Lost Tapes From Major Musicians Are Out There. These Guys Find Them.

April 12, 2024 10:01 AM

Lost Tapes From Major Musicians Are Out There. These Guys Find Them.
posted by Ideefixe (9 comments total)

NYT no paywall
posted by Ideefixe at 10:01 AM on April 12

I'm an archivist and documentary producer in the music space. I've helped to rescue a few collections along the way, although mine end up in the Library of Congress. This stuff haunts me at night. I'm glad someone's doing this, and hopefully they won't just stop at the major artists. I'd like to see every last one of those tapes end up somewhere better.
posted by mykescipark at 10:13 AM on April 12 [5 favorites]

It utterly blows my mind that such products aren't considered precious and valuable, and just get negligently dumped in storage areas and forgotten.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:20 AM on April 12

Also:

Metafilter: a disused echo chamber that has been turned into a tape storage
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:28 AM on April 12 [7 favorites]

NYT no paywall

There is for me. But this should get you there.
posted by philip-random at 10:39 AM on April 12 [3 favorites]

I lived in a 4 story brownstone in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn from 2011-2013. The basement was a weird horrorshow, full of junk and the remnants of previous tenants, along with a dryer that was not vented to the outside and just expelled lint everywhere, creating an enormous fire hazard. It did, however, have a back yard, which when cleared of overgrowth revealed a working grill w/ propane! That back yard was memorialized in a strip of Octopus Pie. Oh, also, our apartment was previously rented by the Anarchy In A Jar people. They apparently left a lot of jam outside of the kitchen window.

But! The relevant point is that, in that weird scary basement, I found a large number of sealed vinyl records, all of one album by an experimental band called bird(something). I can't remember, and I didn't keep one of the records for myself. I think I emailed the band asking if they wanted them? But they didn't, or at least they didn't reply. There was a guy at a coffee shop on DeKalb who started talking about that band, though, and I mentioned that I had access to the vinyl, and ended up giving one of them to him. So at least one of those abandoned records went to a good home.

I have the masters from all of my albums on 2-inch in my basement if these dudes want to "rescue" it.
posted by grumpybear69 at 12:41 PM on April 12 [3 favorites]

The 20-times-platinum 90s album recorded in Los Angeles referenced at the end… that has to be Metallica’s black album, right? Which would be kinda funny, given their history with copyright enforcement, that they’d be so careless with their material.
posted by Kattullus at 12:51 PM on April 12 [2 favorites]

I was wondering that too.

While Brian Kehew has a long list of credits, there aren't that many 20x-platinum albums, and the list of ones that were recorded in the '90s, in LA, and have since been reissued, must be even shorter.
posted by box at 3:58 PM on April 12 [1 favorite]

I sold an Akai MG1212 tape machine to Brian a couple of years ago. Cool!
posted by Dokterrock at 11:40 PM on April 12