December 3, 2011
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Psychedelic Stardust
My wife and I left Seattle for England in 1995. I returned to Seattle, solo, for several months in ’97 to do some work for a physics professor while my she remained in England cranking out her post-doc. Living close to the bone in Seattle, I stayed with my dear friend and fellow geek/artist Ben, crashing on the floor of his homemade recording studio.
By day I’d bust my ass on time-critical physics problems at work. By night, well, I was still drinking back then, and so every evening I’d load up a good buzz and Ben and I would get together and record something we called music, but about which a lady friend remarked “You two can call it music if you want, but it’s sure as hell not a song.”
As far as the combination of energy output and creativity was concerned I was at the height of my powers. Missing my dear wife added the extra spark that totally set me on fire. My skills — both as a debaucher and a pursuer of excellence – were honed to an unprecedented edge. It was the best of times and the worst of times, and I was totally alive.
Something else showed sign of life one night during my stay with Ben. It was near Halloween; peak season for a certain wild mushroom of which we’d earlier partaken…and the walls were moving nicely by the time Ben and I decided to have a look inside an old-timey tube radio he had lying around. It wasn’t working, see, and I thought maybe we could fix it. So we popped the hood and found that one of the main tubes – the power rectifier tube – had obviously failed.
The good news was we could get the thing to work; all we needed was a spare 5U4 rectifier tube. The intermediate news was that, had we the inclination to scour King County, we’d have felt lucky to find a single spare 5U4 rectifier tube. The bad news was that we were more on the level of scouring Ben’s bedroom closet.
However. It occurred to me that although we didn’t have any old 5U4 rectifier tubes lyin’ around, we did have two brand-spankin’-new “solid state diodes”, and, in theory, we might be able to replace the faulty vacuum tube with these two tiny black miracles from the newfangled transistor era. Like keeping the carriage while replacing the horse with a chevy small block 289. What’s not to like?
We broke out the soldering iron and got to work. With some difficulty (as the radio was rather liquid at the time) we bridged the old tube socket with the new diodes.
All that remained was to fire it up.
The worry, though, was that these diodes might jolt the system. Transistors and solid state diodes are electronically “hard” - vacuum tubes, on the other hand, are soft. When you turn an old radio ON the rectifier tube comes up slowly (by nature), gradually coaxing up the voltage to all the other components. In contrast, when we turned on our retrofitted solid state rectifier it was gonna force ALL THE JUICE TO ALL THE COMPONENTS RIGHT AWAY.
Sure why not? So carefully we set up the radio so we could see the innards in the event the poor thing sparked or something, and then we turned it ON.
After the unusually blue rainbows melted away and I could see again, it became clear that something had most definitely sparked.
We looked for the cause. But try as we might we couldn’t see a single remnant of the tiny nuclear holocaust that had occurred.
Finding nothing I concluded that the poor radio had simply needed to “get something out out of its system,” and would probably work fine if we turned it on again. Ben disagreed. See, Ben has always been a little more scared of sparks than me. So to keep him happy we kept looking and making measurements, and poking and prodding. Eventually Ben reluctantly decided that the old radio must’ve needed to get something out of its system. After all, how many years had it been since it had seen even a single volt, let alone ALL THE JUICE TO ALL THE COMPONENTS RIGHT AWAY.
So we turned it on again. This time it didn’t make a peep…no spark. nothing. Then, ever so slowly, ever so faintly, it began to make a sound…a pleasant, warm sound.
Why, it was Glenn Miller and His Orchestra playing Stardust Memories!
Try as we might that evening, we couldn’t get that old-timey radio to pick up anything but oldies stations. I’m not even joking.
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Crazy times, man.
