I love a surprise. Like when I'm transferring a recording of a demure female folk duo - sweet harmonizing vocals and autoharp and acoustic guitar, presumably playing at a coffeehouse sometime around 1980 - and as their penultimate song, they pull out a Bev Grant tune about street harassment called "Tired of Fuckers Fucking Over Me." Written, I believe, in the 1970s but as relevant today as ever, this song is begging to be covered. Any takers?
Summer News
I will not complain about the weather. I live in Berkeley, California, and it's sunny and pleasant every frickin' day. I love it! (Okay, I wouldn't mind a nice, violent thunderstorm now and then).
I was guest #80 on the Working Class Audio podcast, hosted by Matt Boudreau. If you ever wanted to learn more about decamethylcyclo-pentasiloxane as it pertains to archiving cassette tapes, then this is the podcast for you! Matt and I had a great chat about mastering, restoration, archiving, gear, tape formats and best practices.
Check out this video by Very White and see if it doesn't stir up the tiniest bit of romance in your soul. I mastered their upcoming EP, Make Believe. Here's another one for your summer playlist: Summer Jazz, by Buffalo NY's The Tins. They've got some truly excellent new material coming out soon, too. Southern blues rockers Swamp Cabbage's JIVE is finally out this month (and worth the wait!) I really enjoyed working closely with Walter Parks on this album.
One of my most challenging projects of this spring was reviving a thirty-something year old cassette for Awesome Tapes From Africa. It was a doozy, but I am in love with the music, which transcends the medium. Hailu Mergia and Dahlak Band's Wede Harer Guzo, the third record I've restored and remastered for Ethiopian synth and keyboards genius, Hailu Mergia.
I am one tape away from finishing the digitization of an archive of nearly 100 1/4" analog tapes I've been working on since January. It is unbelievably satisfying to look at my tidy spreadsheet detailing the progress of the preservation of these tapes and see one last entry waiting to be filled in. And, oh, the music! Under wraps for now, but you'll hear some of it soon.
As I'm finishing one archive, I'm starting another, this time a batch of cassettes recorded in New York City in the early 80s. I'll leave it at that. But they sound positively skronky!
Happy summer! Happy 4th of July! I'm going camping!
My Favorite Song In The Vinyl Finale
Straight up, it was Clyde McPhatter’s “You’ll Be There.” Not Traffic or Queen or the Stooges or the MC5 (though it was great to be taken out with “Kick Out the Jams”). Not the Nasty Bits. The voice that made me sit up and Shazam (because I was watching the show while lying on the floor on the brink of falling asleep) was Clyde McPhatter’s. His music speaks to me in a way that the edgier late 70s tunes don’t. I was born in the wrong decade.
Fun fact #1: the sound of Nasty Bits is based on the wild, uncategorizable mid-70s band Jack Ruby, whose demos and unreleased recordings were restored from cassette and remastered by yours truly. They were released on boutique label Saint Cecilia Knows, which describes them thusly:
They have been variously described as “the Velvet Underground in a car crash” and the “art-punk Steely Dan”.
Don Fleming and Lee Ranaldo recorded four Jack Ruby songs with James Jagger on vocals for Vinyl, which I would love to hear.
Fun fact #2: I did a bunch of vinyl transfers for Vinyl so they could use authentically clicky, poppy, sometimes warbly music in their sound mixes. Respect, HBO!