Journal No. 24, Normalcy

Making things is hard

1. Ca. 1950

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Saul Marantz, sitting in his basement in Queens, soldering away in total anonymity. He came back from World War 2 and seems to have fallen in love with classical guitar. He was a graphic designer by training, not an electrical engineer or even a radio repairman – though he did work in naval communications during the war. Anyway, whatever music he listened to at home, however he listened to it, the situation was unsatisfactory enough that he learned how to make his own components. And that’s what the basement in Queens was for: that was his little lab.

Why Marantz? Why the classical guitar? Who knows. As happens to so many of us, you hear something at the one right point in your life and it never leaves you. You become enraptured with the properties of sound itself. Marantz loved classical guitar enough that he actually became friends with Andres Segovia(!) and helped write a book(!!) with Segovia(!!!) about classical guitar technique.

Now, that’s just one guy. There were a dozen of them, all over the country, plugging away at the same problem: let’s make listening better. Frank McIntosh and Gordon Gow started in Maryland, and then moved to New York. Marantz, obviously, was in The City. Leo Fender got his start as a radio repairman, then began making instruments, and amplifiers, for his friends – gigging country musicians working the Bakersfield-Los Angeles circuit.

“Make it sound better.”

That’s it; that’s the mission.

I don’t know why they cared about this stuff. They’re dead, so I can’t ask them. And even if I could’ve asked, they may not have known why either. Maybe it was just a problem to solve for friends. Legacy is funny, because it only works in retrospect; in 1950, nobody knew who Fender or Jim Marshall were.

I’m not even entirely sure why I care about this stuff, but I do. I don’t want to go searching for reasons why. I am tired of having to justify myself. I’m tired of having to put myself in a box to make myself consumable. I want to feel wonder and let it be.

2.

The years between 1948-1955 were extraordinarily important in the history of modern music. All of the following categories emerged simultaneously, and without any of them, there probably is no rock’n’roll.

1. The teenager emerged as a social category;

2. Music by and for teens emerged as a genre;

3. Rock’n’roll separated itself from both blues and country. Blues also underwent a radical transformation, from acoustic-delta to electrified-delta (Chicago) blues; blue separated itself subtly from jazz, while rock morphed into pop-blues;

4. A surge of young men came home from war with sophisticated technical training and plenty of experience making things work on the fly;

5. The GI bill, the first generation of suburbs, general upward mobility and consumer spending to match;

6. Soaring consumer spend, paired with the spawning of television and radio and the first records concurrently drove mass adoption of all of them;

7. Which drove the need for specialized gear to support three similar-but-different mass mediums;

8. Which drove the need to differentiate media gear based on tiered “premium” experiences.

This is effectively a tidal wave of social-technical-media change. Now multiply that with the following:

9. The industry of radio repair and music instrument making had no borders or even conventional wisdom. Nobody knew anything; there were no rules.

It was all experimental. There was no normal.

~1948-1955 is a period where relatively young men (this scene has always been overwhelmingly male) made gear for peer-or-younger performers to play for younger audiences. The desire for “more, bigger, faster, louder” was relentless from the beginning. It’s no coincidence that hot-rod car culture began roughly at this point, too.

I only wonder – how many Saul Marantz’s don’t we know about? How many brilliant technicians died with their ideas never having seen beyond the owner’s own garage or study?

3.

Marantz did two things right. He was clever and he was fast.

Why was he clever? He incorporated a new industry standard into his preamp design. At the time, record companies used their own standards for mixing and mastering. As a result, no record sounded the same system-to-system, label-to-label. By introducing the RIAA standard 20hz to 20khz curve into a sound system, he created a dynamic new listening experience.

Fast? He implemented the change first and brought it to market first. His basement was the shop and the lab, and then it became a Manhattan retailer, and now, 70 years later, Marantz is still synonymous with “high fidelity audio,” analog or digital.

Why was he the first to do it?

I have no idea.

I’d guess many people were satisfied with what they had. They were happy to be in the slipstream of good-enough. I’m sure many people knew what the problem was; Marantz sold a batch of 100 quickly, so you can’t argue about demand. Maybe other folks didn’t have the skill to solve the problem. Maybe they thought his solution didn’t “need” to be done, or that the RIAA standard (which is now the “gold standard”) would ultimately fall by the wayside — I could make a thousand arguments against New, Different and Strange. In the end, they were wrong.

Change means you are going to fail. Change means you will be exposed when you are failing. As I have recently discovered, proposing change sets you up for ritualistic cutting-down; devouring by judgement; most observers are invested in doing nothing, and therefore, demand you be sacrificed for being different and seeing differently.

I don’t fault anyone for writing Saul Marantz off, or McIntosh, just like I don’t fault private equity for lapping up these luxury brands years after they’ve made themselves canonical. It’s safe to worship them now, so money worships them. PE doesn’t want to be first — that’s a risk — and doesn’t want to be last — what’s left to liquidate? PE behavior is totally in accordance with its passion and purpose.

Even daring to envision oneself as Marantz, or McIntosh, or that kind of builder, is haughty and ridiculous. You have no shot. No chance. The decision flow-grid says the math is stacked against you; give up, go home, be less strange — change the vision into something we already recognize.

Had Marantz followed any of these ways-of-being, he wouldn’t have ended up as a mass communications legend.

It’s not just Marantz. It’s Gow, McIntosh, Reeves, Marshall, Fender, there are many others I know I’m forgetting – no one person can stop the onslaught of lowest-common-denominator slop. But you can always choose what to put your name on. These men chose not to settle; they rejected junk.

4. Ca. 1994

I’m trying to think of the first album that stopped me cold. There’s several.

My best friend at the time, J, had an older brother, B. J was smart and athletic and already cool, and B was like J only older and more enigmatic, more artsy, more knowing. They had an awesome house. I remember they’d just moved from a townhouse into a bigger lot either on or near a wide, arcing cul-de-sac. I remember a sunny afternoon. I remember finding this record lying around, with a screaming orange figure on it, warped, black shadows, but orange. You can see the mouth open, agape, an oblique hole in a melting body, but I remember most is the brilliant vermillion color of the album art. Fuckin weird as hell.

Soundgarden’s “Superunknown.”

Angry, churning, full of indecipherable lyrics and mean, menacing guitars. I know the riffs but it was the fullness of the tone, the depth of it, the pure power –

Where does that come from? How do you do that?

I remember going off to summer camp with Stone Temple Pilots “Core” on my Walkman. I must’ve had “Purple” with me, too. I remember playing Plush over and over again; what a harrowing and dense, layered song. I still swear by Interstate Love Song as a reference; I have spent years trying to understand how to mix guitar distortion in a way that is somehow snarling, orchestral and glimmering all at once.

I remember these music videos as a collective unit full of oblique angles and VHS-grain bodies and odd lighting. My mom – always the teacher – forbade me from watching MTV, but I found the videos anyway, in my subtle little acts of rebellion.

I was a docile, tame kid and a docile, tame teenager, too, and these songs were unhinged. I played them over and over, like I was in a daze, like somehow the band knew exactly what condition I was in. Somehow, their sludgewall of guitars made innate sense to me. I had no idea how they did it, but I understood it like they were speaking to me personally.

5.

When you pitch a panel of judges, and they react with disdainful mockery, when they look at your quest for truth-in-acoustics and call it a cute hobby, unworthy of their time — a part of you dies. A part of you cannot come back from that experience the same as when you entered the room. And maybe that’s how it should be. Maybe everyone should face this kind of life-negating ridicule as part of one’s growing-up. “You get used to it.” “Get a thicker skin.”

I can’t argue with that. Getting used to “no” is important.

A room like that does thicken your skin. It also teaches you something critically important about the adult world, which is to say, it can often be pre-dead. No more Legos. No more toys. No exploration. No curiosity. They’ve been replaced — Aged? Matured? Beaten? — into pattern-matching boolean-compute expectations. You go into a room like that one way, and leave it with less of yourself than when you began.

In our feedback, we were told that “entrepreneurship is passion with a purpose, it’s not just about you.” I had the survey data that answers this. There are millions of guitarists who just want to hear themselves as they are. Maybe my data was ineffective. Maybe I failed to communicate it clearly. Of course, had I used more of it, I’m sure I’d have been told the story was too dense.

When you have an oddball product, you will be met with open hostility — until you meet the one right voice.

About a week after the pitch, my team and I attended a “demo day.” We didn’t win any money there, but it was the fastest three hours of my life. We had old men, mostly my parents age or slightly younger, queuing up to talk to us about what we wanted to do and how and why and the economics of it and the fact they saw Aerosmith in ‘72 with Blue Oyster Cult in a small club outside Boston – it was like that all day, story after story.

We had a well-annotated copy of the RCA Tube Manual – the gold standard text in this space. Eyes lit up. Engineers are not famously emotional, but there was real, personal joy in seeing these vintage texts come out of the cobwebs and get put to practical use. Analog sound technology is not going to die.

Some rooms will give you will-to-live. Others will be a vortex of suck. I’m sure Marantz encountered vortices of suck. You can’t avoid them. My only advice is to know yourself and know your mission. Know why you’re doing what you’re doing. Know your own value and don’t let the vortex rewrite anything.

I’m in a strategy class now. We recently spoke about “Blue Ocean” concepts — i.e., finding new opportunities in uncharted waters. They give us systems and matrices and flow-grids, but this only speaks to the great irony of the class: they want to use known-knowns to seek out unknown-unknowns. Really new thinking is done by guys in basements who have obscure obsessions – to find truly uncharted waters, you need people who see the map differently.

No matrix can make that happen on its own. No decision flow-grid is going to un-seize someone who believes “customary” means “frozen.”

For a company to really find new opportunities, you need well-developed human beings with lots of interests and hobbies and you need a culture of divergent thinking, which means you need strange people who can be, it is true, hard to manage. Watching people try to automate outside-the-box thinking makes me sad more than it makes me angry.

6.

I can’t make someone fall in love with music. I can’t make someone want to sit with sound so rich it is tactile; beams of mids, shimmering top-end and fat, warm lows so full you can swim through them — I can’t make someone want to experience that. I feel sorry for people who don’t seem to even want to have transcendent experiences. It’s not my job to save them.

I have a responsibility to two people: the two undergraduate engineers who agreed to go on a journey with me. We’re not making stuff for everybody and we don’t see the world like most others do. We’re not, I guess, “normal.” We don’t want to make firmware that evaporates ten days from now.

All we’re trying to do is follow the customs and traditions of a craft and skillset that predates us considerably. Those customs have staying power for a reason.

We will see.

-A