Audiophiles May Not Love Music, But We Love the
Sounds It Makes…
I had my aunt up for a visit over Thanksgiving. She
actually stayed in the apartment with us, so we went through one of our frantic -- and all
too infrequent -- cleaning rituals, shipping reviewed products back to manufacturers,
coiling up and storing all the unused cables, filing the CDs and records back on the
shelves.
So once again we appear to be living like other people.
Sort of. We may have three unused subwoofers stashed behind the sofa, but we can actually
see what color the carpet is.
It was fun having Nancy visit. My dad was the firstborn in
a huge country family and Nancy was the baby -- which makes her only a few years older
than my older brother. And she is very childlike (read: like me) in the way she
still follows her enthusiasms.
For example, she loves football, so she has managed to
finagle a job as one of the hostesses at the Superbowl. She has to wear a gown and greet
the owners at a pre-game party or two and she has to meet'n'greet some bigwigs in a luxury
box on game day, but then she can go watch the game. She does something similar for the
Kentucky Derby.
And lately, she's been following the Dwight Yoakam band
around the South, going to his concerts and hanging out with the band after the show. I
think this is pretty cool, myself. I like Dwight and think the band is topnotch, so I
approve of her taste.
Which is pretty presumptuous of me, since she 's been
listening to country music since before I was born. In fact, she and her sister Betty went
to hear poor, doomed Hank Williams sing when my mother was pregnant with me -- which
places it somewhere in mid-1952.
I got a chill when she let that little tidbit drop. I had
just played her Billy Joe Shaver's "Tramp On Your Street," which is, of course,
his song about going to hear Hank Williams sing. "A long time ago, no shoes on my
feet / I walked ten miles of train track to hear Hank Williams sing / His body was worn,
but his spirit was free / And he sang every song, lookin' straight out at me."
I asked Nancy if she'd told Dwight or the band about going
see Hank Williams, but she's looking forward to seeing them perform at Buck Owens' Crystal
Palace on New Year's Eve more than she's looking back on the past. She doesn't seem to get
it that, to me -- and I suspect to a whole generation of country musicians -- seeing Hank
Williams was like seeing this great river called country at its source.
Of course, she doesn’t see it that way. She knows that
"country" existed before that. She remembers when it was called
"hillbilly" music, to distinguish it from "cowboy" (read:
Western) or the blues.
While she was here, I figured I'd impress the heck out of
her by playing her my hi-fi. She'd undoubtedly never heard a $70,000 stereo rig before, so
I reckoned I could knock her out with it. I was wrong. She liked it well enough, but she
couldn't sit still through an entire song. She'd heard the records before. She was more
interested in the people -- and in the songs she hadn't heard previously.
She could hear that the system was clean and clear, but
when I tried to talk about imaging and soundstaging, she just got bored. It was quite a
lesson for an ardent audiophile. We audiophiles aren't the only people who love music. In
fact, sometimes we need to face facts: As much as we love music, we also love the toys
that bring it to us. And we're probably the only ones who don't realize that.
John Cage said, "Let no one imagine that in owning a
recording he has the music. The very practice of music is a celebration that we own
nothing." And he's right -- Nancy proved to me that it's not just musicians who don't
need fancy stereos to experience the music. She has a good, but nothing special hi-fi at
home -- in fact, she informed me that she wants to buy a Bose Wave system for her new
apartment and just looked at me in disgust when I tried to talk her out of it.
And you can't tell me that music isn't important to her --
it obviously is. It's just hi-fi that fails to move her. Even the good stuff --
even the best of the good stuff. She'd rather hear her music live -- and don't you dare
shush her so she'll hear the good parts, thank you very much.
It was just one more thing I had to be thankful for this
Thanksgiving. Also one more reason to be humble: No matter how much I love music, I
learned once again that my way is not the only way. And that as good as hi-fi can
be, it's not nearly as important as the music it brings us.
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhifi.com
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