just about unbearable.

Last year at our annual bike-around-Lake-Tapps-Island-mega-garage-sale-extravaganza I picked up a burr grinder for five bucks (didn't work, needed a part) and a USB turntable (didn't work, needed a part). No worries for either. A twenty-dollar burr for the grinder and it was as good as new. And a seven dollar stylus for the turntable rendered it back to life.

The first reason: the receiver I got to replace my older one did not have a phono input (phono voltage is much lower than line-level - so-called RCA - so the receiver/preamp must have a dedicated input labeled for phono because it then takes the miniscule amount of voltage a turntable stylus outputs and transforms it to line level before sending it off to the amplifier). So my turntable I've used for years and years was more or less useless. And this new one had line-level out.

And the second reason: I love vinyl. Yes. I love vinyl.

I love evenings spent incense or candle burning one light flickering in the living room corner the crackle and ambience of a good vinyl recording filling my space. I love summer barbequeing running back and forth from the kitchen to the grill an old Neil Diamond record blasting windows open cos its warm and it fits for summer. A record of Mussorgsky's grandiose Pictures at an Exhibition cranked so loud even with the cover on the turntable flipped down the feedback loop starts to become unbearable the neighbors probably wondering what's going on in there all that classical music but because classical music can only be listened to at near-unbearable levels.

And that's why I am breaking back out the vinyl. Most of my classical collection is on vinyl. And I need to immerse myself in it to remember what it is I am aiming for while writing and to not get sucked into the hole of sameness where ninety-nine-point-ninety-nine percent of current music resides. Or something like that. Because I do not want to write a rock song. I want to write a piano concerto. A piano sonata. A symphony of sorts. All embedded in a rock song. With lots of dimished chords. And unconventional progressions. And ...

And anyway. I need to listen to more classical music. So I unburied the old wooden crate I scored back in LA that is my vinyl collection from under the Bechstein and moved it to the front corner of the living room.

And I thought some organization was, well, in order. So I flipped through my little collection ...

Ah yes. 1976. The. Greatest. Recording of Beethoven's monumental Fifth. Carlos Kleiber. He was the sh*t. The real deal. Viably one of the greatest conductors of all time. Hardly recorded anything. Fanatically particular with the works he did conduct. A perfectionist to the core. German. He knew Beethoven. Well, not literally. But he knew how to conduct Beethoven.

Kathy, Kari and I were browsing the vinyl section of the old Seattle downtown library when they lived on Capitol Hill back ten or twelve years or so. I was pawing through the Beethoven section and came across this twelve-inch. Checked it out and took it home. Gently placed it on the turntable delicately setting the stylus down as it spun up. Bumped the volume way up. Sat back. And there it was. From the first couple of bars I knew the tempo was brilliant. Perfection. The dynamics exactly as they should be. I had heard dozens of recordings of Beethoven's C-minor symphony over the years. None of them sounded like this. None. This was it.

Flipped through some more.

Suede's Dog Man Star. Best. Pop. Record. Of. All. Time. Songs the likes of The Two of Us. The Asphalt World. Still Life. Holy sh*t. Still Life. A symphony in itself the orchestrations incredible.

Lots of Suede 45s. Love 45s. Suede was always a band known for producing spectacular b-sides. I remember borrowing my friend's copy of Trash - the guy responsible for getting me into Suede a few months earlier playing Dog Man Star one day the two of us working out back at the Scottsdale Goodwill then The Two of Us came on and I hit repeat instantly and listened to it for hours the rest of the afternoon while the sun set behind the Maricopa Mountains west beyond the city of Phoenix me plopped on the open backend of a semi trailer - with the b-side Europe is Our Playground set to repeat for hours on end (yes, one turntable I owned year's past had a repeat function). Late nights putting on vinyl recordings of songs like High Rising and My Dark Star. Sweet F-A. Brilliant.

Not sure if any other recording of any other piece of music has ever effected me as much as Wilhelm Backhaus' playing from 1960 of these three particular Beethoven sonatas (coincidentally, the same three sonatas on Vladimir Horowitz's almost-as-perfect but still brilliant recording - which I also own on vinyl - made over a period of several years back in the early seventies). Listening to it one evening on headphones I discovered rather quite surprisingly how absolutely critical the symbiotic notion of imperfection is to the equal but opposite notion of perfection. How the two are intertwined. Balanced. And necessary. Backhaus was brilliant. And no coincidence he played a Bechstein ...

Then there is my signed vinyl by the three guys one gal of The Veils I picked up at their show in St. Louis. Missed them that summer three years ago when they played at the Crocodile in Seattle. Didn't see the news they were even touring until that had passed but in a week they were playing a tiny bar in St. Louis. I booked a ticket that night.

Got to see my family and drive into St. Louis just around the corner from the Budweiser brewery this dilapidated bar in a sorta-sketchy area got there too early so walked a few blocks to another slightly-less dilapidated bar and had a Guiness from the tap. Closer to show time I wandered back in time to see them pull up in their battered white van they had driven that afternoon from some hole in Oklahoma. Unload all their own gear and set up. There were eight people there. I had hooked up with the owner of the place beforehand to make sure I'd get a ticket. Told him I'd be flying in from Seattle. Guess I didn't need to worry about it selling out but he gave me a beer on the house for my effort anyway.

When Finn asked for requests my first was of course The Leavers Dance but he didn't seem too interested in playing anything from Runaway Found (the album I've labeled as the second greatest pop album of all time, right behind Suede). So I tossed out One Night on Earth which they did play. F-ing incredible. I was just about in tears.

After the show I chatted with them all a bit. Apparently I had bought their last vinyl copy. So they all signed it. I also picked up a t-shirt now all worn out ragged turned painting shirt mostly.

So I should probably also use this turntable for its other intention - converting vinyl to MP3 of course so I can have some of this stuff in a bit more portable format. But still. Nothing quite like putting on a vinyl record and turning up the volume to just about unbearable.