A response to reading Jeremy Eichler's "Reading between the grooves of classical vinyl's improbable return"

When my kids were young and we lived on Main St. in Amherst, I used to walk them up the hill in a stroller until they fell asleep and then I would peruse the record bins at the Salvation Army that used to be in Amherst Center and Mystery Train. While I could sometimes splurge on an album from Mystery Train (like an early mono pressing of The Times They Are A Changing), for the most part I was a bottom feeder and bought the cheapest albums which were the free jazz at Mystery Train and the classical music at the Salvation Army where you could get 4 records for $5. Because of my childhood I knew the names of virtuoso classical soloists and the major composers, and I knew the major orchestras, but sometimes I also picked up a record because of the cover (the beautiful photograph of cellist Jacqueline du Pré) or the particular design of the gatefold album. What I couldn’t do in the moldy, wet cardboard smelling corner of the Salvation Army store was match the sound, the actual composition to the object I was holding in my hand, so I would walk home with these incipient surprises to be uncovered as the kids played on the floor and I cooked, or did laundry, or fell asleep on the couch. Those were also the days when I first pieced together my stereo system with parts scavenged mostly from the Amherst dump where retiring professors would empty out their offices and leave behind old analog dial Kenwood receivers, and Acoustic Research and KLH speakers. I pieced together a turntable using the chassis of an old Thorens turntable that I stiffened using a thick sheet of MDF on the bottom and put on a new acrylic tone arm mount and new-er tonearm (the one object from post 1980 in my system). Also, because so many of my records were from the Salvation Army they were often mildewed or so moldy you could see a green haze over the record. So I made myself a record cleaner. I salvaged a cheap turntable from the dump, cut a slot in a piece of PVC pipe and coated it with velvet, then connected the PVC pipe to a small wet vac, and using a recipe I found for a record cleaning solution from distilled water and soap, I washed and sucked all my new records clean, placed the record in a new clean sleeve, put it back into the record jacket and dropped the whole thing into a protective plastic sleeve. I’m pretty sure the word “geek” or “dork” is running through your head right now. So after the record was clean, I would put it on the Thorens, and while the kids played and I also build Lego spaceships, or read picture books, or prepared a snack, I would listen to an early Boston Symphony Orchestra recording conducted by Charles Munch playing Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony No. 6 and suddenly I could remember the piece and I was eight or nine years old running through the gardens at Tanglewood back before they filled in all the fountains with dirt. My friend Robert Patterson (son of a cellist) and I would set traps in the topiary maze imagining some obnoxious tourist walking through the maze holding a glass of wine when suddenly a sprung branch would whip out and foil his sophisticated designs (we never did get to witness the fruits of our efforts). But, all the while that we played, there was the sound track of the orchestra. The start and stop and repeats of rehearsals, but also the full performances with the roars and cheers from a lawn and shed full of people more audibly attentive than I was. I am always grateful to have grown up with that core experience with music (even as I rebelled against the rigor of learning violin or piano). As an adult, as a young parent, I was able to relive my childhood by listening to the music that was ever present in my childhood. And in turn, as I revisited my subconscious auditory memory, my children were being imprinted with another generation of transmission so that today, my son Simon talks about hearing Cecil Taylor in Jazz History class and being the only one who raises his hand to identify the player, recognizing him, almost intuitively, from his childhood (I could only play Cecil Taylor when my ex was out of the house to maintain household harmony). Simon is, like his grandfather, driven by his love of classical music. I, of course, educated him on all the classic formative music of my musical influences (Duane Allman, Clapton, Hendrix, J.J. Cale, Roy Buchanan, and later The Clash, Dinosaur Jr., etc.), and in grade school he played in a band (switching off between drums, guitar, and keyboards) that played Beatles, Rolling Stones, and other classic covers. And while his musical curiosity still drives him to explore music with a braver outlook than his father (he sometimes listens to Bollywood music while going for a run), he always returns to the music I used to play from his childhood. The Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Saint-Saens, Mozart. The music of his grandfather. The music of summer lawns. The music passed down from father to son, and then father to son.