Self-Recorded Documentist

On the way home from work tonight, i popped in one of the many cassette tapes i have scattered on my saturn's (car) floor. the lucky pick tonight was a barrington arts festival dress rehearsal recording i made from saturday, october 11, 2003, in barrington illinois. it became a dress rehearsal, due to the mere fact that for someone unknown reason or another, the plumbing wasn't working thast night & they decided not to present a show. still, about 20 people showed up & i performed by heart out, as if it were.

i've been recording myself since the early 1980s, ever since i heard a radio interview conducted by the bbc's andy peebles toward the end of 1980, with the late john lennon & his wife yoko ono, as lennon remarked how they had documented themselves since the time they got together in the late 1960s. i was intrigued by that thought & decided to take heed to their advice & started to record myself as well. and somewhere, there is a reel-to-reel recording of me when i was just 6 months old, recorded by my parents, so the recording bug was imprinted on me early on.

in the beginning, i used to record myself, mostly to hear how i would sound on tape, my delivery style & my ennuciation skills. prior to this self-documentation declaration, i had recorded myself a few times earlier, at age 10 or 11, when i wanted to sound like a sports radio broadcaster announcing trades between baseball teams, which had been a career dream of mine, to be a radio broadcaster. sadly that tape doesn't exist anymore, as it went the way of the great tape eating machine frenzy. i also have a few high school interview tapes, of when i wrote for my high school newspaper in my senior year.

so, the tape recordings began. as you might well, imagine, i recorded everything i did in the 1980s, including all of the interviews i conducted when i began my career in journalism between 1980-1995. i recorded almost all of my performances, rehearsals i had with bands when i played with them, the two i formed, JTK (Joey The Tush Kangaroo) & Tribal Screen Hens. even as i recorded all of my poetry readings, hauling my tape recorder everywhere i went, i was always pointed out by poetry slam originator marc smith as, "it's charles bernstein & his tape recorder..." could have trademarked that one, i suppose, oh well. but onward i recorded. in the late 1990s, one of my roommates asked me why i recorded everything & why was it so necessary? i explained to him, that i wanted to catch everything, including the mistakes that i could learn from.

from time to time, i recorded others, street sounds, girlfriends, telephone messages & events. that came in handy later, as i made hard to find recordings of my friends who knew i had recorded them on tape. the roommate who asked me why so many years ago, was more than eager to have a cassette full of recordings that weren't available elsewhere. i had become a documentist.

in the mid-1990s, when i lived in both attica & west lafayette, indiana, i became the unofficial tape recording documentist for a monthly talent program, while recording bands on my four-track machine. i must have recorded over 30 bands, besides myself, all the while, working on my delivery style.

in late 1994, in an attempt to get the programmers of the monthly talent program to make good on their word of releasing a compilation of all of the bands i recorded, i put up flyers around town, offering the tapes for sale along with other performances i had, only to receive a cease & desist letter from the program coordinators, telling me i couldn't release those tapes, only my own recordings of me.

although they explained to me that other bands complained, it was kind of funny, in light of the fact that i had never heard or received a complaint, only requests by various bands to get copies of their performances. the coordinators didn't seem to mind that i had recorded the bands, but i suspect when it came down to making a buck off of the enterprise, they cried foul, ahhhh, but money always talks, i guess.

along with those tapes, i have over 150 hours of songs, rehearsal songs, songs that never made it past rehearsal, false starts & demos of songs that ended up in completely different forms. a lot of these songs came from my time spent with teachers in private lessons, recitals & songs i had written from the early 1980s onward, including pop, jazz, comedy, novelty & throat-singing. all of these tapes are boxed and labeled and yes, i remember each and every performance i ever gave. hard to believe, but true. out of all the performances and readings i have recorded, only six didn't turn out, but from such an massive archive collection i have, these tapes have come in handy, when trying to piece together past outings & rememberances.

i hope one day to donate my tapes and other recordings to a public library, a college or university, somewhere that someone like you reading this, can study what it was, that i am all about, both in poetry & song. like the world, i am ever-changing, interlocking with new sound & creativeness. i pity the day the recording industry abolishes tape entirely for a cheaper way to imprint a sound.