Saturday night is spent in the livingroom with Dad and some red wine listening to a doo-wop CD I brought over for him. A CD of the early 'bird' groups: The Cardinals, Ravens, Orioles, Robins, Larks, Wrens and Swallows. Dad sits with his box of old 45's and a guide book of vintage record prices, flipping pages and cross referencing as each new song begins. He proudly holds up a $1000 Larks record with about $950 worth of scratches on it. Some of the rarer songs he hasn't heard since he was a boy. You can plainly see when a certain song moves him, and he starts shushing me so I don't miss a particularly brilliant & nuanced vocal, and I assure him that I won't miss a thing and neither will the neighbors seeing as he's blasting it so damn loud. And he's right, the singing is phenomenal, all dreamy & haunting and filled with graceful phrasing and subtlety. Simple recordings where you can hear the insides of rooms in the early '50s. Large ribbon microphones, glowing vacuum tubes and plate reverb. You think of boys in suits & brimmed hats, and girls in wool skirts & monogrammed sweaters, and everyone is smoking Chesterfields. Then, as usual, my father starts to bemoan my (lack of)musical sensibilities, and obnoxiously asks why I can't create a song with nice chords and a beautiful melody, and this triggers a full-blown argument about music where we are each playing devil's advocate to the extreme, feigning complete outrage at one another's opinions. Mom is yelling from another room: Hey you two, shuttup!