Speaker 1: A smile is the protection of I heard Riggio m h.
Speaker 1: Crow Island, Crow Island. What is that that I have?
Speaker 1: The four cordels deal, miss Jellice thing? He said, tell
Speaker 1: us about your eight favorite fails in school? Friend like Lisa. Well, okay,
Speaker 1: I have friends like Lissa and Kelly and Lynn Jarvis
Speaker 1: and mary Gan and Lynne for and let this sing song.
Speaker 1: You're joining Uncle Jack? Okay, Ni goings. Uncle Jack's nifty
Speaker 1: tape recorder is beautiful. I love it. No, don't touch brick, No, Brian,
Speaker 1: your level. They have to take you into our server
Speaker 1: shop and give your transistor fiction. Yeah, getting all over
Speaker 1: your cabin. Yeah, daddy, Yeah, look at that. Look at
Speaker 1: that Uncle Jack. He goes he and he bites it
Speaker 1: his father. I don't hi, Oh that's allowed. I know. Brian.
Speaker 1: Can you say something, Hi, Bryan, say Hi, Say hi? Hi? Cookie?
Speaker 1: Got a cookie? Shoes shoes, shoes, shoes, shoes, shoes, shoes.
Speaker 1: This hundred or so feet of real real tape comes
Speaker 1: to us from master collector Bob Purse on his blog
Speaker 1: Inches per Second. He describes it like this, Today's brief
Speaker 1: tape may not sound like much to some listeners. I'll
Speaker 1: leave that to you to decide, but it is a
Speaker 1: greatly loved little hundred and thirteen seconds for me and
Speaker 1: a few of my closest friends, and a key tape
Speaker 1: in my development as a collector of other people's sounds
Speaker 1: and memories. This tape came from the a LS Mammoth
Speaker 1: Music Mart sale, and it was a tape found most
Speaker 1: likely in the first batch at the first of those
Speaker 1: yearly sales that I went to, And as a result,
Speaker 1: this little moment in time, recorded very likely in the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties, was among the first, if not the first
Speaker 1: tapes I found of this sort, and definitely the first
Speaker 1: to make me want to hear more of this sort
Speaker 1: of thing. The fact that it was clearly recorded in Winnetka, Illinois,
Speaker 1: a town less than a mile from where I grew up,
Speaker 1: probably helped too. Plus and maybe this is the reason
Speaker 1: it made such an impression on me. There are a
Speaker 1: remarkable number of enjoyable little moments for such a short tape.
Speaker 1: Regardless of the reasons, this is one of the tapes
Speaker 1: that pushed me into the collector that I had today.
Speaker 1: What we hear Uncle Jack has brought his tape recorder
Speaker 1: over to the home of a family member. A child
Speaker 1: named Gail, being apparently the oldest child present, is encouraged
Speaker 1: to talk after not wanting to at first. She then
Speaker 1: lists several of her friends Lissa and Kelly, and Lynn
Speaker 1: Jarvis and Mary Jane and Lynne Fische and mentions are school,
Speaker 1: there's a toddler present, No Brian, and he begins nibbling
Speaker 1: on part of the tape recorder until told not to.
Speaker 1: The family then comments on Brian's behavior and looks before
Speaker 1: trying to get him to say a few of the
Speaker 1: words he knows. Can you say something? Hi? Hi? That's it,
Speaker 1: except it isn't for me. My family and friends, several
Speaker 1: phrases here have become the sort of obscure references that
Speaker 1: we all have within our family and friendship circles. Some
Speaker 1: of the things I love here, Gayl saying it's beautiful.
Speaker 1: I love it. Uncle Jack worrying about Brian shorting out
Speaker 1: the transistor. Have to take you to shop the way,
Speaker 1: Gayle says, Uncle Jack. He goes, he and he bites it.
Speaker 1: Gail's mother's description of her son Brian, leading to the
Speaker 1: essential question can an overbite be nifty? The same woman's
Speaker 1: wordless vocalizing immediately thereafter demonstrating that nifty overbite. For those assembled,
Speaker 1: the failed attempts to get Brian to say his new words,
Speaker 1: including Gail's excited encouragement shoo shoes, shoes. This is one
Speaker 1: that I treasure above all, but perhaps it doesn't others.
Speaker 1: If it doesn't live up to the billing for you, well,
Speaker 1: then please allow me the indulgence. Bob has curated thousands
Speaker 1: of home recording oddities from all kinds of garage and
Speaker 1: rummage sales, sifting through chaotic masses of analog tapes and
Speaker 1: Final seventy eight's, grabbing anything with an intriguing description and
Speaker 1: anything unlabeled. Most of these, I'm sure contain nothing of interest.
Speaker 1: Some are badly recorded or damaged, many are mislabeled. Many
Speaker 1: are just tapes of pop music recorded off the radio,
Speaker 1: but a few are absolute gems, stuff you would never
Speaker 1: hear anywhere else. Families gathered around the piano, singing songs,
Speaker 1: predictions of the future five years from now, am radio jingles,
Speaker 1: scare tactic p s as someday a friend may offer
Speaker 1: you a trip to a world of colors you can
Speaker 1: taste and music you can see. Whole unreleased albums by
Speaker 1: amateur musicians. Wow wow wow reputation. Very good things that
Speaker 1: defy easy description. Stacks of this media line Bob's House.
Speaker 1: It's the culmination of a life's work. This is not
Speaker 1: necessarily glamorous work. Indeed, it's a grind, digging through haystack
Speaker 1: after haystack, unsure of which contained needles. It's a labor
Speaker 1: of love. But the archivist has the spirit of the adventurer,
Speaker 1: the pilgrim, the backpacker, the urban explorer. The more difficult
Speaker 1: the expedition, the sweeter the reward. Imagine driving up into
Speaker 1: the mountains and turning into a dying radio frequency anything.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's conservative talk show on one band, and it
Speaker 1: starts running into Christian hymnal music on the other, and
Speaker 1: then something altogether different arises, a creation that is greater
Speaker 1: than simple some of its parts. What's the chance that
Speaker 1: these two things could collide in such an intriguing way?
Speaker 1: What's the chance that this would ever happen again? This
Speaker 1: feels akin to the process by which David Byrne and
Speaker 1: Brian Eno crafted their imaginary cultural artifact in the Bush
Speaker 1: of Ghosts, Competing their new brand of psychedelic dance music
Speaker 1: against found vocal tracks, evangelist preachers calling radio shows America
Speaker 1: is waiting before field recorded folks singing, and an exorcism
Speaker 1: called on tape? How Still Watercolor fell in love with
Speaker 1: the bootleg cassette of Gumboots Accordium Drive Hits Volume two,
Speaker 1: a now lost collection of South African jam sessions that
Speaker 1: he channeled through his controversial album That Mysterious Thing. You
Speaker 1: think I have never heard anything like this before. You
Speaker 1: listen over and over. You feel compelled to share it
Speaker 1: with others. You attempt to unlock its secrets, Treasures saved
Speaker 1: from obscurity and eventual oblivion because they're just too fascinating
Speaker 1: to put down. These could generally be referred to as
Speaker 1: ephemeral recordings. Audio that left undisturbed would only exist for
Speaker 1: a short time. Physical media breaks down, tape rots, final disintegrates,
Speaker 1: and certain types of recordings have historically been most susceptible
Speaker 1: to neglect and decay. But of course, all right, so
Speaker 1: here we are one of the elephants. Alternative alternative, alternative facts, life,
Speaker 1: doubleble turn the frigging frogs game. You gotta stop eating
Speaker 1: the type pods, Hi Doggy, He wrote the word drank
Speaker 1: the cafe Everyone the least predictable, most confounding era in
Speaker 1: the history of human expression. In a world where nothing
Speaker 1: is ever truly deleted, in which every meal of person photographs,
Speaker 1: every taped hour of video gameplay exists potentially forever, what
Speaker 1: will be analogous with the ephemeral audio of the past.
Speaker 1: What is the danger of being lost in the digital age?
Speaker 1: And as part of that continuum, old ephemeral things that
Speaker 1: may have never been seen again now have new life
Speaker 1: thanks to the efforts of folks like Bob Purse and
Speaker 1: Rick Prelinger. So much of the ephemera I have cherished
Speaker 1: was already digitized by the time I got to it.
Speaker 1: You wonder what miss the cut off? What media in
Speaker 1: between the advent of recording and the recording of this
Speaker 1: turned to dust before it could be turned to ones
Speaker 1: and zeros? For instance, Florence Lawrence, often referred to as
Speaker 1: the world's first movie star, acted in over three hundred
Speaker 1: films in the first third of the twentieth century. She
Speaker 1: worked for all the big studios, Biograph, imp Lubin, Vitograph.
Speaker 1: She was the first film actress whose name was used
Speaker 1: to promote the pictures truly the first celebrity of the
Speaker 1: medium and the initial linkage of the Hollywood star system.
Speaker 1: Yet of her staggering film catalog, the majority are now
Speaker 1: considered lost films. In other words, no part of the
Speaker 1: celluloid stock still survives. Born in six in Hamilton, Ontario,
Speaker 1: Florence was mostly in silent films, but she acted in
Speaker 1: a handful of sinc sound talkies in the nineteen twenties
Speaker 1: and thirties before the end of her tragically short life.
Speaker 1: Hollywood was not kind to flow, and her last roles
Speaker 1: were tiny bit parts. So while you can still hear
Speaker 1: her doing vaudevillian stick as a Russian maid were calling
Speaker 1: a few words out from a crowd of extras, the
Speaker 1: remaining over of this once icon grossly underrepresents her voice.
Speaker 1: Well documented in other ways, this becomes a most inaccessible
Speaker 1: moment in history. I don't remember how I ended up here,
Speaker 1: but it was surely the course of some search engine
Speaker 1: rabbit hole. I started my professional extremity as ronades, trying
Speaker 1: to break and relieve to my ronoptic piece that's the
Speaker 1: voice of Dr Sigmund Freud. Knowing nothing else, I made
Speaker 1: a copy of the recording and archived it away. It's
Speaker 1: not exactly pleasant to listen to. The fidelity is low,
Speaker 1: and the delivery, perhaps because of Freud's strained English, is
Speaker 1: somewhat painful, but it was unique. Sometime later those hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty seconds made it into a composition of mine.
Speaker 1: That was before I learned that this is the first
Speaker 1: and only known recording of Freud. He was suffering inoperable
Speaker 1: jaw cancer. With every word he was an agonizing pain.
Speaker 1: I can only imagine what compelled him to speak, but
Speaker 1: in this likely the only time Freud was offered a microphone.
Speaker 1: What he provided was kind of the business card version
Speaker 1: of his work. I started my professional activity as a
Speaker 1: neurologist trying to bring relief to my neurotic patients. Under
Speaker 1: the influence of an older friend and by my own efforts,
Speaker 1: I discovered some important new facts about the unconscious in
Speaker 1: psychic life, the role of instinctual urges and so on.
Speaker 1: Out of these findings grew a new science, psychoanalysis, a
Speaker 1: part of psychology, had a new method of treatment of
Speaker 1: the neuroses. I had to pay heavily for this bit
Speaker 1: of good luck. People did not believe in my facts
Speaker 1: and thought my theories on savory. Resistance was strong and unrelenting.
Speaker 1: In the end, I succeeded in acquiring pupils and building
Speaker 1: up an international psychoanalytics association. But the struggle is not
Speaker 1: yet over. Color I had? Is all this inherent in
Speaker 1: the track? Did the conditions of its creation somehow manifest
Speaker 1: in its mystique? Or maybe I just got lucky? Maybe
Speaker 1: those things aren't mutually exclusive. Six Filmmaker Ken Jacobs presumably
Speaker 1: bought a lot of old newsreels. He used them in
Speaker 1: his found footage cut ups, But one reel, shot two
Speaker 1: decades prior, proved to be something different altogether. Quickly, we
Speaker 1: know where we are. It's February on. Talking crowds are
Speaker 1: gathered outside of Manhattan's Audubon Ballroom. Malcolm X has just
Speaker 1: been shot. These are the raw recordings of the camera
Speaker 1: crew on the ground. We see the same few people
Speaker 1: interview and reinterview. We hear the responses sharpened, and he
Speaker 1: raised his head in the Muslim greetings Alona legum. Like this,
Speaker 1: the reporter's questions grow hawk is are you angst that
Speaker 1: both of these men had no part in the conspiracy
Speaker 1: to kill Malcolm? Where we have two suspects in custod
Speaker 1: If you're careful, you can catch the facts begin to drift.
Speaker 1: I can't give you an accurate at least eight shots,
Speaker 1: and then smack in the middle, a ghostly figure downs
Speaker 1: the screen. Well has given the order to his followers
Speaker 1: to see that I am primpled or killed at this one.
Speaker 1: A perfect film, as Ken titled it, twenty one minutes
Speaker 1: forty five seconds of uncut, sixteen perfect, requiring no additional edits.
Speaker 1: If we were to divide these recordings into categories, I'd
Speaker 1: file each of the aforementioned examples under perfect. Whatever the
Speaker 1: intent and conditions of recording, they find us now like
Speaker 1: immaculate conceptions, preserved, fully formed, and ready to ascribe, meaning
Speaker 1: you where you see here? Join? Okay? I is are
Speaker 1: you joining this? Uncle Jack's nifty is beautiful? I love it.
Speaker 1: Ephemeral is written and assembled by me Williams and produced
Speaker 1: by Annie Reese, Matt Frederick, and Tristan McNeil, with technical
Speaker 1: assistance from Sherry Larson. Special thanks to this episode to
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb, Joe McCormick, Dylan Fagan, and the inimitable Bob Purse.
Speaker 1: There's more information about everything you heard here online at
Speaker 1: ephemeral dot show next time on ephemeral. What record collectors
Speaker 1: collected was stuff that had to do with the story
Speaker 1: of America country, blues, jazz, gospel, but the immigrants stuff,
Speaker 1: the ethnic stuff. The record collector is standing there in
Speaker 1: your living room with your grandparents records in his hand,
Speaker 1: and he hands them back to you and he goes, sorry,
Speaker 1: there's nothing here I can use really dollar apiece now, sorry,
Speaker 1: it's just I don't I don't think anybody wants these,
Speaker 1: So then what happens to them? Will you throw them away?
Speaker 1: They're junk If that guy doesn't want them, nobody wants them.
Speaker 1: Visitors in the world Wide Web in interacribus and soulsial
Speaker 1: media at the former show for our podcast on IHAT media,
Speaker 1: use a Ironartradio Apple podcasts when we ever use a
Speaker 1: new favorite shows