A poet's audio obsession, from collecting his earliest vinyl to his
quest for the ideal vacuum tubes. A captivating book that "ingeniously
mixes personal memoir with cultural history and offers us an
indispensable guide for the search of acoustic truth" (Yunte Huang,
author of Charlie Chan).
Garrett Hongo's passion for audio dates back to the Empire 398 turntable
his father paired with a Dynakit tube amplifier in their modest tract
home in Los Angeles in the early 1960s. But his adult quest begins in
the CD-changer era, as he seeks out speakers and amps both powerful and
refined enough to honor the top notes of the greatest opera sopranos. In
recounting this search, he describes a journey of identity where
meaning, fulfillment, and even liberation were often most available to
him through music and its astonishingly varied delivery systems.
Hongo writes about the sound of surf being his first music as a kid in
Hawai'i, about doo-wop and soul reaching out to him while growing up
among Black and Asian classmates in L.A., about Rilke and Joni Mitchell
as the twin poets of his adolescence, and about feeling the pulse of
John Coltrane's jazz and the rhythmic chords of Billy Joel's piano from
his car radio while driving the freeways as a young man trying to become
a poet.
Journeying further, he visits devoted collectors of decades-old audio
gear as well as designers of the latest tube equipment, listens to
sublime arias performed at La Scala, hears a ghostly lute at the grave
of English Romantic poet John Keats in Rome, drinks in wisdom from blues
musicians and a diversity of poetic elders while turning his ear toward
the memory-rich strains of the music that has shaped him: Hawaiian steel
guitar and canefield songs; Bach and the Band; Mingus, Puccini, and Duke
Ellington. And in the decades-long process of perfecting his stereo
setup, Hongo also discovers his own now-celebrated poetic voice.
