A poet’s audio obsession, from his earliest vinyl to his quest for the perfect vacuum tubes, as he strives to make both sound and sense of his life
Garrett Hongo’s passion for audio dates back to the Empire 398 turntable his father paired with a Dynakit tube amplifier in their modest tract home in L.A. in the early 1960s. But his adult quest begins in the CD-changer era, as he seeks out speakers and amps both powerful and refined enough to honor the top notes of the greatest opera sopranos. And in recounting this search, he describes a journey of identity where meaning, fulfillment, and even liberation were often most available to him through music and its astonishingly varied delivery systems.
Hongo writes about being a Hawaiʻi-born, Japanese American kid growing up in L.A. in the shadow of the shameful internment of his people during World War II; about picking up on the music of his Black classmates in high school; about feeling the pulse of John Coltraneʻs jazz and rhythmic chords of Billy Joelʻs piano from his car radio while driving the freeways. Journeying further, he visits eccentric collectors of decades-old audio components, hears a ghostly lute at the grave of English romantic poet John Keats in Rome, drinks in wisdom from blues musicians and a multi-cultural diversity of poetic elders, and turns his ear toward the memory-rich strains of the music that has shaped him: Hawaiian steel guitar and ʻukulele, doo-wop and the Beatles, Bach, Puccini, and Duke Ellington. And in the decades-long process of perfecting his stereo setup, Hongo also discovers his own, now celebrated voice.
