SPIN DOCTOR

The Garrard 301 in a new light

- BY MICHAEL TREI

They say that with age comes wisdom, and judging by some of my younger self's misguided choices, that adage could be true, at least for me. In 1984, after graduating from college with a degree in audio production, I moved back to England, where I had spent most of my teen years as a boarding school inmate. I had friends and connections there, and despite being a US citizen, I had some kind of sketchy work authorization that allowed me to work legally in the UK for up to six months. I connected with my old school friend Morris Gould, and we found a flat in South London to share as I looked for work.

Morris had been the de facto leader of my high school punk band, The Ripchords.¹ Six years later, he was getting started with a career as ambient chill-out deejay Mixmaster Morris, releasing records as The Irresistible Force. Our apartment became a kind of hub in the South London music scene, with musicians and industry people circling through. Eventually, I found a job working at Music and Video Exchange, the gear-focused branch of the popular Record and Tape Exchange chain of secondhand record shops. At M&VE, the staff had first dibs on any cool gear that came in, and I remember being intensely envious when colleague Andy snagged a rare EMS VCS 3 synthesizer for almost nothing. I got my share of goodies too, but in retrospect, I was rejecting all the really good vintage stuff and picking up things I really didn't need. Back then, I felt that vintage gear like Leak tube amps, Quad electrostatic speakers, and old idler-drive turntables were ancient history, appreciated only by old men with leather patches on the worn-out elbows of their tweed jackets whose pipes wafted Capstan Navy Cut Flake tobacco into the air.

Another way to find cool gear was through the pages of Exchange & Mart, a weekly local classified paper similar to the