Jack interviews Senator Jerry Melin, ca 1980

From 1973-1984, I recorded hundreds of hours of material in San Francisco, Seattle, and New York City. The Archives--a collection of cassette tapes, drawings, poetry, and ephemera--containing these recordings has largely disappeared, being lost, borrowed, and rendered unusable by the ravages of time. This recording was salvaged from a crumbling generic cassette tape by a Seattle audio engineer, Ian Rodia. The sound levels vary widely, there is a large amount of ambient noise, including buses and semis passing by. To make matters worse, every few seconds there is a bump sound in the recording caused by a defect in the recorder's mechanism. Jerry Melin died a decade ago, and this is one of the few audio recordings that survived him.


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Jack Brummet interviews Senator Jerry Melin, 1980, New York City

Of the literally hundreds of hours of recordings in The Archives, only one cassette tape has survived. That cassette, fortunately, contained numerous recordings of the late, greatly and dearly loved Jerry Melin. This is one of them. Thanks to Ian Rodia, who digitized the crumbling generic cassette tape. As you can hear, the cassette recorder itself generated a "bump" every few seconds, and the tape is filled with the ambient sounds of buses, semis, glasses tinkling, coughs, and mumbling. Nonetheless, it is good to hear Jerry's voice.

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Audio Lost and found: some great downloadable MP3s from the great WFMU Blog

I love strange old audio ephemera, from the hundreds of Jean Shepherd shows I have to recordings of chatter on shortwave, the famous Buddy Rich rant tapes, and the "shut up and play" compilation of rock and rollers freaking out on stage and ripping into their audiences (Doiurtney Love, Mike Love, Elvis, Jim Morrison, Lou Reed, etc.). A great source all of this is the WFMU radio site that often releases free weird recordings that have slipped into the pulic doman.

WFMU's beware of the blog is a great web site and they always have lot of goodies for downloading. You should visit once in a while... in the meantime, here are three gems I recently found there that you can download.




1) How Do I learn. A collection of 6 MP3s from a collection of old educational film strips. Check out the cut "Who's afraid?" . . .it is genuinely spooky.



2) Flying Saucers Unlimited. This record is probably the score for Frank Stranges UFO documentary Phenomena 7.7. Pretty cool. The Reverend Strange is unquestionably way way out there.



3) Sound off Saxons! This is amazing. "Created as a keepsake for the 1965 graduating class of North High School in Torrance, CA, this album takes you through the school and introduces you to the multiple characters and events there — all with the corniest, dated humor you can imagine."

This is a wonderful slice of a world that has long since disappeared. It was already gone by the time I graduated from high school.
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