In the summer of 1969, when I was 11, I bought a stereo system at the local hi-fi shop... I spent long afternoons in my room, listening to records... I didn't listen particularly loud, at least not compared to my college days when I actually set my loudspeakers on fire by cranking up the volume too high, but the noise was evidently too much for my parents... My father was a businessman; he worked 80 hour weeks... Being the businessman that he was, my father made me a proposition: he would buy me a pair of headphones if I would promise to use them when he was home. Those headphones changed the way I listened to music forever . . . READ MORE
In the summer of 1969, when I was 11, I bought a stereo system at the local hi-fi shop. It cost all of the $100 I had earned weeding neighbor's gardens that spring at 75 cents an hour. I spent long afternoons in my room, listening to records: Cream, The Rolling Stones, Chicago, Simon & Garfunkel, Bizet, Tchaikovsky and the saxophonist Boots Randolph. I didn't listen particularly loud, at least not compared to my college days when I actually set my loudspeakers on fire by cranking up the volume too high, but the noise was evidently too much for my parents. My mother is a novelist; she wrote every day in the den just down the hall and played the piano for an hour every night before dinner. My father was a businessman; he worked 80 hour weeks, 40 of those hours in his office at home on evenings and weekends. Being the businessman that he was, my father made me a proposition: he would buy me a pair of headphones if I would promise to use them when he was home. Those headphones changed the way I listened to music forever.
The new artists that I was listening to were all exploring stereo mixing for the first time. Because the speakers that came with my $100 all-in-one stereo system weren't very good, I had never before heard the depth that I could hear in the headphones - the placement of instruments both in the left-right field and in the front-back (reverberant) space. Records were no longer just about the songs for me anymore, but about the sound. Headphones opened up a world of sonic colors, a palette of nuances and details that went far beyond the chords and melody, the lyrics, or a particular singer's voice. The swampy deep south ambience of "Green River" by Creedence, or the pastoral, open-space beauty of The Beatles' "Mother Nature's Son"; the oboes in Beethoven's Sixth (conducted by Karajan), faint and drenched in the ambience of a large wood and stone church; the sound was an enveloping experience. Headphones also made the music more personal for me; it was suddenly coming from inside my head, not out there in the world. This personal connection is ultimately what drove me to become a recording engineer and producer myself.
Many years later, Paul Simon told me that the sound is always what he was after, too. "The way that I listen to my own records is for the sound of them; not the chords or the lyrics - my first impression is of the overall sound."
Wednesday, May 7, 2008 - This is Your Brain on Music
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