33 1/3

I remember that fateful Sunday in early February when I met up with Michael and his family for lunch in Brooklyn. That's when I told him about my plans to move back to the Bay Area and take a job at my current newspaper. Michael sounded skeptical.

"I just want to have all my stuff in one place," I told him. "I want to listen to my records."

"So you listen to your records and then what?" Michael asked me.

I thought for a second. "Then I'll listen to more records."

Such was the thought process back then and here I am, nearly four months later. Just a few weeks ago, I finished compiling the components to my new sound system, and yes indeed I'm listening to my records. So was it worth it, you ask? That's a hard question to answer. But I am enjoying my records.

I've been listening to Bruce Springsteen's "Nebraska," which I played probably all of once back before I went to Brazil. This time around, I'm connecting to the Boss for some reason, to the loneliness of the record, the desolate tales of violence. I was about a mile away when Springsteen performed at the Lincoln Memorial before the inauguration and basically watched him on the Jumbotron screens and was impressed by his agonized howling, his body jerking up and down in the cold, him just unloading into the microphone. "Nebraska" is much different from that performance with its gospel choir and such, but it's designed to haunt and it's haunting me.

I've enjoyed my cassette tapes too. Miles Davis, for example, sounds great after four years in storage, and I was grooving to Workin' With the Miles Davis Quintet the other night. I haven't really sat down and listened to Miles for years. So sitting there in the semi-dark listening to him float from my JBL speakers, that dude seduced me all over again. His tight, bad-ass control of the instrument, his muted tone swooping and diving, sounding like a whisper on the low end and a child on the high, his precise, lethal phrasing.

I've also listened to Robyn Hitchcock, Bob Dylan and the Band, Brian Eno and Harold Budd, Throwing Muses, a lot of the Byrds. I play one record and then I play another.