I REMEMBER MONO

Someday I'd like to figure out the electronics business. I started out listening to records, then got interested in the machines I needed to play them, that led to the realization that the plastic metal mass media hardware was as important as Hendrix's guitar licks and Joplin's vocals. More important — without the hardware they'd probably still be alive. Electric magic boxes have to do with so many past events: the radio in my room and in my car and the first time I heard Venus In Blue Jeans; the tape recorder and microphone into which Jimmy Clanton sang; my first TV set and my first collective experience — The Beatles on Ed Sullivan; the TV camera that watched Oswald shoot Ruby. Round and round it goes. I wonder what it would have been like not to have' been there for the first step on the Moon.

Electronics is part of a you are there/they are here approach to life. It's responsible for rock and roll as we know it. It eventually leads to the old Charlie Chan saying, "What comes first, chicken or egg?" In this case, it's '(What came first the TV set or the TV show?" Mass media U.S.A. is a group effort: people who watch TV sets, people who make sets, and people who produce programs for the sets are indispensible to each other. It's the same for people who play records, people who build record players, and people who make records. If there's one thing I've learned from my study of the electronics business, it's that none of them admit the others exist. Especially the men and women who build amps, TV's, and video recorders. They prefer life in a vacuum. I think they're embarrassed. They don't want to take sides. They turn out machines that'll play your records, but they don't want to know what record you play. This position is difficult to understand since the point of rockradio-p.a. systems-tv-video-recording studiosetc. is to exploit the media in pursuit of the message. Electronics folks stand convinced that the message shouldn't affect the design of the medium. Like workers in a giant McLuhan Worldhive, they buzz as they solder: "We make the medium for the message, but we. have nothing to say."