REVIEW POTPOURRI: Looking Back, Part 2

by Peter Cates

To continue from last week – after landing a job at Jordan Marsh’s record department in its Annex, I initially shared an apartment with a woman friend in Somerville, a working class street within easy walking distance of Cambridge’s Central and Harvard Squares. My share of the rent was $70 a month with utilities included and I would give her the cash for the landlord. Arriving in mid-July, I remember it being a ferociously hot summer but the two story building of four apartments was on a very shady street.

The other three units were occupied by Greek-American family members. The matriarch had the other apartment on the first floor while her two sons and their families were upstairs.

The family owned a trash collecting business with two trucks in operation. I remember one brother having a son accompanying him while the other spoke of preferring to be alone in the cab during those long runs.

During one muggy evening, one of the brothers gave me a quick inside glimpse of his mother’s apartment in which her air conditioner was kept at very Alaskan temperatures.

On quiet evenings, I heard Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde playing from the second story apartment across the street and soon made the acquaintance of that neighbor. He owned 10 different recordings of that work alone and not more than 90 or 100 other records, preferring to keep his life simple – a most intriguing principle which I have never followed when it comes to records.

He also had a good sense of humor and owned what he considered a party record for friends to listen to with laughter. It was an LP transfer of a 1942 Berlin radio broadcast of excerpts from Bizet’s Carmen sung in very exaggerated German instead of the original French. One thought of how Hermann Goering would have sounded singing the Toreador Song.

The woman I shared the apartment with was originally from Amherst, had attended U-Mass, worked as a nurse’s assistant at Massachusetts General and had a boyfriend living in Providence, Rhode Island who’d alternate weekends with her in visiting. At that time, my record player had crapped out so they graciously gave me permission to use their stereo system when they were out for the evening.

Working in the JM record department, I encountered an extensively heavenly selection of records that small Maine stores never matched and was buying two or three albums a week on my weekly salary of $70.

I remember after my first pay day purchasing the Bruckner Fourth and Seventh Symphonies, a total of three LPs at $4.88 each and not feeling the least guilt at such self-centered extravagance. The performances were conducted by the gifted Dutch Maestro Bernard Haitink (1929-2021) with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra on the Philips label which was then arguably considered the finest for its imported pressings from Holland – their earlier American pressings were considered horribly noisy by the at-times lunatic sound nuts (I could care less about recorded sound and found those domestic pressings fine. I also benefited when sound aficionados would sell me their own classical copies dirt cheap.).

Quite often on my days off, I would explore the surrounding neighborhoods.

More next week!