During my first attempt at college, I lived in a dormitory where my next- door neighbors had an informal trade in pharmaceuticals; their most ardent customers were my neighbors across the hall. One of the latter was a fellow named Pete, a good-natured guy (if a bit sanctimonious in his disdain for music he considered insufficiently bluesy) whose heavy rotation list was, at the time, topped by John Fahey’s The Voice of the Turtle. I merely disliked the record the first time I heard it, but in the days ahead I came to loathe it. I found it repetitive, masturbatory, technically inept, and dead boring. Pete hated my music, too.

But at 18, I was an insecure listener. I projected my own pretensions onto every musical artist I encountered—and so it never occurred to me that some of Dylan’s best songs were intended as humor, or that at least half of Robbie Robertson’s songs didn’t mean jack shit, or that listening to Led Zeppelin was okay because it was fun.

That was almost a half-century ago; in the ensuing years, I learned to love a lot of music that was lost on the teenaged me.

I have also learned to forgive myself—for that shortcoming, at least—although lingering embarrassment prevents me from disclosing all of the great composers and writers and performers whose stuff I didn’t get the first or sometimes even the second or third time around. The fact is that, at 18, I simply hadn’t listened enough, read enough, or lived enough to grasp all of what I was hearing. I hadn’t snuggled enough babies or mourned enough elders or done enough heavy lifting in the times between.

John Fahey didn’t cross my radar again until 5 or 6 years ago, when a record store opened in the rural village I then called home: an unlikely occurrence that served only to strengthen my belief in a loving God. During that merchant’s brief time in Cherry Valley, NY, I bought some wonderful records—ones that remain among my very favorite, snatch-from-a-burning- house LPs. Chief among them: a copy of a reissue of John Fahey’s first album, Blind Joe Death (Takoma C 1002, footnote 1), a collection of original and traditional instrumentals performed solo on a steel-string guitar, recorded in 1959 and, remarkably, rerecorded in 1964. When I saw it in the bins, I remembered how much I enjoyed the Fahey-curated-and-produced Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, Volume Four (2 CDs, Revenant 211), so it seemed I should give his own compositions and performances another try.

I’m awfully glad I did. This time around, I wasn’t hung up on the surface details—the consistently out-of-tune guitar, the lack of polish in the playing, the near-absence of any real development or improvisation in these repetitive and at times downright drone-y pieces—and was now able to focus on the intensity of the performances, and the apparently unique way Fahey melded blues and folk purism with his own slyly trippy take on simple ballads, laments, and hymns. (Or maybe the latter quality had been there all along, and Fahey just knew how to bring it out?)

Yes, I still wonder about the out-of-tune guitar. Was it a deliberate attempt to mimic the recordings left behind by itinerant musicians whose poor-quality fretted instruments couldn’t stay in tune or intonate properly? Was his indifference toward playing in tune part of some semi-unconscious ritual he used in preparation for his performances? Or did he consciously invent punk folk decades before the emergence of punk rock? I don’t know. Wondering is fun, but answers to those questions aren’t crucial to getting John Fahey’s music. For me. Anymore.

It probably wasn’t my status as an audiophile that led me to finally appreciate John Fahey, but it surely had something to do with my status as a record collector—and in my mind those two lives are linked. And that leads me to wonder: Which performers or composers or entire styles of music did you have to keep coming back to before you got it? Which records did you hate as a kid that you now love as an adult? Please let me know ([email protected]), and if you don’t mind, I may wind up putting your answer in this space a couple of months from now.

Cryo Me A River
My life as an audiophile can be divided into six distinct eras:

ERA I (1966–1969): My family’s (monophonic) Webcor record player, which I annexed: the rare sin for which this Catholic feels zero guilt.

ERA II (1970–1981): Various humble component systems purchased with funds from my first precollege part-time jobs.

ERA III (1982–1985): The high-end era begins with my purchase of a Rega Planar 2 and winds down with Conrad-Johnson electronics and Magnepan speakers—all very good in their way. But halfway through this era was a dip in pleasure when I somehow wound up with a SOTA Sapphire turntable (with a record clamp so badly designed that the user had to distend the suspension springs every time it was applied), Spectral DMC-5 preamp, and BEL amp: a combo that sounded Godawful through a pair of Thiel speakers.

ERA IV (1986–1995): Flat Earth Artie: Linn LP12 and Roksan Xerxes turntables, Naim electronics, early Epos and ProAc speakers. A good time musically and sonically, if just a wee bit cultish.

ERA V (1996–2007): Low-power tubes and Lowthers—about the latter, the less said the better—and then, beginning in 2000, moderate-power tube amps and Quad electrostatics.

ERA VI (2008–PRESENT): Low-power tube amps and speakers that aren’t Lowthers—first Audio Note AN-Es, which I still admire, then various horns.

I love where I am. The hi-fi I have now, which I’m listening to as I write this—Garrard 301 and Thorens TD124 turntables (I still mean to dedicate one to stereo and the other to mono, and I still can’t decide which should be which), EMT, Ortofon, and Denon pickup heads and cartridges, an Auditorium 23 Hommage T2 step-up transformer, Shindo Monbrison preamp and Cortese power amp, and 1966 Altec Flamenco speakers, with Shindo, Auditorium 23, and Luna cables—does everything I want and need: color, texture, touch, force, flow, momentum, and scale, plus a pretty wide frequency range, convincing spatial performance on stereo records, and enough clarity and freedom from gross colorations that I can review gear with it.

Looking back, the only things I miss from time to time are my Linn-Naim-ProAc system and that original Roksan Xerxes (all of said products having been sold a while back) and my Quads (which I still have but don’t get to use very often: There isn’t room in this house to maintain two full-size systems). I miss the Webcor a little, if only for its simplicity and portability, but it didn’t sound nearly as good as the portable KLH stereo owned by my best friend’s family.

The worst part of my job is the steady stream of disruptions to that system (although the results are often happy-making, as with the Ortofon SPU Century, Air Tight ATM-300R, etc.). The best part of my job is that I sometimes get to travel back in time and revisit individual products or whole technologies I used to live with. So it was in late summer 2019, when I received not only a generous loan of a mid-1980s all-Naim amplification system but a damn good excuse to take my Quad ESL speakers out of mothballs (footnote 2).

Footnote 1: Only 100 copies were pressed of the original 1959 release; virtually all were given away, some to reviewers and folk-music archivists, others by sneaking them into record-store bins.

Footnote 2: I actually keep them in vacuum-pack mattress bags: Dust and Quads really hate each other.

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