What Jeff's Spinning

August 25, 2007

I had a long talk with Jeff Catalano this week. Jeff owns and runs High Water Sound, an audio dealership and distributorship in the town so nice they had to name it twice -- New York, NY. Amidst talk of Jeff's 20,000 LPs and collection of phono cartridges, he mentioned his blog, which is linked on the High Water Sound website. I am a professed blog hater. I can only take so much rambling self-absorption mixed with pictures of house pets. But Jeff's terse blog is different and seems to be a perfect extension of him. "I feel like I just shed a skin" begins the June entry, which goes on to poeticize life in America today with sympathy and anger. It ends with "I welcome June," which sounds to me like a distant echo of the opening line of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land": "April is the cruellest month."

What will keep people visiting, however, are the eclectic listings of LPs Jeff plays on a pair of German-built TW-Acustic turntables. In March it was Radiohead, Junior Kimbrough and the Butthole Surfers, while April saw Moby Grape and The Clash. The two Warren Zevon titles in July – Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School and Excitable Boy -- caught my eye, as did the Jo Jones Trio's Self. This month Jeff has been spinning records by Duane Eddy, The Sir Douglas Quintet, Chico Hamilton and a host of other notables. He writes, "Thankfully, I have friends: Raven AC-Graham Phantom-Dynavector XV1-S" -- his 'table, 'arm and cartridge of choice.