US: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
Jason Victor Serinus
The Los Angeles and Orange County Audio Society (LAOCAS) has chosen John Atkinson, former editor-in-chief and now technical editor of Stereophile, as the winner of its 29th annual Founder’s Award. The award comes 57 years after JA1 began making recordings on his first tape recorder and 46 years after he began working at a hi-fi magazine, as an editorial assistant at British magazine Hi-Fi News & Record Review.
John’s career has been illustrious and varied. Due to his self-described “schizophrenic nature,” he was passionately drawn to music but excelled in science. John said goodbye to formal instrumental study and went the science route, earning a B.Sc. in physics and chemistry from the University of London and postgrad certification as a high school science teacher. He then began working in a government research lab, where he made his own transistors.
Around the same time, he began performing in bands. One gig was as a member of the short-lived British folk-rock band Back Alley Choir, on whose sole, eponymous album, released in 1972, he played bass and sang. Another band, led by Matthew Ellis, recorded at Abbey Road Studios, inspiring John to abandon his scientific career. When the band manager ran off with the recording’s advance and record-release plans vaporized, JA was out of a job.
After that, John spent four years touring with “teen singing sensation” Helen Shapiro while doing other gigs. “The album I was most proud of was Obie Clayton,” by the three-person Obie Clayton band, engineered by Jerry Boys of later Buena Vista Social Club fame, released in 1975 on DJM Records. The album was a “Porky’s Prime Cut”; you can listen to a track, “Blues for Beginners,” on Stereophile’s website.1
In September 1976, JA1 became an editorial assistant at British magazine . “I continued with my career as a musician for 18 months after joining ,” John said. “It was the summer of ’78, when I was playing matinees and weekend evenings in a vaudeville show, that I decided to stop. I was sitting in the music pit, looking down at the music and looking up at the stage, when it hit me that you learn about music and improve your’s editor-inchief. By the end of 1985, he had almost doubled the magazine’s circulation. Larry Archibald, ’s owner and publisher, snatched him away to succeed founder J. Gordon Holt, this magazine’s founder, as editor.
