The First Watt F8

I spent my childhood summers on the Reichert family farm near Turtle Lake, Wisconsin, where, inside the red 1880s barn, my uncle Harold played 78rpm records for his cows.

- HERB REICHERT

He used a wind-up Victrola sitting on a shelf directly in front of the cows, just below a framed reproduction of an Alpine landscape painting. He said the music and the mountain scene relaxed the cows, causing them to give better milk. Harold played the same Gustav Mahler symphony every day. I remember how quickly each disc ended, how I had to run over and change it, and how cross he got when I played the discs in the wrong order. I remember how the room smelled like hay and wet cow pies, how half the sound from the Victrola was a scrapey, hissing noise, and how Mahler’s (and Harold’s) Austro-Bohemian German-ness dominated the room.

These sensuous farm memories entered my mind after watching a movie, Desperate Man Blues, about a notorious radio disc jockey and 78rpm record collector named Joe Bussard, who explains that he found many of his most valuable discs by knocking on the doors of houses without electricity, in one case walking waist-deep through a swamp to get there. Joe Bussard is legend. Watching him in his wood-paneled basement playing rare discs from the 1920s is the purest illustration of what an evolved, music-loving record collector looks like.

Joe wears plaid flannel shirts, drinks beer, and sits in a gray steel office chair at the end of a long wall containing thousands of brown-sleeved, unlabeled, deliberately disorganized 78rpm discs. In front of him are several turntables, including his current favorite, a Technics SP15 with an Audio Technica ATP-12T tonearm. To his side is a 1970s-looking equalizer amp with faders that he plays like a dobro (which he also plays) and a shelf with a row of cassette decks.