With Jazz on the Turntable and a Drink in His Hand

Philip’s house was bigger than ours, and more run down. The hockey equipment stacked against the wall of the entryway spilled across the floor, which was scuffed by sneakers and boots and the Bauer ice skates that were the chief means of reckoning with the long Michigan winter.

The kitchen, the linoleum headquarters of Philip’s mother, was in back. Seated at a small table, her hair in curlers, she spoke on the phone or worked through the newspaper with an ashtray and cigarettes at her side.

In the early 1970s, I spent as much time at Philip’s house as his parents would allow, and Philip’s parents were lenient. I don’t remember ever having eaten anything there that my own mother would have identified as dinner. Breakfast was the prevailing meal; cereal was the champion of breakfasts.

An exhausted sofa squatted in the living room, beside an armchair that matched its fatigue pound for pound, year for year, boy for boy. Positioned around the furniture were the objects that gave Philip’s family meaning and identity. A stereo turntable rested atop a kind of pulpit, appropriate to the reverence in which it was held. The speakers were the most powerful I had heard. When the volume rose, they rattled the windows and pushed music out to the sidewalk and street beyond.

Guitars, amps, cords, cases, and microphones, along with various instruments—in storage, on loan, or in transit—all found a place on the first floor. They appeared, disappeared, and reappeared at the sole discretion of Philip’s older brother, Billy.

A skinny, long-haired underclassman at the local public high school, Billy was already cashing checks as a bass player. His parents treated him the way their elders might have treated a son bound for the seminary. His gleaming black Rickenbacker was their version of a new Buick, something in which the entire family took pride. The Rickenbacker appeared immune from