| Vibrations is a record that's been released under at least three
different titles. This alone practically guarantees it a permanent
place in my heart, since I love that sort of thing: "that sort
of thing" being a rubric under which I'd group unfinished novels,
people who lie about where they're from, towns you drive through
but don't stop in, and once-popular but now obscure varietals of
apples. I don't know if I could convincingly sketch the connecting
thread between these and the numberless other phenomena that make
up the "that sort of thing" whose posited existence speaks
so loudly to me, but we're not going to find out whether I could
do so or not, because I'm not even going to try. I don't want to
explain the totemic power of an album whose identity may still be
in flux, thirty years after it was recorded. I just want to listen
to Albert Ayler. |