MoFi, Steve Hoffman, and So On

Although it's only Wednesday, it's already been a brilliant week for Seventies music here at Casa Baruth. Certain music-forum posters and/or Road&Track editors are likely to disagree, of course.

When my friend Chuck texted me in the dead of night to say he had a line on an affordable copy of Mobile Fidelity's vinyl pressing of Steely Dan's Aja and to inquire as to whether I was interested in buying said copy, I nearly broke my fingers trying to affirm the purchase decision. I bought the MoFi "Gold Ultradisc" of Aja way, way back in 1989. It was $24.99 at the time, real money. Why a seventeen-year-old who earned five dollars an hour before tax would spend that kind of cash on what was already "old peoples' music" at the time remains somewhat unclear to me, although I was the seventeen-year-old in question.

At the time, I had a Denon DCD-620 and a set of Sennheiser headphones and I thought that CD sounded better than anything else in the world. My ears were pretty good back then, having not yet suffered the ten years of competitive shooting and ten years of club racing and two years of owning a Lotus Seven clone where the exhaust exited two feet from my head. But after reading the Steve Hoffman forum, it turns out I was wrong. They say that the MoFi gold CD is "mediocre" and the vinyl is "worst ever, a rare miss." The Cisco vinyl pressing is what I want. It's the only version that comes from the true master tapes.

But wait! That one guy who sells "hot stamper" records has a testimonial that says MoFi is "tonally weird" and Cisco isn't telling the truth! Only a hot stamper is good enough! Fuck my life! And although Better Records has a "hot stamper" Aja for only $179.99, I just know that if I bought it I'd regret not waiting for a "super hot stamper" or a "white hot stamper"! I'd better just be content with my MoFi versions, even though they are hardly any less shitty than an old white cassette with Dr. Pepper stains on it that's been run through a Pioneer car tape deck a thousand times!

It's very tempting to read discussions like the one to which I linked regarding the MoFi Aja and just conclude that it's all a bunch of over-privileged idiots convincing themselves that they have golden hi-fi ears. They see themselves as princesses of the audio world, forever listening for the shadow of a pea beneath fifteen mattresses of original mastering. And then... the Steve Hoffman 24k remaster of Crosby, Stills, and Nash's adult-rock anthem album CSN appears at my doorstep.

I've been listening to CSN nonstop since Amazon Prime added it as a freebie a few months ago. I didn't know the album at all prior to this, though of course I'd heard "Dark Star" and "Just A Song Before I Go". As I'm sure many of you know, it's an absolutely brilliant effort from three people who hated each other, much like "Abbey Road" was for the Beatles. As a forty-three-year-old man, I find "Dark Star" more compelling than ever. It's the very opposite of all the love-at-first-sight songs:

I met you several years ago The times they were so strange, but I had a feeling You looked into my eyes just once An instant flashing by that we were stealing

Then, farther down, emphasis mine:

We must make some time together Take the kids and find a world that's ours to keep Now you've got me dreaming girl It's been so long that I thought that I'd forgotten how My heart is once again my soul We touched, we did, you know we did, no more teasing now

As a father, I blanch at that line; there are few things as traumatic for children as being swept along in the romantic intrigues of their parents. But I also know the feeling of being in love with someone who has children and dreaming of the day when you'll all move in and find happiness together.

Dark star, I see you in the morning Dark star, a' sleeping next to me Dark star, let the memory of the evening Be the first thing that you think of When you open up your smile and see me, dark star

That's a plea, by the way. When you wake up, don't think about the bills to pay, the ache in your tooth, the warning light on your car's dashboard, your children or the nights on which they were conceived. Let the memory of the evening / be the first thing that you think of. Be here, with me, in the present, dark star.

Amazon Prime has a woman's habit of changing its mind and taking free music away, you know, so I decided to buy a CD of CSN just in case. A little research showed that Steve Hoffman had done a master from the original tapes for an Audio Fidelity 24k CD. It was twenty-five bucks, and if I could spend that as a kid I could certainly do it now.

The disc arrived yesterday and I thought I'd put it on briefly before getting on the elliptical machine. Two hours later, I finally got up to get some exercise. The hype was real. I could hear things on this disc that just didn't exist on Amazon's streaming MP3. The bass parts in particular had so much more definition to them. It was almost like hearing a different performance. After I exercised, I sat down to listen again. That's how I spent most of yesterday evening; listening to an old Crosby, Stills, and Nash record. And some of you think I have an exciting life.

When the MoFi vinyl of Aja arrives at my house, will I experience a similar revelation? I hope so, because I paid real money for the record. (Well, Chuck paid, and I owe him, anyway.) But there's part of me that says I should stop trying to polish the glass through which I see the Seventies past darkly. That there's great music out there right now and I should find it.

I'm not listening to that part of me.