It was 1975. I was 21 years old. It was time to buy my first serious stereo system because if it was 1975 and you were 21 years old, that’s what you were supposed to do. I enlisted by buddy, George, to aid me in purchasing the requisite components — a stereo receiver, a turntable, and a pair of speakers. George was five years older than me. He still is. So, at 26, he was considerably more knowledgeable and worldly than I was, at least in my 21-year-old view of the world. Plus, he already had a serious stereo system. That made him the perfect choice.
As fortune would have it, 1975 also was the year Little Feat’s The Last Record Album came out, as did Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run. George and I owned both of those albums, of course. They helped us develop the ritual we employed to find the components I’d need to assemble my first serious stereo system. Here’s how it worked:
We’d determine which stereo shop we were going to visit on each foray. Then we’d grab, in no particular order:
- The keys to one of our cars
- The Last Record Album
- Born to Run
- The consciousness-altering substances we’d smoke, ingest, and/or imbibe on the way to the stereo shop du jour.
We’d fine-tune our intake of said substances such that we’d be suitably blasted by the time we got where we were going but still together enough to function well enough to make our desires known reasonably coherently. We’d ask to be set up in the sound room. We’d settle into some chairs, pull out our copies of The Last Record Album and Born to Run, and ask the attendant to play one or the other of the records through a series of variously connected components to hear how they sounded.
After visiting all the stereo shops within a reasonable driving distance over a series of months, without visiting any shop twice for fear of wearing out our welcomes — or being arrested — we finally narrowed our options down to a buying decision. We scored each component from a different shop:
- A Marantz 2270 Stereo Receiver. (The price was lower in 1975, before it became vintage.)
- A Dual 502 belt-drive turntable. (I don’t recall the price.)
- A pair of Audioanalyst A-100X speakers. (The price was higher in 1975, before they become vintage.)
Since I aspired to have hearing aids someday (I succeeded), I eventually upgraded the Marantz receiver, which was rated at a measly 70 watts per channel. I replaced it with a Phase Linear 400 power amp, which was rated at 200 watts per channel. It produced enough volume to peel the paint from my walls, to cause the neighbors on either side of me to move away, and to permanently damage my hearing.
Mission: Accomplished.
Oh, Yeah. The Music
I never did become the Bruce Springsteen fan I was supposed to be. George and I always played “Born to Run” and “Meeting Across the River” in the stereo shops we visited. We wanted to hear the differences in frequency responses and dynamics between those two cuts. I will admit, though, I still have a major soft spot for “Jungleland”. The line — “The poets down here don’t write nothin’ at all/They just stand back and let it all be” — is a piece of writing for the ages. And the saxophone solo by Clarence Clemons is a thing of power, beauty, and majesty.
I did, however, become a Little Feat fan. My two favorite tracks from The Last Record Album are “All That You Dream” and “Long Distance Love”. Given the advances in recording technology, I hold out hope they’ll be remastered someday.
And yes. While George and I have forgone the substances of our consciousness-altering days, we do remain friends. My life and the music I appreciate would not be the same without him.
