Westberg, The TVD First Date

“From the height of a small child gazing up at the bureau, some of my earliest memories were born.”

“There in the dining room, my grandfather’s beloved record player would sit, and Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf would emanate from the room. The bustle of my grandmother cooking in the adjacent kitchen, the TV softly murmuring in the living room, and the Southern California suburbs of the early ’80s would dissipate as I was whisked into another world, a world that at times felt more tangible in my mind than that which existed in my reality. Music profoundly shaped my imagination and symbolized a kind of freedom for which I was relentless in my pursuits.

My grandfather was a lover of classical music and had an extensive collection of vinyl records, with the likes of Mahler, Beethoven, Choin, Stravinsky, and many more. At the age of four, I would improvise short cantatas which my grandmother would score in her well worn and tattered music book. Imagining myself the composer of an opera one day, I’d sit in a little nook I created in the dining room, eating string cheese, and one by one peel the layers as I dreamt. I absorbed the organic quality to the audio, the scratches and earthiness as the music’s timbres would rise and fall. I loved the physicality of placing the record on the turntable, carefully setting the needle, and letting the crackling sound of the speakers fill my ears.

My mom also shared a feverish love of music and vinyl records with my grandfather. She and her sisters all loved to sing together. One would take the melody and the other two each took a harmony line. Their voices would fill the room at holiday parties and family gatherings. My grandmother was a talented pianist who taught lessons for a time. Ours was a musical family and I always felt so grateful to have had the early experience of the record layer.

My mom was a child of the revolution, and Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Carole King and so many other greats of the era were constantly playing on the record player. I remember sitting on the floor of a small duplex unit we rented in Eugene, Oregon, playing with my plastic toy horses, and the smell as my mother rolled eggshell paint onto the living room walls. From those familiar speakers, Simon and Garfunkel and Cat Stevens would imprint my heart and mind. The sound of the vinyl are moments deeply etched into the fabrics of my childhood.

When my grandfather passed away, I was given his beloved record player. Yet, as a young adult attending school at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, I just couldn’t seem to get my life together enough to be responsible for caring for such a delicate and large machine. I moved from place to place fairly often, and at one point I lived out on a remote peninsula called Steamboat Island. In exchange for ranch work, I lived rent free in a tiny rundown trailer on a rustic horse farm surrounded by ancient evergreens and enveloped by the peninsula’s scenic wilderness.

There was little room for my belongings, much less a record player: it was a minimalist time in my life. Watching the muted grays sulk above the verdant greens of the rainforest from the tiny trailer windows, I fought valiantly to glean a purpose for myself during the most dismal of winters. The music of my upbringing and the dream of that same sense of freedom through imagination that I had chased to Olympia gave me faith that brighter days lay ahead.

Only later when I transferred to Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle was I settled down enough to reclaim the record player. As a student of composition and vocal jazz there, I used it constantly in those years, listening to Bud Powell, Ella Fitzgerald, Cecil Taylor, Leonard Bernstein, Benjamin Britten, Bartok, John Cage, Harry Partch, Charles Ives, and Frank Zappa to name a few. I loved the small stucco house on Greenlake where the record player and I lived. I loved the varnished mahogany wood floors, the coved ceilings and the elegant arched hallways. I would drink coffee in the dining room by the stained glass window where I had placed the record player and I’d dream, just as I had when I was a child listening to Peter and the Wolf in my grandfather’s dining room.

When I ultimately made the move from Seattle to LA, I had no choice but to part with the record player and it now resides at my aunt and uncle’s home in Tacoma. I have to trust that it is as loved today as it was throughout my journey from childhood into adulthood, and from the generations that loved it before me.”
—Ariel Westberg