Brown. Everything has to be brown.

Definitely.

Black speakers won’t do. If you get black speakers, it’s all you’ll pay attention to. You’ll be miserable.

Dude, I’m right there with you, brown all the way. Brown laminate and if it’s a little greasy and chipped, all the better. Hang on, what’s this…

(I click furiously on the listing title, too-eagerly watching the little rainbow-spinny thing next to my cursor, my credit card vibrating in my wallet.)

Bose 201 Series 3′s…dude check these out…

Interesting…what’s that thing on the top?

Hold it I’m looking. Oh shit check it out – you turn that thing and it moves this little flap in front of the tweeter so you can like, aim the sound or something,

No shit? That’s crazy. They look good though. How big are they? You don’t want something tiny. Small is fine. Tiny is not fine.

Nah not too small – they look kind of chunky actually. I dig how they lay kind of horizontally…

That is cool…What was that Pete was talking about? His roomate in the Seventies had them up on special stands or something? See if you can find the stands for those things…

(I search for “Bose stands” and turn up a pair of 201′s on stands. Buy it Now for three hundred smackers.)

Nice. Calli says Bose are shit though. When I was looking for new speaks he told me to check out Missions. I’m pretty sure that’s what’s in his rig. So I got Missions and they sound DOPE. Seriously, you should check out the Missions. Seriously. Calli doesn’t fuck around.

Yeah? Alright. I’ll check it out.

(I add the 201′s to my Watched Items and the quest continues for another hour. We decide to check in with the project manager before breaking for lunch. She tells us everything is cool, but it would be more cool if we found some more stock examples for the production house to reference. We tell her sure, no problem, we’re on it. Seconds later we’re in the elevator.)

I like her for you. You should get her number.

i don’t know what her situation is. She probably has a boyfriend.

Yeah probably. But maybe not. Did you see the shoes today? Some kind of snakeskin thing. Very metal, right?

(He raises his eyebrows at me in lascivious agreement.)

(20 minutes later. Lots of sushi on the table.)

So the turntable is a Phillips…I’m pretty sure her dad had it in his apartment in the Seventies or something. Maybe early Eighties, but it has a Seventies smell. Anyway, it’s in the original box, pretty much mint. Big, fat, clear acrylic top – sort of kinda brownish gray. Know what I mean?

Dude, of course. Sounds perfect.

Powers up fine, but the RCA’s are all crackly and the rubber belt is all loose. I don’t think it’s been touched in decades. Just sitting in the box.

How’s the cartridge? You want a good cartridge on there – very important.

(We go on like this throughout our meal. He’s checking out a turntable on eBay that has a brown wood veneer base. He already has two turntables, but the obsession belongs to both of us now. We need old, vintage gear for listening to records. Real records, LP’s, 12-inch beauties that will re-affirm our faith in music, the world around us, our places in it. And everything must be brown, with big silver knobs that feel, when turned, as though they control not only the volume of the music but somehow align the very beams of connective power that binds all elements of the universe together into a cohesive form whose sole purpose is to rock…just a little bit…harder.)

(I’m a little jealous of the turntable he’s Watching. It’s much browner than the one in my house.)

(We stop at Radio Shack on the way back to the office. The situation is abysmal. The place is nothing like it was. Where once there were were microphones and amplifiers and all manner of analog knicknacks, now it’s all cellphones and bullshit. We leave, disgusted. It’s almost 2 pm.)

Coffee?

Hang on.

(He extracts his iPhone from his front pocket, checking the Outlook calendar and his email…looking for signs that someone, somewhere might be wondering where the hell we are. There’s an email from one of his other teams. They need something reformatted, a graphic or some crap. The kind of thing a junior should be doing, not him. We agree that, since they’ll be getting the work of a senior expert who shouldn’t have to do this kind of stuff, they can wait for it.)

So this receiver – it’s been sitting in her house for like fifteen years. It’s in the original box – WITH the original manual! She says she got the thing from her grandfather. It’s a Kenwood – big, fat fuckin knobs and a sweet VU meter – it was probably like two-fifty or something in the Seventies, which is like a MILLION dollars today, right? She sold it to me for thirty-five bucks. My mom was in town, we drove out there together to pick it up. Craigslist rules. This is why i fuckin love Craigslist. it’s the best. The thing needs nothing. ninety watts per channel and the chassis is very, very brown.

Sweet, that sounds awesome. You took your Mom with you for a Craigslist pickup? That’s crazy. So I’m pretty sure I’m gonna pull the trigger on this 8-track.

What 8-track? 8-track? Seriously?

Dude, wait til you see this thing. It’s awesome. The guy selling it has a demo on YouTube. We’ll watch it later. It’ll blow your mind.

Can you even find 8-tracks anymore? Doesn’t the tape like, degrade over time or something? How much is it?

(He sighs. Tells me to wait and check out the YouTube thing. We walk back toward the office in the hazy afternoon. Downtown Boston is buzzing with Financial District drones, book store codgers, beggars and evangelists…we soak it in, deep in thought, deep in conversation, just deep. It’s 3 pm.)

(The little red light on my phone tells me there’s a message. It’s the Very Metal project manager. In reality, she probably listens to the same bullshit everyone else does –but based on her snakeskin shoes and overall hotness we give her the benefit of the doubt. I don’t listen to the message, I just dial her extension. The production vendor has posted a new version of our video online – can she come check it out with us?)

Yes!

Definitely!

(We watch the video with her, offer some thoughts and criticisms. Quickly the conversation turns to the soundtrack. He’s talking up a storm so I un-hide my browser window and cruise the listings for “vintage+speakers+brown.”)

Hey – what are those?

(He swivels in his chair and points at a pair of free-standing Advents.)

Big-ass Advents. But I need bookshelves. I don’t have the space for that shit.

(Metal Manager asks me if I’m looking for speakers. We spend the next twenty minutes showing her all the gear we’re Watching and expounding on the virtues of vinyl. She plays along nicely, either genuinely interested, simply humoring us, or just entertained by the two goofballs she’s got on her hands this week. It’s not like there’s a whole lot of laughs around the place these days. People are walking around afraid for their jobs, scrambling for credit, sucking up to people with fancier titles who have even more reason to worry…it’s sad and desperate-feeling. Maybe it’s just me. She leaves us, laughing, obviously not sweating the project. We may not be one-hundred-percent focused, but we’re pretty fucking charming compared to the people who actually WANT to be here.)

(Couple of days later.)

Here…here it is. Check this out. Wait that ain’t it. No, this. Here. Dude watch. This is the 8-track I bought.

(On-screen is a gorgeous relic from the past, all brushed silver face, glowing LED’s and VU meters. It looks like it would be more at home on the set of ALIEN than in one’s living room. A disembodied voice explains the condition of the device in loving detail.)

That looks pretty sweet man.

Just wait he’s gonna play something.

(Now there’s a hand gripping an 8-track cassette that I would recognize from fifty paces. It’s KISS Unmasked, and the disembodied voice is shoving it into the waiting maw of the sci-fi time machine. The deck roars to life and it’s a deep track from the album, a Simmons tune called Naked City. My jaw spanks the top of my desk and the two of us are grinning ear to ear like a couple of 10-year-olds jazzed up on slurpees with a pile of Playboy’s.

No FUCKING WAY! Dude, you HAVE to buy this now!

It’s done. On the way…I had to buy it, right?!?!

(Even on YouTube, through my crap-ass multimedia speakers, the song grabs my spine, gives it a good shake, squeezes, releases, and shakes again. Gene’s bass throbs as his raspy-smooth vocal elucidates a scene from a more vibrant, more actualized era. That’s the effect this music has on us – now more than ever. Especially now when things are so tightly-wound, so predictable and safe and confusing and scary and homoginized and dark and fast and somehow not as real as they should be. Things are weird for us. Seventies KISS on 8-track is the opposite of weird. It’s anti-weird. It is, simply, the balls.

Hell yes you had to buy it. You’re lucky I didn’t see this first. That is SICK.

Right?

(Next day.)

Who should I start eating lunch with? Got any ideas?

Dude when you’re on vacation or something, you know what I do? I go and get a wrap or some bullshit and I bring it here to my desk and look at kissonline.com and eddietrunk.com and blabbermouth and shit. I have no idea. It’s like I can’t socialize at all when you aren’t around. You’ve stunted my growth entirlely.

Shut the fuck up.

(The new job is in another town miles away. He jokes with me about all the lunches I’ll enjoy at “Shenannigan’s” or “Ruby Tuesdays” or some such suburban hellhole where salads are wilted afterthoughts of iceberg lettuce and stale croutons drowned in French dressing. My office walls are bare, but we’re hanging out there anyway. Now I’m cruising eBay and Craigslist for commuter cars. I obsessively shift between Jeeps and Toyotas and Hondas. He tolerates this, weighing in on colors, numbers of cylinders required…)

My father wouldn’t be caught dead in a car with less than six cylinders…

Mine neither…but check this one out it’s a Wrangler SE with only 90k miles on it…