One of the unpleasant things you learn when living in a dormitory or an apartment complex is that you have neighbors, and many of these neighbors have no more consideration of the people around them than so many hamsters. If they aren’t having screaming fights at all hours, they’re stomping around in their four-hundred-pound twenty-eye Doc Martens at all hours, or having noisy sex and banging the bed’s headboard against the wall at all hours, or throwing loud keg parties at all hours, or playing the stereo with the volume turned to eleven at all hours. The last one, and what one guy did about it, produced one of my Spousal Equivalent’s favorite college-days tales.
In 1978, L lived in Hagerstown Dorm at UMuD-College Park. One of her friends, King Thomas Newlin (“King” wasn’t his name, it was his title; he regularly ran for Students’ Association president on the Monarchist slate), lived on the dorm’s seventh floor north, which was universally known as “The Twilight Zone.” One of the favorite group recreations among the proto-slackers up there was to get stoned and play Stereo Wars with copies of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon.” Living in the middle of the hall, King Thomas got hit from both sides, and after a few thousand times, you know, you can get tired of listening to “Brain Damage.” Eventually Tom, whose taste ran to classical music, did.
Now Tom owned a good stereo setup, with a big amp head and adequate speakers. So one evening, when he was trying to study and the potheads at both ends of the hall had turned up their stereos to “distort” to inflict Roger Waters on each other and the dorm at large, he got an idea. He turned his speakers around and pushed them up against the cinder-block walls, which made wonderful resonators, set the volume to eleven and bass boost full on, and dropped the needle on E. Power Biggs playing Old Bach. Ten minutes or so later, when he shut it down and after the entire building quit vibrating to the harmonics of those 32-foot pedal stops, the Twilight Zone was completely silent, and he had no more trouble with Pink Floyd—or anything else—for at least three weeks.
The scenario serves the frozen wheel cork in London. Fnord.
