This post is dedicated to a clever troll – tapesfor2 – who once publicly posted this nice comment about my efforts to preserve the Sonic Archives tape collection:
“You shouldn’t have. His recordings were at ‘best’ personal souvenirs. They were not quality recordings. They should not be shared. Those tapes belong on a waste dump.”
Well… thank you for calling, and I hope you have a wonderful – err… something or other…
![Entry console layout [back of Cows setlist]](https://sonicarchives.com/wp-content/uploads/Entry-console-layout-back-of-Cows.jpg-791x1024.jpg)
Recently, I received a letter from someone who had seen my previous post about the Mpls band archives, and how it related to the time they had moved to Minneapolis and their own experiences with the local scene at that time.
As I was replying to them, it occurred to me that some of this might be a good follow-up to my earlier blog post, so here goes:
No matter what point in time, there was always going to be some aspect of that syndrome, of being a day late and a dollar short – and you just missed whatever big thing was happening before you arrived.
I grew up in Mpls, and because of when I was born (in the late ‘50s), I missed a lot of things that happened before I was old enough to go to music venues and such, so there was an entire scene I missed, which I would have loved to be able to check out.
The same thing happened when I moved to NYC in the ‘80s – the scene I had been enamored with was already gone. Fast forward to the present day, by the time my wife and I moved to Portland, all the cool places I heard about had closed, and all the artists I looked forward to seeing had left.
So yeah, I reckon it’s always going to be like that in a way.
Besides timing though, I’ve witnessed a lot of other discriminatory factors – ageism, people’s perceptions of “cool”, gender bias, race, and so forth. I’ve personally been excluded from a lot of scenes for all of those reasons, and I know I’m not the only one. I’ve lost track of how many times younger people have quizzed me as to what I was doing at a rock show – was I someone’s dad, or a cop, etc. But I digress.
It was really just dumb luck that I was able to capture as much of the scene I grew up in, for what it’s worth to anyone. I happened to be working as a waiter at The Longhorn Bar in Minneapolis, when it was a family owned steak restaurant that occasionally featured jazz or country / western bands as entertainment. Then the venue was sold to Jay Berine, who turned it into a rock venue – his version of CBGBs, basically. Mpls had never had anything like that before – not even with First Avenue, which was still a disco called Sam’s at the time. Suddenly I was seeing and hearing all these new bands that were playing music like I had never heard before, and I loved it.
I also realized that a lot of these bands who were playing two sets a night were breaking up before they even had released anything, and that was the reason I started recording bands – I thought it was important to document what was taking place, before it disappeared completely. Of course, I was young and relatively poor, so I didn’t really have the best methods of documenting most of what I saw and heard, but I was kind flying by the seat of my pants as it were, and capturing what I could by whatever means I happened to have access to at any given moment.
In some instances, when I first started on this mission, that could mean using the equivalent of a twenty dollar Sony TCM 260 or 747 mono recorder. In retrospect, it’s kind of amazing that some of the results came out as well as they did. Then again, I had no idea that the Frequency Response of the built-in mics on decks like that were not really equipped to handle the aural assault they were being subjected to. The learning curve for recording tape itself took a bit longer, and I admit that in my youth, a three pack of tapes for ninety-nine cents looked like a real bargain.
Despite the lo-fi nature of most of these recordings, they are still a lot of fun to listen to, and it’s a shame that more fans of some of these bands didn’t get to hear them, but I was generally pretty protective of the local artists I taped. I had always hoped that some of these bands would have taken advantage of what I was doing back in the day, and might have used some of these recordings as demos, or DIY releases, but that only ever happened a few times. It seemed like most bands never really took my archiving efforts seriously, because it wasn’t a “professional” endeavor, so it was just perceived as my weird little hobby.
At one point in time, I was on the verge of disposing of the entire archives, and I probably would have, if my wife hadn’t convinced me that what I was doing had more value than could possibly be measured by someone else’s perception of success. Based on the deluge of e-mails and phone calls I’ve received from bands as a response to my previous post, it seems that quite a few artists are thinking along those lines as well.
Then again, there are always going to be critics – like the anonymous human cited above, I reckon – but to paraphrase a quote from Shaft’s Big Score, “that and fifty cents will get me on the subway”. Point being, the value of an opinion can diminish over time, while the importance of regional archives might not be so worthless after all.
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