It’s February 23, 2026, as I write this, a fact that I mention not necessarily because of the temporal delays inherent to publishing, but more because anniversaries resonate with me a lot these days. In May of last year, I lost my dear friend Michael Gaughn, formerly of The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, Rayva Roundtable (where we started working together), and finally Cineluxe (which was our baby until its unceremonious end, although he never gave up hope of reviving it).
If you don’t know Mike’s name, that’s because he didn’t care to make one for himself. The writers you do know in the hi‑fi space, though? I guarantee you they all knew Mike. In fact, if you ask most people who’ve worked with him, they’ll tell you he was one of the most gifted editors ever to work on our copy, whether they liked him as a human or not.
And I did. Very much.
It was on February 23 of last year that I finally talked Mike into seeing a doctor after a long struggle along those lines. That’s one reason why this date is so salient. He’d had a tumultuous history with the medical-industrial complex, including a botched surgery at the hands of an incompetent and malicious urologist just a little over 18 months before his death that only compounded his distrust of the entire profession.
But Mike had been suffering from some concerning abdominal distress since even before that surgery, which reminded me a lot of the early warning signs of the colon cancer that took my mom from me. So I begged him to get a regular GP who could give him a proper going-over.
And yes, I promise you this is a story about music and hi‑fi and the emotional weight of physical media. But to tell this particular story, I have to overwhelm you with backstory. Apologies for that.
At any rate, Mike’s first appointment with the doctor I handpicked for him wasn’t until about a month later. And at that appointment, she did a panel of bloodwork and told him that she saw no signs of cancer. But she still wanted him to have an MRI just to put everyone’s mind at ease, and she scheduled it for early May.
Long story short, that MRI revealed that he was riddled with cancer. Indeed, he was already in total organ failure, and further testing indicated that—despite the assurances from his new doctor—he’d developed colon cancer and liver cancer independently, and both cancers had metastasized. By the time he knew he had that horrific disease, he had days to live. In just over two weeks in the hospital, he accumulated over 300 pages of medical records that I still haven’t completely gone through as his medical proxy.
Mike died intestate. Our mutual friend Frank Doris (PR personality and audio journalist extraordinaire) and I rushed to settle Mike’s affairs and wrap up some business loose ends. But we weren’t able to get his estate in order before the end came. The one item of inheritance that we got settled was that Mike sent a videographer we’d occasionally worked with to his apartment to retrieve his first trade edition copy of T.E. Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which was promptly shipped to me.
But we weren’t able to create a will. By the time we reached the point where Mike was willing to talk about his estate, his brain was so addled by morphine and the natural cognitive decay brought on by total organ failure that he couldn’t remember the name of his storage facility, couldn’t remember his banking info, couldn’t remember much of anything, in fact. He was no longer of sound mind and was unable to sign legal documents. And that videographer wasn’t able to get back into his apartment to grab all of the remaining LPs that Mike wanted to give me, because the building manager had shut down his electronic key.
The Randy Newman connection
Let’s jump back in time a few years to fill in some details that are pertinent to what follows. Mike and I had a strange but wonderful friendship. I’m reminded of a quote from Alan Turing’s close friend Robin Gandy, who after Turing’s death wrote, “Because his main interests were in things and ideas rather than in people, he was often alone. But he craved for affection and companionship—too strongly, perhaps, to make the first stages of friendship easy for him.”
I’m pretty sure Mike was autistic. I know I am. And we often bonded over our shared appreciation for deeply flawed men who nonetheless had something to contribute to the world. We both loved Randy Newman and often discussed his song “Marie,” in terms of both composition and lyrical meaning. Secretly or not, we both related to the character Newman inhabited in that song.
In May 2020, I was lying in bed waiting to die. Absolutely certain I was going to die, in point of fact. Fever was ravaging my body as a result of another abscess of the sort that had been consistently trying to kill me since April of 2018. My temperature was well over 105°F (40.5°C). My wife was racing home from her office over half an hour away to try to get me to the hospital another 90 minutes north for yet another emergency surgery that would leave me with open wounds that had to be packed with iodine-soaked gauze for months on end, assuming I survived that long. Spoiler warning: I did survive. But just barely.
Mike called me and stayed on the phone with me so I wouldn’t die alone if it came to that, since my wife had to drive through cellular dead zones. He hadn’t played piano in years—not since shortly after his divorce. But the only way he could think to show me how much he cherished our friendship was to pull his old Yamaha piano out of storage, connect it to his laptop via a MIDI cable, and play me a beautiful rendition of “Marie,” the song we so often discussed.
He recorded that session and later sent me a copy of the recording, as a way of expressing his relief that I didn’t actually shuffle off this mortal coil. I always intended to record vocals atop it, but Mike’s phrasing was so immediate and so much a function of his emotions in that moment that I never could quite match the tempo. I regret that failure on my part to this day.
Fast-forward again to May of last year, 2025. It was Mike who lay dying this time. I was under no illusions that he would get the lucky break that I did, though. His palliative-care nurse called me every afternoon so I could talk to him. On the Monday before his death, his eyes moved a little under his eyelids at the sound of my voice, but he seemed agitated. So instead of talking, I cued up Good Old Boys via Qobuz and played “Marie” over the phone for him. His nurse said that calmed him and put him at peace. And so every afternoon for the next few days, when his nurse would call, I would have “Marie” cued up and ready to play.
Postmortem
In the months after Mike died, I tried my best to honor his memory. I worked with another industry friend of ours to organize an online memorial service for him, knowing all the time that his body was crammed into a cooler in the county morgue, since he had no one to claim his remains and I had no legal right to do so. I reached out to as many of his friends as I could to give them the shocking news, but if you’re one of those people and I wasn’t able to reach you, I’m sorry if this is how you’re hearing the news so long after the fact.
I continued as much of our work as possible, but didn’t have the key pieces I needed to finish our biggest to-do item: a screenplay about the abolitionist John Brown—a very real and deeply flawed man, a terrible father, and an intransigent ideologue who nonetheless changed the world for the better. Mike didn’t know I recognized this, but he was really writing about his own self-loathing self-perceptions, and it broke my heart. But I still want to complete that screenplay—not in the hopes of sending it to Joel or Ethan Coen, as Mike intended to do—I don’t know either of them—but just for my own edification.
But the work is less important to me than the camaraderie I lost. At least once a week since his death, I’ve cued up Newman’s “Marie” and thought about all the conversations I would never get to have with my dear friend ever again.
Oddly enough, via my attempts to reach out to Mike’s estranged family members to inform them of his death, I started to build a deep and meaningful friendship with his ex-wife, who picked up the ball and got Mike cremated—six months after his death—and even collected his ashes with the intention of spreading them at his favorite spot in the world after the spring thaw. (Mike hated wintertime with all his mind and body. It would have been a dishonor to his memory to scatter his ashes before the pink lady’s slippers bloomed.)
His ex even recently cleaned out his apartment, which had sat empty since his death, since there wasn’t a death certificate that would allow the building’s managers to clean out the place. She gathered up the remainder of his books and shipped me all the ones about John Brown, as well as some of the old pulp novels Mike and I often discussed.
And she collected the handful of records he still had in his apartment. The bulk of his collection was in his storage facility, mind you—the contents of which were auctioned off to the highest bidder a mere two months after his payments stopped going through. But the records he had in his apartment were his favorites, and I knew his Randy Newman collection would be in there.
Thankfully, she graciously shipped them to me, along with some midcentury modern pottery he loved and a few other personal items she wanted me to have, including a photograph of Elvis Costello at what I believe may have been the Attractions’ New York debut at The Bottom Line in 1977, taken, printed, and signed by Ebet Roberts. I need to sit down soon and investigate the provenance of this photo, because I could be misremembering Mike’s stories about it. If my memories are indeed correct, it was published in The Village Voice sometime thereafter. But don’t hold me to any of that.
At any rate, getting those boxes of Mike’s belongings was bittersweet in so many ways. It was the first time I’ve really, truly been able to come to terms with the fact that I can’t pick up the phone and call him anymore when I’m having a crisis or just want to chat about Thomas Cole or David Graeber or Max Ernst or the antidemocratic insidiousness of the Trilateral Commission. Or, perversely, to scold him for not keeping his records in poly-lined sleeves. He was a purist to a fault.
I’ll admit, there’s some part of me that simply wanted to file those old Randy Newman records away like a museum exhibit—to preserve them exactly as they were the last time Mike touched them, to maintain the dust and the shitty paper sleeves and the accumulated years of gunk in the grooves.
But I have a rule: no record touches my turntable or my stylus without a bath first, and certainly not one that has been stored in a paper sleeve. And it didn’t take long for me to arrive at a place where I really wanted to listen to Mike’s copy of Good Old Boys, with all its unique flaws. In short, I wanted to hear “Marie” as Mike heard it.
So last night, I set up my Record Doctor, gave his LPs a good bath, and put them all in poly-lined sleeves and proper outers. A weird thing occurred to me during the bathing and vacuuming process. I realized that some of the dust in those grooves was Mike. Like, actually the flaky detritus of his corporeal form, sloughed off from his epidermis and transferred to his records the last time he played them, in the form of dust.
Mike and I shared a morbid sense of humor, and I couldn’t help being reminded of a song from my favorite Joanna Newsom record, which I desperately wanted Mike to love but never could get him to power through. “It’s Only Skin,” I muttered to myself with a wry smile, but also a strong desire to share that joke with him, despite the irony of it all.
Once I had those records all dried off and re-sleeved, I went to my listening room and dropped the stylus on the first side of Good Old Boys, and was immediately sort of overwhelmed by . . . well, everything. I was hearing surface noise Mike heard. Ditto a few minor pops and crackles and scratches. I felt his presence in a way I haven’t in a long time. I texted his ex and said, “It feels like Mike is in the room with me.”
It wasn’t until I got to “Marie” that I broke, though. As soon as those strings started, so did my tears, my heaved breathing, my sobs. And I realized that this was the first time I’d cried for Mike since he died. It was the first time I really mourned him. I’ve raged at the universe. I’ve laughed while telling stories about him at his virtual funeral. I’ve felt a pang in my chest when I instinctively picked up the phone to call him, only to remember that I can’t. But I hadn’t cried. Not until playing “Marie” for the bazillionth time since his death—not via my CD, which frankly sounds better than Mike’s LP; same with the Qobuz and Apple Music streams—but for the first time via his own pressing.
Objectively, all of the digital sources sound better. But none hit me in the emotions nearly as hard. Maybe if I’d inherited a CD he owned? Possibly. I doubt it, though. Because, remasters and such aside, one CD of Good Old Boys sounds like any other. But this LP copy was Mike’s and Mike’s alone.
Until it was mine.
The magic of inferior fidelity and superior sound
I can’t help thinking that something along these lines is what happens to people who legitimately believe vinyl is objectively higher-fidelity than any of the formats that followed. Because I’ve since listened to “Marie” twice via streaming, and it simply didn’t have the same emotional resonance. It had a lot of resonance, mind you. Just not to the same degree.
Of all our senses, only the olfactory has as much impact on emotions as does the auditory. And of all the physical forms of music media, only vinyl really combines both of those senses in any meaningful way, along with the tactile and the visual. When I opened the box from Mike’s former wife, I could smell the cardboard, the paper, the dust. Holding the covers, I almost wondered if I could dust them for Mike’s fingerprints.
But it’s really that unique sound that triggers my emotions. And there’s also, I think, a dialectical relationship between auditory stimuli and emotions. Yes, euphonic sounds can make us feel positive emotions. But positive emotions can also trigger euphony. That sort of reinforcing feedback loop doesn’t happen with smell or touch or sight.
There’s no doubt in my mind that this weird obsession with having some tangible connection with Mike, and the outsized emotional reaction to listening to his records, comes from the fact that I lost him so quickly, so unexpectedly, and I feel some responsibility for not having pressured him harder to go to a doctor sooner. But that’s not the whole story here.
There truly is a sort of totemic aspect to vinyl. I’m not the first to write something like that, and I certainly won’t be the last to arrive at such a revelation. I’m somewhere around two years into my vinyl journey, a fact that delighted Mike to no end. Because, unlike me, he was a true believer in the superior fidelity of the LP format. Here’s the thing, though: we don’t have to agree about whether or not vinyl sounds objectively better. What I think those of us who’ve experienced it can agree upon is that there is something legitimately magical about it.
And I don’t even believe in magic. Nor did Michael Gaughn. Although when I sit here and listen to his Randy Newman records and finally let myself grieve for the loss of him, there’s some small part of me that wishes I did believe in magic. Because I’d like to believe some aspect of him is here with me, listening to these records by my side.
Instead, I’ll settle for the illusion thereof. Because in many ways, it’s almost as comforting. And it’s every bit as moving. And although it doesn’t ameliorate the pain, it makes it easier to bear.
I miss my friend so much. But I’m so relieved to finally have some tangible things to remind me of him. And it’s all the more meaningful that most of those tangible things contain waveforms within them representing some of the music that Mike and I loved in equal measure.
. . . Dennis Burger
dennisb@soundstagenetwork.com
