The seasons of life go around and around, not unlike a record spinning on a platter. Unlike that proverbial record player, though, life itself is known for shifting its speed without notice.

An actual turntable, when correctly calibrated, will rotate at a constant 33⅓ revolutions per minute. No more, no less. Such constancy is especially welcome in the midst of extended unpredictability like the kind that descended in March of 2020. As was surely the case for many, the pandemic’s winds of change momentarily threatened to topple Tom Blizzard, a Murfreesboro transplant by way of Mobile, Alabama.

Under the business moniker Turntable Medic, Blizzard currently repairs record players and a variety of electronics. The Medic can calibrate your platter to spin at precisely the correct speed, if that’s what it needs. But the story of the revolutions per minute that brought him to this particular endeavor is quite a long-player in itself.

A versatile fellow, Blizzard is at heart a creative soul and a performer with deep roots in music. It’s what brought him from the Gulf Coast to Middle Tennessee in 2015, when he and wife Aubrey followed a couple of his band members who were relocating to the Music City. For Blizzard, Murfreesboro was “a great spot. It was just close enough to Nashville, but retained some of the ‘community’ feeling I had been used to.”

In Mobile, Blizzard had served stints as a home health aide and an apprentice welder in a shipyard, studied watchmaking, repaired hearing aids under a microscope, fixed engines, and even serviced computers and networks. Possessing an entrepreneurial bent in addition to a natural mechanical aptitude, he ran a business programming custom software solutions and also owned a small computer hardware company.

All the above followed a short but notable “detour” in the Air Force Space Command in the early 1990s, working on satellites and helping with a shuttle launch before concluding that military life wasn’t a cozy fit for his artistic side. (One additional encounter with the aerospace world did take place in a later career incarnation as a professional photographer, when he did a photo shoot with Moon-walking astronaut Buzz Aldrin.)

Blizzard, who spent his adolescence singing in church and barbershop quartets while also learning to play trumpet, baritone and French horn, would gradually resume his musical orbit. In 1999, Blizzard and a friend opened GroundZero Cards–Comics–Games in Mobile. Soon he found himself booking young local bands and occasional bigger-name acts into the store. The comic shop’s weekend shows broke even, but the experience nudged Blizzard back into a longstanding passion.

“[The shop] was a gathering spot and we had a lot of space, so I was able to open a music venue in the back,” explains Blizzard, who at the time was performing with a regionally popular rockabilly and old-school country act. “That’s when music really kicked in again for me,” he says. “Since then, I have kept music a part of my life and tried to make it a part of everyone else’s!”

After having settled into Murfreesboro, Blizzard had been operating a photography business while singing and acting on the side. He was content enough until pandemic conditions emerged in early 2020, causing a drastic shift in revolutions per minute. “It wasn’t until the lockdown,” he says, “that I realized [my means of making a living] weren’t coming back anytime soon and I needed to turn to something else.”

His nearly year-old Turntable Medic business, he says, “grew out of an obsession with tube electronics. I was collecting tube radios and repairing them. At some point I got an old console [record player] and repaired it. I posted it for sale and was immediately overwhelmed with responses,” says Blizzard, who quickly realized there was a strong demand for vintage audio gear and, by extension, repair service.

Blizzard’s Turntable Medic venture is flourishing, with drop-off/pick-up locations at independent record stores in Franklin, Spring Hill and Columbia as well as the regional granddaddy of the groove, Grimey’s in Nashville. Working from his Murfreesboro home, he offers personal area pick-up and does house calls for customers with furniture-sized units. Often, he says, these items are treasured family heirlooms that retain considerable sentimental value.

Blizzard offers one particularly poignant example of a console repair for a customer whose parents had been the original owners.

“It was one of the first pieces of furniture they had purchased in 1960 to furnish their home,” he begins. “The customer’s father had passed away and they were downsizing his mother’s belongings for a new living situation.” Fearing the non-working console’s disposal, his customer’s mother shed tears. When she later saw a video of the restored player in operation, she wept again, he was told—“this time with tears of relief. People really get attached,” he says, “to the things that bring them joy.”

Blizzard’s own first audio infatuation was the mid-century Magnavox Astrosonic console his parents had—and his mom still has, he reports.

“That may be why I work on consoles now. I’m about the only guy around here doing it, but they have such a great sound, and owning a classic console, or vintage turntable or stereo, is like owning a classic car,” Blizzard rhapsodizes. “Once they are serviced, they do their job very well and with a lot of style!”

Occupying a rewarding niche as the Turntable Medic, Blizzard was riding a groove into 2021 until another jarring disruption took place in his revolutions per minute—his wife, Aubrey, was diagnosed with aggressive cancer. The reasons it bears mentioning here are twofold: first, the Blizzards want to express their gratitude to area citizens as well as others who generously responded to an online fundraiser and a locally managed meal delivery schedule as Aubrey’s recent April surgery date approached. Secondly, her convalescence and continuing need for treatment have necessarily slowed Blizzard’s repair turnaround time, which is typically quite efficient, relative to the severity of the repair. (For opportunities to help with meals or medical expenses, go to turntablemedic.com/cancer-sucks.)

Handling business as effectively as possible while tending to his wife, Blizzard sometimes finds respite from the whirlwind by spinning one of his well-worn vinyl LPs. When the speed of life suddenly changes, recalibration is required. But as Turntable Medic and his customers both know, the constant RPM rate of a long-playing disc as it therapeutically revolves—33⅓—is perhaps the nicest, and roundest, number of all.

For more on the Turntable Medic, visit turntablemedic.com.