I know it’s the dead of summer, but I’m tired of all this drag-and-drop bullshit. Can’t we take a break and hang out in the courtyard for an hour or two, sipping cool drinks and listening to some boss tunes? No? Sheesh.
Okay, so yes, I’m frittering away my summer in the basement of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, keeping my head down, concentrating on the task before me. What task is that, you may ask? And well you may. Archiving, my friends, archiving. Plowing through decades of audio tape, capturing songs that have never been committed to a hard drive; songs recorded on primitive ribbons of tape, stored away in shoeboxes, and nearly forgotten. Literally hundreds of recordings, the overwhelming majority made by Matt in the privacy of my abandoned bedroom.
It’s an exhausting undertaking, particularly when you are as work-averse as I am. Still, I’ve made pretty good progress. I’ve gotten most of them transferred to digital, and now I’m pruning around the edges, looking for songs that I know exist but haven’t located on tape as of yet. I’m also trying to fit all of Matt’s Christmas song collections into appropriate buckets — he did about eleven of them, starting with a handful of songs in 1985 up through 1995. They represent a subset of his total output, but even so, it amounts to about 60 – 70 songs. I’m curating them so that at some point interested parties can listen to each year’s collection in its original sequence.
What’s the point of this pointless exercise? Well, it’s one way to kill a summer … before the summer kills me. It’s kill or be killed in this era of climate change. So I wind my way down to the cool basement and dig through old banker boxes looking for buried treasure from the forgotten eighties. (Forgotten because no one seems to remember much of what happened during that decade.) At some point, I will find a way to post versions of at least a selection of these songs, though I must admit that my preference is for building that big, honking web jukebox I mentioned a few weeks back – just belly up to the interactive console and pick a number between one and three hundred. Sounds like a plan.
Hey, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) …. close the door on your way out. And yes … that’s my way of saying GET OUT.
There were songs before Big Green, of course, and I’ve been digging through those as well. Matt started recording pretty much as soon as he could tell one end of a guitar from the other. Both he and I were always fascinated by tape recorders and other gear. We had a shrimpy little portable monaural reel-to-reel machine when we were kids, about the size of a steno pad, which we would use to record hastily contrived audio plays, jokes, and other bullshit. Matt recorded his first songs on an old SONY stereo reel-to-reel that kind of half worked. I remember working out a method for overdubbing, using a digital delay – you could arm one of the two channels for recording, run the playback of the other channel through the delay, and it would line up pretty closely. Then came the four-track cassette portastudio.