Vinyloscopy with The Risk! Podcast's Kevin Allison

Kevin Allison

Before we get into it, yes, this is the same Kevin Allison who was on MTV's The State.

About 2 and a half years ago, I was sitting on a plane to San Francisco reading The Union of the State by Corey Stulce. It told the story of well, The State. At the end, it started talking about what the cast members did after the show ended. Allison ended up starting a podcast called Risk!. I'd never been much for podcasts and had never subscribed to one, but I figured, let's listen.

Well, we're a couple years on, and I've not missed an episode since then and I've read the Risk! Book as well. If you think This American Life is great, but it needs more...we'll call it  uncensored spice...then Risk! is probably right up your alley. Check it out on all the podcast apps.

Recently, Allison made mention of buying a turntable and we spoke briefly about his setup and such. It then occurred to me, let's find out more. The Vinyloscopy column has had loads of metal dudes giving us the what for, but now let's find out from someone who's new to all of this.

So, let's jump right in.

1. Listening to Black Sabbath's eponymous debut the night I got it blew me away. What's the album that sounds the best on vinyl compared to digital sources?

This question is so hard for me to answer right now. Here's why. Records were my first hobby obsession as a little kid. When I say little, I mean before I could speak sentences. I was a toddler, and my whole extended family and all our neighbors knew that my favorite thing was to sit in front of a spinning record player, watch the label go round and round, and go off into fantasyland creating little movies in my mind of musical stories happening somewhere in all that sound. 

I grew up in a town where sports meant more than God or work or family. But while all the other kids were playing each and every game involving a ball, I was in the basement listening to Meet the Beatles, Free to Be You and Me, West Side Story, Children's Songs by Woody Guthrie, The Monkees, and Jesus Christ Superstar. 

I stayed obsessed with records right through high school. Discovering the later work of The Beatles, the whole career of Bob Dylan, the new sounds of Talking Heads and Laurie Anderson... I was always listening. My father had a huge opera and classical collection. Plus my brothers were very much of the Dazed and Confused generation. 

They had a really expensive and top of the line set up with huge Cerwin Vega speakers and a huge collection of the stuff you would expect, like Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Genesis, The Velvet Underground, The Sex Pistols, Roxy Music and more, but also stuff like Bird, Miles, Monk and Trane.

But at 18, I moved from Cincinnati to New York to go to college. It was 1988. There was no point in a kid who couldn't afford a slice of pizza to buy a turntable. So what records I owned stayed in Ohio and got thrown away over the years.  

At 48, I finally decided to buy a turntable again. I am brand new to the vinyl all over again. Back in 1988, when me and the rest of my college friends stuck with cassettes and CDs, the rumor was that vinyl sounded better than digital. I heard that for decades. 

But digital has had plenty of time to keep improving. It's not just the music industry but the film and TV industry, the telecommunications industry, NASA and whatnot that are always making little improvements in that realm. So... what sounds better on vinyl now? Frankly, I'm going to have to do more record buying before I can really say for sure!

2. I was laying in bed one night and couldn't sleep and I figured, it was time to start buying records. How did you come to the idea that it was time to start buying vinyl instead?

For most of my adult life, I've been very barely able to get the rent and bills paid. No health insurance, no dental. When you're a writing and performing artist in this country trying to carve out a career of your own, you can go decades without being able to afford to get your teeth cleaned. 

My podcast RISK!, that I started when I was turning 40, was what finally turned things around for me. I created a podcast where people tell true stories they never thought they'd dare to share in public. It's extremely uncensored and extremely surprising. 

So a lot of people started listening to it as an alternative to the much less frank and more PG-rated stuff you'll hear on NPR. In 2018, we put out a book, also called RISK! After all the work that went into that book, I decided I wanted to buy myself a present. So I got myself a turntable, a receiver and speakers. 

Now, the way I went about it was classic online consumerism. I checked the website called Wirecutter to see what they recommend as the best, but most affordable items. They recommended the Sony STR-DH190 receiver, which I like except that I wish there was a lot more fiddling around that I could do with EQ on it, and the Audio Technica AT-LP120 turntable, which I like, although I had to learn all about balancing a tone arm to use it, and finally, the Q Acoustics 3020 speakers, which I have to say were not nearly big enough with sound, so I kept them but added the KEF Q750 floor standing speakers to the mix, by far the most expensive of all these items. 

3.For my old stuff, it's vinyl worthy, for new stuff, it's all vinyl if available. Do you buy everything on wax or do you have a vinyl worthy category?

My job is to constantly, constantly be searching for singles to place between the stories on the RISK! podcast. So for many years, I grew out of the habit of listening to entire albums in any format. Just constant bopping around listening to individual songs, mostly from the indie rock realm. 

But when I got the new stereo, I remembered something. I was very near the towers on 9/11 and saw lots of terrible things that day. I was shaken up, like everyone. In the days after the towers fell, I made a conscious decision that I had just seen so much destruction, that I wanted to deliberately investigate creation. I decided to start learning about jazz. My brother in Staten Island had a huge CD collection of jazz, so I started borrowing his CDs like crazy. 

So at the age of 31, I fell in love with jazz. Mostly the mid-century stuff -- 40s, 50s, 60s. 

I realized that the music actually spoke to my soul on some deep, grounding, meditative sort of way. There was something that felt like "home" in the music spiritually. 

Then I started the RISK! podcast about 8 years after that and no longer had time to listen to jazz. I had to be finding fun, catchy, melodic songs with lyrics for the podcast. 

So... after all the exhaustion of creating the RISK! book and doing the book tour this past summer, I knew I wanted to buy a turntable to get back to my roots as a record listener like I'd been as a kid... but to buy jazz records now, as a sort of soul-caressing for me as an adult.

4. My second living room is where I keep it all. Upstairs, my Sherwood 7100S Receiver (from 1970) into a Panasonic 70's turntable and Sansui 70's 5 way speakers. Tell us all about your vinyl set up.

I listed the equipment above. I will say that I'm still getting used to the fragility of it all. The way you have to verrrrrrry slowly lower that tone arm onto the first track. The way you can't walk past the stereo with a heavy footfall lest you make the record skip. The way you have to get that tone arm back off the record right away after that side of the album is finished, lest the needle just get worn down from bumping up against the label. That even records bought brand new have some crackle and pop in them. One of my boyfriends is 25 and he'd never operated a turntable before, so when he tried to, he assumed the needle hanging down from the stylus was a "mistake" and he plucked it right off. 

I will list for you just some of my favorite records I have acquired since I started a brand new collection just about four months ago. I must admit, I got a kick out of going to used record shops at first, but lately I've gone the easy route and bought new versions of things from Amazon. 

Django by The Modern Jazz Quartet

Their most beloved album. It was the first record I played on my new system and I made a little Instagram video of the spinning label. But it was also the moment I realized I needed a deeper, more dimensional bass end coming through the speakers, so I got the KEFs. 

In a Silent Way by Miles Davis

I wish he had made a dozen records that sound like this. It's got the jazz-rock fusion sound that Bitches Brew later made famous, but it's using those electric instruments in a much more quiet, ethereal way. I can't get enough of this sound. 

The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid by Stars of the Lid

A three-record set. All ambient. Very dimensional. 

12 Sides of Miles by Miles Davis

This was a record store find. I had bought a version of Dave Brubeck's classic album Time Out at this little used record shop in Williamsburg, but brought it home and found it was so messed up, the first track on Side 2 wouldn't even play straight through. When I was a little kids, we'd keep pennies near the turntable to place on top of the stylus to weigh it down and force it to stick to the grooves. But I certainly don't want to be doing that now. So I took the record back and the guy said, "Okay, choose anything else in the store for $40 to replace it." To my amazement, I found this incredible boxed set from Columbia records of 5 different Miles records, including Kind of Blue, Bitches Brew and Sketches of Spain, three of his most beloved records, for just $40. 

Anyway, I have a bunch more like that. There's only one rock record in my new collection. Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits. But that's because I purchased a framed poster from a Brooklyn poster and framing store of the famous Milton Glaser illustration of Dylan that Columbia Records included in all the LP sleeves of that record back in the day. So they said, "You get the record along with the framed poster." When I heard the Dylan record, it was the first time I began suspecting that some old vinyl does NOT sound as good as new digital, since I've am huge, huge Dylan fan and have been listening to plenty of those songs on iTunes or Spotify in the past decade or so, and this old vinyl version of his greatest hits sounds a little flat. I think that some records nowadays are not only remastered but pressed with new technology in mind. Some of the newer releases of old jazz records that I've bought brand new from Amazon have bragged that the vinyl is made of "micro-grooves," in an attempt to improve on things, I suppose. 

5. Do you read the lyrics and go over the inserts when you're spinning?

I should, but I'm so distracted nowadays. I definitely smell the record and I love the old jackets and labels. I love the ritual of putting a record on. It is surprising how quickly one side of a record is over. I was shocked to buy Ascension by John Coltrane, an album consisting of one song, to find that you have to turn the record in the middle of the damn song. 

6. When someone says, I'm stupid for buying records, I tell them, thanks, more limited edition colored vinyl for me, what's your answer?

It definitely feels like a luxury item and a geeky collector's sort of thing to do. But then, music is here and now. It's an ephemeral thing that you can never quite nail down. So one record might sound better than the next. 

One alteration of treble and bass in your receiver might be perfect for one album but not the next. One track you hear by connecting the receiver to Bluetooth and playing the music over Spotify might sound a little more dimensional than the LP of the same track that you have. 

For me, I'm wondering if I should buy a subwoofer, to bring out some of the more delicate nuances of the bass end of things. For me, it's always the bassier side of the spectrum where things sometimes sound a little muddy. 

7. My first album ever was Live Evil by Black Sabbath, so I'm stuck on live albums. What's the best live album on vinyl?

Sunday at the Village Vanguard by Bill Evans is gorgeous. Everyone knows the Vanguard is the quintessential New York jazz club. Extremely intimate. Low ceilings. Photos on the wall of so many legends who have played there. And this gentle, sweet, intricately nuanced record sounds great there.