The eighth UK pressing of The Beatles’ Please Please Me (oh yeah)
sounded distorted on the snares and rickety Rickenbacker rhythms. I know because
you played it over and over, swapping out the AE5 speakers for JBLs and Evergreen
interconnects. Sometimes you dropped the needle closer to the end of the track before.
That was even more annoying because the song ends like “you you you hoo.”
You stood in different parts of the room to isolate the defect. I would get up sometimes
and watch you from the Sodastream in the next room. You mostly observed by putting
your ear to either woofer or standing in the distance. I don’t know if
that’s how sound travels, but if it were a shape, the three of you made an
isosceles triangle (two identical lines separated by a fixed distance). For the most
part, I thought it sounded normal for being so old. I could make out the words just
fine, which doesn’t mean you were wrong.
A graduate of the University of Illinois and Young Chicago Authors, Nilay Gandhi lives
in Chicago and is working on a new collection of fiction, prose poetry, and half-truths
entitled Triumph.
