Audio archaeology

Kevin Irwin has been camped in the back of the web office for the last few weeks with a resurrected reel-to-reel tape deck hooked into a computer. Tape is like a Twinkie--leave it in a dusty box for a couple of decades and it will eventually go bad. So beside Kevin is a piece of ad-hoc tech cobbled by Radio Bob out of plywood, tin foil, light bulbs, and a thermostat pried out of an old CPU. Inspired equally by a toy Easy Bake oven and a Clarkson engineering degree, it is used to cook the tapes, stabilizing them just long enough for one last good playback.

String band sketch by Matt Gordon from their 1980 LP Backroad Breakdown.

Some at the station view this exercise in audio archaeology with trepidation. Radio is meant to play, then go away. And given the quality of much that has come to light from the somewhat random library that survived the move to the new station offices more than a decade ago, one could agree. But now and then, the midden heap disgorges a gem--intermittent reinforcement to keep the digger keen to his task. One such for me is a recording from around 1975 of the St. Regis River Valley String Band.

Back in the day, band founders David and Linda Danks lived around the corner from me in Sanfordville, in a farmhouse on Pickle Street. This was a golden time for live music in the area; another band lived downstairs from me, and yet another down the road in the opposite direction. I recall the largest member of the Danks family was a massive and ugly specimen of swine named Captain Gonad. The band limped from gig to gig in a crapulous and ancient GMC school bus, renamed The Fool Bus. The prime venues of the day were bars, beer blasts and Legion halls. Hearing the band today, the sweet old-time tunes are inextricably bound up in my mind with the din of table talk, the clamor of pinball machines, and the pungent funk of half-dried beer, tobacco, and woodstove-scented flannel shirts.

Bookends

The flag out in front of the station is at half-staff, in memory of President Gerald Ford, who died this week at the age of 93. But it could be lowered as well to commemorate the passing of a very different cultural icon, James Brown, who ascended to a higher stage this week at the age of 73 (or 146 in normal-tempo years). The two men--as wildly different as two can be--could be bookends for that peculiar blip in the American arc, the 1970s.

Ford is best remembered for his calm, stolid and avuncular style at a time when the country, on the one hand, was coping with the disastrous denouement of the Vietnam War, and on the other, with the executive overreaching that brought down the Nixon administration. Ford’s time in office also marked the end of the era when cultural and political moderates dominated the GOP. Republican leaders for the next thirty years would be conservatives empowered by the Reagan “Revolution.”

James Brown embodied everything that the cultural warriors who came after Ford decried. He gloried in the outrageous--celebrating sexuality and appetite. His freaky-deaky costume and makeup, the in-your-face steaminess of his performances, his celebration of racial identity, his chaotic personal and public life—all make him a poster-child for the exuberant iconoclasm that also marked the time.

Two Americans, two Americas—and so it remains.