Throughout the years that my son, Jude (who prefers to be called Nathan) and my lovely and tough-as-nails (but not entirely sane) daughter, Megan — hey, it runs in the family, on both her mother’s and my side — through their younger years and their teens music was ever-present in their lives.
On the long Sunday afternoon drives, the monthly excursions to Seattle, the quarterly sojourns to the west coast of Vancouver Island, visits with friends on the far side of Port Coquitlam, nearly in Pitt Meadows, more often than not the music loud enough that we would all sing the lyrics together, or sometimes we would just lie back (although, I am always hyper-alert when driving) and listen to one or more of our favourite Todd Rundgren songs, or music by The Boss, The Bangles, Bob Dylan, The Ronettes, Elvis Costello, Tears for Fears, or whatever pop song was playing on hit radio — and later on, for my son, angry, profanity-laden hip hop songs — for Jude and Megan and I, music was throughout the course of every day of our lives a central feature of lives full of love, and well-lived.
In the 1970s, I was the go-to guy if you wanted to purchase new stereo equipment, or anything tech related. As you might well imagine, then, in the Tomlin household you would find the best, high-end stereo equipment, a perfectly calibrated turntable and stylus, amp, tuner and speakers, the best money could buy (I wasn’t always a pauper). My love of great stereo equipment, or lovingly created mix tapes, encompassing the broadest cross-section of music you could imagine — for most of my life, I’ve been an arts critics, the record companies only too willing to give me any vinyl record or, later, CD that I wanted, creating a vast library of music at home, played to optimum effect on the very best audio equipment available on the market — providing access to the best sound and broadest array of music you’d find outside of Business in Vancouver editor, Kirk LaPointe’s home.
My love of music, and love of tech and stereo equipment, is a feature of my life, and now my children’s lives, a gift that has been bequeathed to them.
My son is a recording engineer, putting out his own music under the name DJ Nameless. At home he has recording equipment stacked floor to ceiling, mixing equipment, turntables, all of the music both played and recorded on vinyl, or other legacy media. Jude has taken my rudimentary mixing skills (of which, I am sure he would say I have none) and developed his skill set in music & recording into an art. Listen above to one of his house records.
Every now and then — a gift from my son I very much look forward to — Jude will have found a rare recording, and contrary to the best interests of his nature, and love and commitment to the warmer sounds of legacy media, will digitize a song he’s run across in his travels, loading the mp3 into my iTunes, forever after to be a part of my 6000+ song mp3 library of lovingly crafted music of the new millennium, providing access for me both at home, and on my latest model iPhone — the soundtrack of my life.
On June 28th, 1999, Jude came over to my home for a visit (we were to go to dinner later in the afternoon), just sort of hanging out in my place, repairing for awhile to the magnificent rooftop paradise created by two of my housing co-op’s landscape visionaries, and then as it came time to go, Jude turned to me, gave me a hug (note: Jude gives the warmest and most loving hugs), Jude sitting down on my comfy office chair, leaning into my state-of-the-art computer’s CD drive, loading the song below, the first release by The Art of Noise from their concept album (vinyl, of course), The Holy Egoism of Genius, the song The Seduction of Claude Debussy.
Before he pressed play on the now loaded iTunes song, Jude turned to me and said, “You know that I think mp3s represent a corruption of sound, and I’ll never own an mp3 player, no matter how easy and available they become — but when I heard this song, I thought of you, and thought that maybe, probably, that you’d like it. You’ve always liked narrative in the music you listen to, and on occasion, a particularly compelling and well-wrought foreground narrative — which is an element of the song I am about to play for you.”
“John Hurt, who I know you like — because you’ve taken Megan and I to almost every film in which John Hurt has ever starred, or we’ve watched them at home late on a weekend night, for Megan and I, The Elephant Man and 1984 two of John Hurt’s more memorable films that we have watched with you at home, or when we were younger, at the cinema.”
Here’s the song Jude gave to me that late afternoon, early summer’s day …
