Hearing a sound from your past can be more powerful than a photo in my opinion because it’s movement in real time, not frozen like a picture. What was happening in that moment is “replayed,” not just how you recall the moment. Here’s five discoveries of the hundreds I made diving into my treasure chest of audio cassettes.
Science Fiction Society Promo
This was one of my first discoveries and I had to share it even though it reveals my past as a Sci-Fi nerd, geek, whatever. In high school, I was president of The Science Fiction Society for my Junior and Senior year. “Society” just sounded so much bigger than a club. Besides the usual promotion at the beginning of the school year plastering the halls with posters, I had the idea to create an audio commercial to play during homeroom. So I created one tape with mixed music, one tape with sound effects and set up two tape recorders to play these while recording with a third tape recorder and doing the voice over with everything playing together. Remember, this was fourteen years before the first version of Audacity was available and I couldn’t afford a four track recorder. After a number of tries, I was able to sync everything up.
I assumed the main office had a built in cassette player, but it didn’t. I had to hold up my boom box to the microphone. Unfortunately, I play tested the commercial so many times before homeroom, I had run the batteries down and it was playing at half speed. Where was I going to find 6 C batteries in five minutes? For some reason, lowering the volume brought the speed back up to normal, but it was so low, I had to hold it really close to the microphone, which didn’t produce the best listening experience. After homeroom, I was told some laser sounds were heard, “Star Wars” music, but the rest was garbled. So thirty one years later, I give you the commercial that was never clearly heard.
Communion Video
In the late ‘80’s, early 90’s, when camcorders were huge, events like a communion seemed like a major news event with ten or more dads running around church trying to fight for the best view. This highly annoyed those in charge and when I was asked to shoot my cousin’s daughter’s communion, a stern announcement from a nun forbade us to shoot any of the ceremony. Even though I had shot outside the church and the party afterwards, I wanted to do something to address what happened on the final video. So I recreated the nun’s announcement while using organ music recorded before they shut us down. I then followed it with old Super 8 footage of communions I transferred to video.
Music from America and Beyond
When I met my cousin from Australia for the first time in the early 90’s, I wanted to keep in touch in a unique way. So I got to live out my radio DJ fantasy by hosting a fictional radio show called “Music from America and Beyond.” I filled every second of one hundred minute tape with music and commentary from personal and family news to movie and concert reviews. I even had recurring segments like “Defunct Bands” which featured music I liked from short lived bands, the “Memory Mailbox” which was random audio stories from my past with background music and sound effects and songs from movie soundtracks . I would mail a cassette every three or four months and made about six of them before I stopped. Here’s the introduction which starts with scrolling through radio stations with a dial hearing static like on an older radio.
Elizabeth in the Rain
All my life, I wanted to play the guitar. I watched my sister teach herself and tried to do the same. I can kind of play only by ear, not knowing any formal notes. I don’t know why I just never took lessons or studied chords. My excuse was time, but I really want to make time and promised myself to do so before I’m 50. Uh oh, only have less than two years left. I came across guitar “dabblings” on many tapes. But I found the one instrumental I composed, beginning to end. A few months into dating my future wife, who was a musician and music teacher, I was inspired by a story she told about running outside during a sun shower. A melody came into my head and for a week I worked on it. Once I thought I had it, I sat down and recorded on a 100 minute tape over and over again until I was satisfied. About 80 minutes into the tape, I was finally satisfied. You can hear it at the very end when the last note finally rang out and a low whispered, “Yeah” is heard. Here’s the first rough recording of working through my ideas and then the final.
SPFX: The Empire Strikes Back
I mentioned in my last blog how audio taping the CBS behind the scenes special on “The Empire Strikes Back” and hearing it hundreds of times over influenced my interest in filmmaking. I found that tape and will share the conclusion with host Mark Hamill saying the final line that I always repeated with him out loud as a 12 and 13 year old, “The ‘Star Wars’ saga will continue. In the largest sense, it could never end, because imagination has no end.”
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