Vinyl

The Big Bad, by The Big Bad. 2016, age 44.

I grew up on vinyl. My brothers, 15 and 13 years older than me, were already avid rock and roll fans by the time I'd come along. The first album I remember hearing (and seeing) was The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

Growing up I listened to every record they owned: The Beatles "Red," "Blue," and "White" albums; Abraxas; Electric Warrior; Band on the Run; Houses of the Holy; Never Mind the Bollocks; London Calling; 1999; Mott the Hoople Greatest Hits; The Name of This Band is Talking Heads; Bella Donna; A Night at the Opera; more Bowie, more T. Rex, more Zeppelin, more Beatles, some Stones . . . a bit of everything.

My parents were older and their tastes reflected it. They didn't have a lot of records, but the ones they had were important: Hank Williams 40 Greatest Hits, Nat "King" Cole's Unforgettable, some big band stuff.

The first record I bought (at 8-years-old) was The Beatles' Story, which is more of a sound documentary than a music record. (My twin sister bought The Muppet Movie Soundtrack, arguably a more important musical choice.) Something New was my second record. Later came LOTS of Prince records (usually bought the day of their release), The Time, Duran Duran, Heart, and all kinds of 80s goodies.

Then I got "serious" about music and bought hard-to-get jazz records. Blue Train was the first jazz album I bought on a reborn Blue Note label in the mid-eighties.

In college, we played "drop the needle" in saxophone masterclass and had listening parties with other music nerds. My roommate Eric, took me to the Princeton Record Exchange when I went home with him to New Jersey. We'd come back to school with armloads of experimental classical music, folk and world music on Nonesuch, and tons of jazz. I'd also grab a few rock-and-roll records.

After I got married (the first time), I'd make a point of visiting the used record stores in every town where we vacationed. I'd hit them up in Chicago, the Lower East Side, Memphis, and New Orleans. Lots in New Orleans.

Somehow, I ended up with a couple thousand records.

I mean, it didn't keep me from buying CDs. And cassette tapes -- though that format was more for making mixes for others. And then downloading digital music when all that happened.

When I got divorced, my wife let me keep all the vinyl. I had a turntable, but I didn't make it out with the stereo. I had all these treasures and no way to enjoy them.

I moved around with all of it. You wanna know how committed you are to vinyl, move a few times with a couple thousand LPs.

All of the sudden, I had a new family and all this stuff.

I had a small portable record player -- very retro, except that it is probably actually from about 1976 -- but what I didn't know what that turntables from that era won't play microgrooves on newer albums. I could play original Stevie Wonder through the tiny speakers, but not anything after about 1985.

And I kept buying new vinyl. Stuff by new favorite bands like The Cryptkeeper Five and Harley Poe. And some old vinyl. Which made no sense because I had no way to hear it. I just knew I eventually would.

A little over a month ago, I decide to organize my home studio. I also decided to find a way to listen to my turntable through the board and speakers I use for playing keyboards. I got everything hooked up just right and then went to put on my first record.

The stylus was broken. (For you youngsters, the stylus is the needle that transmits the vibration from the groove of the record to the amplification system.)

So I ordered one.

It came in today.

There is something so different about listening to an album on vinyl. Yeah, I think it probably sounds a little better, but that may be mostly imagination. I'm not sure.

But putting on a 12-inch platter, dropping the needle, sinking into a chair, looking at the jacket, reading the notes in a readable font size . . .

The first record I selected was The Big Bad. It happens to be a record by a band I play in.

The last time I could listen to vinyl on a stereo, I couldn't have had that experience. It makes me feel really good.

I think it's going to be a late night.

I Dream of Wires

1981, age 9. Switched on Bach, by Walter Carlos.

I guess my background is similar to a lot of people who fell in love with music from a young age. I grew up in a house filled with music, my mom played piano for the church choir, and I started taking piano lessons at age 6.

Like a lot of kids, there were days I hated practicing. My mom would put this kitchen timer on top of the piano until I finished my requisite 30 minutes. I think I liked the idea of being a musician a lot more than actually playing the instrument.

I was okay, I guess, but not nearly as good as my twin sister, Sarah. She really came into her own on the piano and was the kid who was always winning talent shows and playing for school functions. She was gracing audiences with "The Spinning Song" while I was struggling to make it out of the first volume of Teaching Little Fingers to Play.

We switched teachers over the years as some moved away or others weren't the right fit. There was Mrs. Showalter, the preacher's dowdy wife, who moved when the church fired her husband. There was Mrs. Ward, who played organ at the church. We had Mr. Stewart, a cocktail pianist and junior high music teacher, a flamboyantly gay man in a very conservative Bible-belt town, who moved to Florida and died soon afterward. There was John Yurick, who has since become a good friend, an accomplished musician and composer who taught at the local music store.

The thing was, when I started really getting into music, I wanted to play the guitar. Guitar was what rock and roll musicians played. The Beatles didn't have a piano player.

My mom told me I was too young to play the guitar and that I could do that after I'd played piano for several years.

So I resigned myself to the keyboard for awhile, looking for any hint of its rock and roll soul.

I noticed that "Lady Madonna" seemed pretty focused around the piano, as were a lot of Paul McCartney's contributions to The Beatles. I learned that some people even called Billy Preston "The Fifth Beatle." Then there was David Bowie banging away on "Rock and Roll Star" and other tracks from the Ziggy Stardust record. I thought I even heard some organ on those Santana records my brothers played.

About this time I checked out a book from the public library called Musical Instruments of the World. It was really fascinating and had drawings and descriptions of every instrument I could ever imagine: balalaikas, citterns, Sicilian bagpipes, nose flutes, and erhus. They even had a section on "Modern Rock Music," that explained how an amplifier worked and the different pieces of a drum set. I was deeply gratified to find the keyboard instruments included as well, with a long-haired gentleman in platform shoes standing behind a Hammond B-3 and Fender Rhodes. But there was another instrument there, too, something I didn't recognize, with all kinds of knobs and weird cables connecting parts of it. It was called a "synthesizer."

When I read about the synthesizer, it sounded magical. Its sounds were produced entirely electronically, so it was a really modern instrument. Because of this, the authors told me, a synthesizer was capable of producing the sound of any other instrument. I read about the synthesizer made by Robert Moog, whose name I assumed, as I guess some of you have just now, rhymed with "fugue." It does not. It rhymes with "vogue."

So I started looking for synthesizers in the music I was listening to. I found bits and pieces, but nothing I could really hear that well. So the next time I was at the library, I strolled over to the bins where they kept the LPs and began digging. I found it in the classical section. It was called Switched on Bach by Walter Carlos Williams.

The record was already over a decade old, but the cover was fascinating. It showed a gentleman in full Baroque attire standing in front of cabinets housing panels of electronic modules and cables connecting various pieces. It looked like it should be used by NASA. I wrongfully assumed that the gentleman was Mr. Williams, unaware that Mr. Williams had begun living as Ms. Williams by the time Switched on Bach came out and had made the complete jump biologically by the time I held the album in my hands, financed largely by the record's success.

I took it home and listened to it. It was engrossing. It was classical music, familiar, accessible — but made with weird electronic sounds. There were tinkling sounds and buzzing sounds and swooping, gyrating sounds. There were thick, round sounds and piercingly thin sounds. It was all very interesting.

But it wasn't rock and roll.

So I kept my eyes and ears open, looking for the appearance of one of these fabled instruments.

Then something wonderful happened. It was called "MTV."

Synthesizers were all over MTV. The very first video I saw on the channel was "Words," by Missing Persons, and the singer, Dale Bozio, stood in front of a platform where a musician worked behind a bank of keyboards. But they weren't the only ones. There was Duran Duran and Human League and Flock of Seagulls and Depeche Mode and Devo. There was Prince, that enigmatic purple-clad sprite whose music was my sexual awakening, due in no small part to the catchy synth hooks that dominated the music, played live by "Lisa" and "Dr. Fink."

I had to have one.

I remember the very first synthesizer I saw. It was a Moog Rogue (that rhymes, in case you have forgotten) and it was at Don Elkins' Music on Valley Drive, where I went for my piano lesson every week. It was 32 keys in a black case with white lettering, a few simple knobs and sliders labelled with strange words: "Oscillators," "Modulation," "Contour Filter." I had no idea what it sounded like and it wasn't connected to any sort of amplifier in the store, so you couldn't even try the thing out. Yet in my mind, it was all electronic sex and rock and roll glory. Some kids wanted to be Batman; I wanted to own a Moog Rogue.

Some time after our school music teacher even brought in a friend, a local DJ, who demonstrated the Minimoog for us in the school cafetorium. I sat riveted. The encounter was brief, but it stuck with me.

There were mail order companies in those days that sold synthesizers. I'm not sure where I got the address for one — maybe in Keyboardist magazine. The catalogs would come in the mail to me and they were just pages upon pages of incomprehensible science projects. They were DIY kits for synth home hobbyists and you could buy and put together yourself these modular synthesizers of any possible size you could imagine. I couldn't imagine where to begin among the list of puzzling modules: VCOs, VCFs, LFOs, ring modulators, and so on. Then you'd have to get an amplifier of some sort to plug the thing in. And a "keyboard controller" that made no sound on its own. Oh, and I found out that these "analog" synths were "monophonic": they could only play one note at a time. My confusion grew.

Somewhere around this time I started playing guitar and saxophone, and my obsession with owning a synthesizer faded. I owned an electric guitar long before I owned a synth, and I was regularly playing saxophone in bands of various styles.

The MIDI revolution happened in the late 1980s and 90s, and once I went to music school, owning a MIDI keyboard than had access to banks of sounds was no big deal. I bought a cheap Casio and used it happily to play with sampled sounds and banks of soft synths. It was not quite the same thing, but it served my needs.

Then a couple of years ago, my cousin Zack asked me to play saxophone with his band. "And some keys." This was without ever hearing me play. I suppose he trusted that I knew what I was doing. So I started shopping around, asking questions, and looking into buy a synth — or maybe an organ. I wasn't sure yet.

I ended up with this very cool Casio XW-P1. Now, most people associate that name with cheap keyboards (see above comment) and this one is a budget synth. (I was less than broke when I bought it.) But it's the real deal: sampled sounds, plus digital synthesis that could be played with. It's been a great little workhorse. I like it so much that when it got stolen last fall, I bought another one.

It's completely opened me up creatively and I've started playing with the on-board sequencer and arpeggiator. I've discovered that timbre can be as great of a source for creativity as rhythm or harmony. I can spend hours at a time making new sounds, lost in my own little world.

Then the inevitable happened: I bought another one. It was called a Synthstation 25 and really it was just a little mini-keyboard controller I bought used for $19. You plug your phone into it and start a $2 app and all of the sudden you have a drum machine, a sequencer, and an analog-modeling synth at your fingers.

Then I got another one at Christmas. It's an Arturia MiniBrute and it's an actual analog synthesizer. (For those of you who are unfamiliar with the differences between "analog" and "digital," suffice it to say that digital is basically playing with computers and analog is basically playing with raw electricity.) It can make some pretty bitchin' sounds, man.

Then I got a Nord Electro 4, which isn't exactly what most people think of as a synthesizer, but has great organ and piano sounds, as well as samples of an old Mellotron — a type of pre-digital sampler that used little bits of tape.

I also got a little $50 Korg Monotron, which is basically a single oscillator and filer with a ribbon controller. It makes all kinds of delicious bleeps and bloops.

I'm really not a gear head, but these instruments just keep opening up new worlds for me. It's like being a painter and discovering that there are new colors you haven't ever seen, or even colors you can invent yourself.

All of which has brought me to this fateful day.

I'm wrapping up this blog post, then I'm making a payment to purchase my very first modular synthesizer. It's not been built yet. I've ordered it from a well-known company that specializes in this sort of thing. I spoke to the owner and chose each module myself: the power supply, the two oscillators, the two contrasting filters, the LFO — all of it. I even chose the case it comes in, which has blank spots, by the way, so I can keep adding to it.

I've not quite crossed the threshold yet into building my own modules, though on slow afternoons I imagine myself hunkered in my basement with a soldering iron, piecing together transistors and resistors, bringing the sounds to life for the very first time.

I also put a bid on someone's old Moog Rogue online.

Someone else can be Batman.

Twerking through the Ages

1984, age 14. "Head," by Prince, from the album Dirty Mind.

WARNING: This blog post contains frank discussion of some matters related to human sexuality. Proceed with caution.

It's been awhile since I've watched MTV's Video Music Awards. I suppose that's mostly because I don't think MTV has much cred discussing music videos.  I also think they are a little predictable.

Nevertheless, I'm an avid pop culture junkie, so I felt the need to investigate following the social media eruption that happened after Miley Cyrus' performance with Robin Thicke on the VMAs. I will confess that I didn't even know that Ms. Cyrus had crossed over to a post-Disney career, following the footsteps of other alum Fergie, Christina Aguilera, Lindsey Lohan, Britney Spears, Shia LeBeouf, Selena Gomez, and of course, the original beach babe, Annette Funicello.

The hullabaloo seems to be related to Miley extending her tongue and twerking during the performance.  She's been called slutty, trashy, and cheap on posts from my own friends and pop culture bloggers. Several of my friends have opined that she represents a decline in musicianship, civil rights, and/or culture at large.

I gotta say, I think it's all a tempest in a teacup.

For those of you over 30, "tweaking" is defined by the Urban Dictionary as "The rhythmic gyrating of the lower fleshy extremities in a lascivious manner with the intent to elicit sexual arousal or laughter in ones [sic] intended audience." (Congrats, Urban Dictionary, for your post-SAT vocab, but you may want to look up "extremities." I don't think the ass counts.)

When I read that definition, I immediately thought of one pop performer: Elvis Presley.

You know, "Elvis the Pelvis"? The King of Rock and Roll?  You've heard of him, right?

Well, if you don't know how Elvis earned the moniker, it's related to one of his earliest television performances. The 19-year-old singer appeared on The Milton Berle Show in 1956 and performed a couple of his hits, including a hip-shaking cover of Big Mama Thornton's "Hound Dog." Now, it's no surprise that Elvis might seek to emphasize the sexuality of "Hound Dog." The song is about a man who sleeps around.  (You knew that, yeah? I mean, you knew it wasn't actually about a dog, right?) The result was electrifying and the public reaction was immediate. Ed Sullivan, TV's most popular host, immediately declared that he would never book Presley. The day following the performance, the New York Times said, "Mr. Presley has no singing ability . . . His one specialty is an accented movement of the body that heretofore has been primarily identified with the repertoire of the blonde bombshells of the burlesque runway. The gyration never had anything to do with the world of popular music and still doesn't." The Daily News echoed the sentiment by saying that the performance was "tinged with the kind of animalism that should be confined to dives and bordellos." Other media outlets concurred.

You know the rest of the story: teenage Elvis went back to Tennessee, scorned and dejected, and lived out the rest of his days pumping gas at an Esso station, never to return to the stage again.

Well, except for the part where Ed Sullivan ate crow, signed Elvis for an unprecedented three-show, $50,000 contract, and he became the single most identifiable figure in the history of rock and roll music.

Presley went on to record lots of songs about sex, by the way, including "Shake, Rattle, and Roll," and "Jailhouse Rock," perhaps popular music's first paean to gay prison sex. (You knew that's what the song was about, right? I mean, what did you think Number 47 and Number 3 were talking about, exactly?)

In fact, Elvis was just continuing a tradition of performing songs to shock the elders. Anyone who is a blues fan knows just how "blue" the music got in the 20s, 30s, and 40s. (Go give Bessie Smith's "Kitchen Man" a listen. I once heard my friend Doris perform it and make a room blush.) And R&B singles like "The Rotten Cocksuckers Ball" by the Clovers, circa 1954, were certainly more explicit than anything the King had to offer. Hell, the tradition goes back even further to the so-called "bawdy ballads" like "Roll Your Leg Over."

And the tradition continued. Songs about sex (and drugs, the other post-30 bugaboo) are pervasive in the history of rock and roll, as are "shocking" sexual performances. A sample:

• Almost all of Little Richard's output consists of sexual innuendo, and sometimes explicit content. "Tutti Frutti" was, of course, about gay sex (You knew that, right? I mean "All the Fruits"? What did you think it was about?) and "Long Tall Sally" included lyrics like, "Long Tall Sally she's built for speed, she's got everything that Uncle John needs."
• The Rolling Stones were forced to change the lyrics of their hit, "Let's Spend the Night Together" to "Let's Spend Some Time Together" for the Ed Sullivan Show. The group agreed, but then returned to the stage wearing Nazi uniforms and regalia to protest the censorship.
• The Doors' Jim Morrison was arrested in Miami for allegedly shouting, "Do you want to see my cock?" and then exposing his penis to a concert audience.
• David Bowie was possibly the first pop artist to come out as bisexual in an interview with Playboy magazine in 1975.
• The Ohio Players released some albums.
• A 17-year-old Prince releases his first album, including the single, "Soft and Wet." Prince's Dirty Mind album, featured the performer on the cover in a g-string and trench coat and includes songs about cunnilingus and incest. Prince's Controversy track, "Jack U Off," is only one of the most explicit from the album. The newly-formed Parents Music Resource Center targets Prince's "Darling Nikki," for including lyrics about female masturbation. Prince appears nude on the the cover of his album, Lovesexy. Everything that Prince has every done.
• In 1990, hip hop artists 2 Live Crew had their album banned for obscenity by a U.S. District Court.
• Remember Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" at the Super Bowl?
• The VMAs themselves have included Madonna rolling on the stage in a bridal gown singing, "Like a Virgin;" an 18-year-old Britney Spears donning a "nude" costume and boa constrictor; and Madonna french-kissing Christina Aguilera and a 22-year-old Britney Spears, both former Disney stars.

I mean, this is a sample — not some exhaustive list. And I'm not including all the Satan-worshipping, biting-the-heads-off-doves incidents, either. The history of music is just full of this stuff.

So what's it all mean?

Two things I think.

The first is that my aunt Awayn was right. (That's pronounced "A-1" with the accent on the first syllable, and yes, that is her real name.) Awayn is a fundamentalist Christian (and she would not mind me saying that). When I was a kid, she insisted that rock and roll was "jungle music" and that it was mostly about sex.

Well, she's right. I'm sure that the term "jungle music" probably indicates some latent racism on her part, but the music is African in much of it's origin — as is all American music. (The conversation about the appropriation of these styles, i.e., the "white boy who stole the blues," is too long for this post, but Robin Thicke is just the latest example.)

But rock and roll is also largely about sex. I mean, "rockin' and rollin' . . ." That's obvious, right? Why are we surprised that there is music about what is arguably the single most dominant biological function of every living organism on the planet? And why are we pretending it's new?

The second is that rock and roll — and many other popular American styles — are about a younger generation rebelling against the social mores of an older generation.

My guess is that Miley's manager said something to her like this: "Girl, Lady GAGA is gonna be on the VMAs. That chick wore a dress made out of flank steaks! You better step up your SHIT!"

Because, how do you shock a generation that rocked out to "Love the One You're With" and "Why Don't We Do It in the Road"? We've all seen your muddy nude dancing at Woodstock, we have read about your acid trips, and we know how you advocated "free love." It takes a lot to shock you.

And you 70s types, with your Studio 54 and cocaine spoons, your Masters and Johnson, your Coming of Age in Samoa — how exactly are we supposed to rock your world?

As for you 80s children, all I can say is that you had Prince.

Art is fundamentally about starting a conversation, making people think. For that reason, this one goes in the "win" column for Ms. Cyrus. We're talking about her performance. And you've read this far. 

The other group who has expressed strong objection to Sunday's show are those who are distressed that we are all talking about Miley while Syrians are being killed, the Egyptian government is in a shambles, and the polar ice caps are melting. To those good-hearted people, I would just say that you are right: the world can be unbearably awful at times. Sometimes art answers those issues. But sometimes (as I have written elsewhere), it just provides a much-needed, booty-shaking respite from all the awfulness. It may not be your cup of tea, but there are those, probably younger than you, who are twerking away, just trying to lose themselves in the music for awhile.