I hope that it’s only amnesia.
Believe me, I’m sick but not insane.
Yes, I hope that it’s only amnesia.
My friends, they don’t look at me the same.
– Jon Pousette-Dart
There’s nothing to say today, except that we’re not going to break a streak of daily posts that stretches back to March 30th … So, we’re just going to do some free-flow stuff, and whatever comes out is what you’re stuck with.
We’ve purposely been not thinking about the blog for the past couple of days, because we have the need to step back and recharge our batteries … certainly the quality of the posts for the past few days have left something to be desired, and it’s probably a good idea not to write anything today, but we’re not in this to sit on the bench.
When Grace Slick left the Jefferson Starship back in 1978 (only to return in 1981), she said that she needed a break from the constant pressure she’d been under since 1966 when she joined the Jefferson Airplane. “I feel like I’ve been shitting for the past 12 years, and I need to take some time to have a good meal”, she said.
Well, we certainly haven’t been at this for 12 years, even 12 months, but we have a kernel of an idea of what Grace was talking about.
Speaking of Grace, we have been going through our old LP collection recently, something we haven’t done in the nearly 25 years since we made the switch to CD. Years ago, we bought a spare turntable under the impression that a turntable would be a difficult item to come by in the future. We didn’t even open the box when we brought it home. We just put it in a storage closet in the basement so that when the turntable on our main system gave out, we’d have something upon which to play our quite formidable record collection.
Little did we realize that turntables, and high quality ones to boot, would still be quite available today, since the vinyl craze has gone from mainstream to high-end cult status. So a couple of years ago, when we re-did our back room as a home office, and we brought up our large LP collection from the basement to get it out of a damp environment that we were never comfortable having it in, even though we had a de-humidifier, we decided to break out our spare turntable and hook it up to the micro-system that we bought specifically for our home office. The results were beyond our wildest expectations.
There’s a lot of controversy among audiophiles about the respective quality of CDs vs. LPs, and after our recent LP renaissance, we have pretty much concluded that we have to come down on the LP side of the argument. There really is an unidentifiable warmth to the sound of an LP, at least on our main system in the living room (and the OMT system has 15-inch woofers, thank you very much), that a CD just can’t quite match, and that an MP3 doesn’t even approach, and we’ve listened to the same album in all three formats right after one another, so we think we know what we’re talking about.
Even on the micro-system in our office, the sound of the LPs vs. the CDs doesn’t even come close, and that’s taking things like wow and flutter into account (we suspect that no one under 45 knows what “wow” and “flutter” are).
We sometimes wonder about all these new technologies that offer us convenience at the cost of fidelity. Does anyone really think that a cell phone delivers anything that even approaches the sound quality of a land line phone ? But still, it lets us have meaningless conversations while piloting a 2-ton battering ram through mid-town traffic, so we suppose it’s worth the trade-off.
But back to records …
Over the years, we’ve always taken great pains to take care of our record collection, to the point of investing in disk cleaners, and vinyl-lined sleeves for our LPs. As a result, today, all these years later, the quality of our quite substantial vinyl music colllection (over 1,000 individual LP titles) is quite good. Only a handful of records have any discernible pops and clicks, and in many cases when that is true, we had managed to purchase a clean copy of the record years ago. Our Beatles collection is a case in point .. having worn them down to the point where one could almost see through them, we decided back in the mid ’70s to re-purchase our entire Beatles catalog anew, and in the process managed to obtain what are now considered to be very collectible versions of the early Capitol releases on the Beatles’ own Apple label.
Of course, we were purchasing for posterity at the time, since by the mid-seventies we had moved quite far beyond The Beatles, and were already starting to get into jazz-fusion (although we managed to entirely avoid Spyro Gyra, to our credit), so that today we have what are essentially pristine copies of our Beatles records.
And then, there are are all those LPs in our collection that have never been released on CD. Like 1974’s Buckingham/Nicks LP, featuring Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks on an album that for our money outshone anything they later did with Fleetwood Mac by a long shot. Why Polydor refuses to release this extremely important record on CD is something that is a constant source of mystery to us.
Then as now, we always went the extra yard to find quality artists that didn’t quite manage to hit the mainstream. We believed then, as we do today, that there is a direct correlation between popularity and mediocrity, and so we would always try to seek out things that none of our friends were listening to. Sometimes, these excursions would lead us to dead ends (Dillard & Clark, Egberto Gismonti, and, yes, Joy of Cooking), but sometimes there’d be something that would turn out to be a keeper.
Back in ‘77, there was this group called the Pousette-Dart Band (hardly a catchy name), led by Jon Pousette-Dart, which got some marginal FM airplay in the summer of 1977. At the time, we were listening to WYDD-FM, 102.7, which was the place to go for anything even reasonably hip on Pittsburgh radio at that time. Tracks from Pousette-Dart’s “Amnesia” LP were getting some notice on YDD’s track rotation, and we managed to pick up a copy at Flo’s Records in Market Square (somewhere in the bowels of our basement storage closets, we still have a plastic bag from Flo’s, which we got before they went belly-up in 1979).
We’d listened to it one or two times, but back in 1977, we were starting to get really excited about this new fusion guitarist who had played with the Gary Burton Quintet, by the name of Pat Metheny, who had just released his second solo album called “Watercolors”. Consequently, the Pousette-Dart Band album just slid into its place in our record collection between Jean-Luc Ponty and Quicksilver Messenger Service.
Pat Metheny, on the other hand, as anyone who knows us is aware, has been our favorite musician/composer for over 30 years now. And with no end in sight …
We were cleaning house today, since it was raining and there wasn’t anything else to do, and, of course, when one has a cat, as we do, one must clean house much more often than one ordinarily might, lest one become overwhelmed with car hair, which in our case would be black cat hair. While we were going around with the Swiffer, we thought that some music would be just the thing. So we scanned our collection and found “Amnesia” by the Pousette-Dart Band.
We popped it onto our turntable, and went about our cleaning …
It was like listening to something brand new, but not exactly brand new, if you follow … We’d listened to it a few times back in ‘77, but it hadn’t made much of an impression on us at the time. In fact the title track had gotten enough airplay that when it came on our stereo today, it all came rushing back like the hot kiss at the end of a wet fist, as they say. We listened to both sides of the album, something we couldn’t exactly vouch for having done 30 years ago, and we loved the whole thing.
Naturally, our curiosity was piqued, so we did a Google search on Jon Pousette-Dart, and it turns out that, while the band broke up around 1980, he’s still quite active musically, and has recorded a new CD as recently as 2005. Of course, all of his old albums are out of print. He didn’t sell enough to compel Capitol Records, his label back in the ’70s, to invest in putting together a CD package.
We will say one thing … this Internet thing has really made a difference in our ability to keep track of people and things … We’re pretty sure that there aren’t any of our readers who even know who Jon Pousette-Dart was/is, but the Internet doesn’t care about numbers … as long as it’s out there, you can look it up …
Which, by the way, was the name of one of our favorite James Thurber stories.
