Editor’s Note: You Had to Be There

One night back in the mid-to-late 1990s, I went out to dinner at a trendy new Polish restaurant in South San Francisco with my friend Brian and his wife, Julie. We had been copyeditors on the night shift at the San Francisco Chronicle for a couple years before he left for the promise of high salaries and stock options at Pets.com during the first Internet boom, while I had stuck with Mix and the Chronicle.

After a bit of catching up, Brian started talking about how they had just recently canceled a vacation to Southeast Asia because, and 30-some years later I paraphrase, “Why would we need to travel there and spend all that money when we can experience the exact same thing over the Internet?”

“Huh?” I remember thinking, “Has my friend gone mad? Does he even realize what he’s saying?” An increasingly heated discussion followed, with Brian doubling down and Julie taking his side, as I said things like, “Are you crazy? You think you can smell the fish of the night market or feel the crush of a Tokyo subway over the Internet? You think Angkor Wat looks the same when you don’t have to climb the steps? Dude, that doesn’t even make sense!” He remained vehement; things deteriorated rapidly. I definitely lost any connection I had with Julie. But I stood my ground.

Remember, this is the mid-1990s, and while the Internet held plenty of promise, half the world was still on dial-up modems. Yahoo was still the dominant search engine; Google had launched only a month or so earlier. Mobile was still on the horizon. There was no streaming 4K video, no VR headsets, no blazing-fast bandwidth. Napster hadn’t even launched! And I didn’t recognize my friend anymore. 

I’m sure that there were plenty of others like him at the time. But I would make my same arguments today, even with Gigabit Fiber into the home.

“You had to be there.” It’s a cliché phrase, for sure. You might hear it from a friend who was at Game 7 when the Red Sox completed their epic comeback against the Yankees to take the series after being down 3-0, or from a cousin who just came back from Coachella and saw Lady Gaga for the first time. It may sound trite, but clichés become clichés because they start out as truths.

Last month, I had one of those “you had to be there” moments when putting together this month’s cover story on Megaplum, Mike Gordon’s new studio outside of Burlington, Vermont, along the shores of Lake Champlain.

Back when Mix was a fat monthly magazine, it was relatively common for editors to jump on a plane and go to a studio to write a cover story, or a feature on film sound, or a profile on a major tour. It was the go-go ’90s! Budgets allowed for it, our sense of journalism demanded it. That doesn’t happen much any more. Zoom, Meet and Teams have largely replaced flight, hotel and rental cars. And that’s okay…for the most part.

So when John Storyk called earlier this year and said, “Tom, you really have to come out and see Megaplum; it’s spectacular,” I arranged a working vacation and in early August found myself jumping into John’s car in Highland, N.Y., and heading out on a five-hour drive up the Thruway, skirting the Adirondacks, crossing the Mohawk River, and winding through a series of gorgeous landscapes along the rural state highways on the road to Burlington. Lake Champlain appeared, and it was spectacular.

After lunch, we pulled into Megaplum. Had I not made the trip, I likely would not have realized the genius of Jared Slomoff, Gordon’s collaborator, chief tech and musical sounding board for the past 24 years. Sure, I would’ve interviewed him, but I wouldn’t have been witness to their unspoken back-and-forth communication, finishing each other’s thoughts like a long-married couple. Or to his proficiency on any instrument he picked up.

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I wouldn’t have been at the dinner where Gordon talked about his filmmaking and his love for the films of David Lynch. I certainly wouldn’t have met his teenage daughter Tessa or listened to her play “Tequila Sunrise” on guitar and sing. It turns out that she works with the same guitar teacher who taught Trey Anastasio in his formative years, and that father and daughter will soon be performing at small fairs and farmer-market- type gigs around Vermont.

I wouldn’t have walked around with the photographer discussing what shots we would like and what angle we might shoot from. I wouldn’t have known about Flash, the keyboard-playing studio cat who rides down from the main residence in a golf cart on Gordon’s lap when he’s needed for overdubs.

Had I done this all by phone, or video conference calls, I would have had a story, but I wouldn’t have had the story. 

The Internet has developed into an amazing, yet sometimes very dark, place over the 30 years since Brian, Julie and I sat down for that fine Polish dinner. The advances in remote connection, spurred by the pandemic, have ushered in a new wave of communication, no question, with unthought-of possibilities still to come. At the same time, for some it has introduced a new comfort with isolation, what I call the “illusion of connection.”

As for me, when I am able, I much prefer to be there.