrageous in its day; "Relax" was banned on several radio shows, and some record shops refused to stock it. Now both appeared proudly in the window of a second-hand shop that raises money for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Intrigued, I went in to find out what the story was. I was in luck: The person responsible for the display was working behind the counter. It wasn't, as I had assumed, a middle-aged bloke reliving his youth, reminiscing about a time when he had a full head of hair (that was me), but a young woman, probably born 20 years after those Melody Makers were published.

The advantage of a highly resolving music system is that you can hear deeper into recordings. The disadvantage is that you can hear deeper into recordings.

Back in the mid-1960s, I was the unusual white, suburban preteen who, for reasons I've long pondered and never fully understood, was drawn much less powerfully to the Beatles than to blues and R&B. I was a bit of a jazz snob, too. Given these leanings, it's no surprise that one of the half-dozen or so albums that fried my impressionable young brain was that seamless blend of blues, R&B, and jazz, Ray Charles at Newport.

There was a time in London, in the mid-'80s, when a party would invariably close with a couple of Pogues songs. It didn't matter what music had preceded them—it could be reggae or soul or whatever—but the Pogues would be played, to enthusiastic sing-a-longs by the party guests. Even I was known to join in occasionally.

As often as not, one of the songs would be the Pogues's cover of Ewan MacColl's "Dirty Old Town." It didn't matter that the song had been written about Salford (a city in Greater Manchester): Everyone would feel it had been written about their own town. This wasn't true just in my part of London, which has a large Irish diaspora, but in many other places across the world.

This was one of several gifts possessed by Shane MacGowan, who died November 30, 2023: Whether he had written the song or not, you felt he was singing about your world, your life.

So, what's "this thing of ours"? I'm only half-kidding. High-end audio is deadly serious for many passionate audiophiles. Some measurement types defend their turf without thought—without mercy—and often deride subjectivists, like me, who believe if you like what you hear, then that's what counts, enjoy. Objectivists say if you can't measure it, then it doesn't exist. Well, goes the retort, you don't know what to measure, your instruments aren't refined enough, and on and on.

The struggle continues to this day for some reason, and boy-howdy is it ferocious, especially regarding cables.