photo by Jesse Flinck

by Chance Solem-Pfeifer

Jesse Flinck had pulled it out of the ground, wrestled it to where he worked, and yet, it would not die. He was trying to make a turntable out of wood that was basically still alive.

After a long day of losing himself in his craftsmanship in the wilderness of Northern California’s Trinity Alps, Flinck would call it a night and return the next day to find his slab of uncured root burl had taken on new angles and idiosyncrasies overnight. Sometimes it even rejected the acrylic he used to help fill holes in the slab from rocks and soil the roots had grown around.

But working with live burl that would fight back against his ideas and ultimately dictate his design was a challenge Flinck wanted to undertake as he constructed the grand prize for Hear Nebraska’s winning Give to Lincoln Day donor. Flinck is a former Lincoln resident and donated all the man hours necessary to create the piece.

“With this project, I really wanted to go with something that would be more alive,” says Flinck of his choice not use a more traditional, cured wood. “Doing the root burl, you’re not going to have the power with it anymore.”

Flinck’s contribution to Hear Nebraska was the second turntable construction he’s undertaken, though he says this piece was a “more intense build” than his first. On that project, he didn’t start the search for wood from scratch, unlike this spring when Flinck went as close to the source as he could, looking for building material.

Using a Caterpillar loader, Flinck excavated a 6-square-foot manzanita root burl from under its visible shrub, a common growth, but a particularly large specimen in the Trinity Alps. And transforming the gargantuan slab of wood into a custom record player was an intricate feeling-out process.

“When I hit boulders (in the wood) I had to turn the chain saw around them, so the turntable shows that shape,” Flinck says. “I didn’t know what the turntable was going to look like and it kind of revealed itself. It was completely changing the whole time.”

Using such volatile material meant Flinck’s designs for the table were intentionally malleable, though he did salvage the technical audio components from a 30-odd-year-old Rega Planar 3 and old hi-fi turntable parts.

“I really wanted to give the plan of conception back to the actual product,” he says.

Give to Lincoln Day donor and Newcastle, Neb., resident Amy Kucera was randomly selected for the turntable prize. She also won four vinyl records, including albums from UUVVWWZ, Pharmacy Spirits, Great American Desert and Kill County. She didn’t donate with the intent or desire to win the turntable, but out of appreciation for her connectedness to Nebraska music and the music scene in Lincoln where she lived for five years.

“I can still know what’s going on and that camaraderie is special,” Kucera says. “There’s no other place I would want to live. The quality of life and music and people in Nebraska is incredible.”

Kucera works as a park superintendent at Ponca State Park near Newcastle and when she takes the turntable into her rural Nebraska home, she’ll be housing the piece in a fittingly rustic aesthetic: a combination of nature and technology Flinck says he found very appealing in his execution of the project.

“If you can see a record player playing out in nature itself, that’s really neat to me,” he says. “Bringing the outdoors indoors. I get really lost in this stuff when I do it, almost like a meditative state. All of a sudden it’s been half of day, and it’s like the blink of an eye."

Flinck estimates he donated 40-50 hours of labor to making the turntable. And although Flinck guessed the custom piece of equipment would fetch a price upwards of $2,000 on the open market, that reference point didn’t necessarily resonate with him. He says he wouldn’t have made such a piece just to sell to the public. The community of Nebraska music was at the heart of his decision to contribute.

“It’s not so much what (Nebraska music) means to me as much as what it means to the entirety of all the people I know in Nebraska,” he says. “If you know the culture and the music in Nebraska, you know this buzz that everybody gets and that’s one of my favorite things about it. My power to contribute comes through my hands.”

Even though more than 1,500 miles now separate Flinck and Kucera and neither currently lives in Lincoln, this turntable still binds them by coincidence.

From California's Trinity Alps to Ponca State Park

A = Trinity Alps
B = Ponca State Park

“When I found out it was a former Lincolnite who made (the turntable), that was wild to me,” Kucera says. “I knew Jesse back when he ran The Public. I used to buy records from him there, so I have quite a few of his old records.”

Kucera will fuel the odd symmetry of winning — which Flinck said makes the whole process “feel really right” — by soon playing an album she bought from Flinck on her prize, but she didn’t hesitate to single out Bob Dylan as receiving first spin on the virgin turntable.

“It’s gotta be Dylan,” she says. “Probably something like the John Wesley Harding album.”

Chance Solem-Pfeifer is Hear Nebraska’s staff writer. He probably couldn’t even get a turntable out of a box. Reach him at chancesp@hearnebraska.org.