When I bought Mountain’s album Climbing! In 1970, I dutifully complied with the instructions on the cover: “This album was meant to played loud!” Maybe I simply wanted to annoy my parents, especially my father, whose distaste for my politics and my music, and my long hair, drove a wedge between us for years. Maybe I wanted to test the limits of my stereo system, just as I wanted to test my guitar amp when I turned it up to ten during our band’s practice in a friend’s basement. More than anything, though, I wanted to hear every note of Leslie West’s screaming guitar on “Theme for an Imaginary Western” as I tried to play them on my own electric guitar. I wanted the sound to reverberate through me and to let it shake me through and through—and I still argue that the song remains one of rock’s greatest anthems and the music itself sparks transcendence—just as I wanted to be lost in the stratosphere when I listened to Cannonball Adderley and the Nat Adderley Trio’s cosmic vibes on Soul Zodiac though my headphones.
It’s not that we weren’t already turning up the volume when we spun our 45s and albums, but somehow it’s hard to imagine cranking up Herman’s Hermit’s “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” or Petula Clark’s “Downtown.” Turning up the volume on the Isley Brothers’ “This Old Heart of Mine” or Sam Cooke’s “Twistin’ the Night Away” came naturally since those songs touched us in a different way. All of this changed when I bought Ten Years After’s Cricklewood Green album; the only way to listen to Alvin Lee’s scalding blues rock, infused with jazz variations, was loud. Listening to music played loud—in clubs, arenas, small bars, on albums, cassettes, CDs, streams—shapes our relationship to the song and to the artist. Listening to music played softly shapes us and the music we hear in the same ways. The more aware we are of the ways we listen to music, the more we’ll understand some of the ways that music shapes us.
Veteran music writer Joe Bonomo (Conversations with Greil Marcus) knows about the nature of listening to a wide variety of music, as a fan and a critic. In his entertaining new book, Play This Book Loud: Noisy Essays (Georgia, May 1, 2025) Bonomo explores various ways of listening, from letting an album’s sounds waft through headphones to mixing exuberantly with a crowd at a rock club. In the essays in this collection, he follows his ear as he explores topics from Connie Francis and psychedelic rock to commercial jingles and digging through crates in local record stores.
