Old concerts for a new world

I kind of feel like I unknowingly prepared myself for the entire world changing, as the past few years have been unlike any other period of my life. Up until the 2000-teens, I not only avoided nostalgia and looking backwards, but I gleefully profited off people who do. Even my prodigious pop culture memorabilia collection of comics, albums, toys, etc. has always been an investment machine - virtually everything I ever bought was intended for eventual resale.

But a few years ago, I finally upgraded my audio-visual equipment so I could digitize all the old concert tapes I recorded in the 80s-90s, as well as the now-rare Betamax videos I accumulated and taped back then. And what an 8-track flashback I went on! First, reliving concerts I attended but haven’t replayed in 20 years or more – every night when I got off work, I put on a new tape, listened to every note with the headphones on while it copied to a digital file, and I even designed my own CD cover artwork for each one of the 100-plus concert tapes!

What a joy that was, just doing the covers while I listened – see, up until then, I’d almost never drawn anything that wasn’t for pay. The only reason I ever started doing commercial art was to keep the paychecks coming when being a writer wasn’t enough to make my living from home. So to be able to just create music-themed artwork as the inspiration struck, while listening to the performer as I worked, well, it was an unmatched experience that I’ll treasure forever.

Every week when Danielle called, I’d look forward to telling her about the newest/oldest concerts I’d just duped, and she patiently listened while I babbled on with fading fogey memories of those dates, many of them populated with long dead friends and lovers. I sent her each CD cover as soon as I printed ‘em out, and loved having her to share the project with as it grew and progressed. I also got to share dupes with fellow attendees, and even several of the bands themselves, all astonished that my archive existed. Plus, posting my homemade CD covers online got me a whole bunch of paying art gigs.

And then it got better when I started sharing my concerts online! None had ever been heard outside my headphones, and the concert-swapping world flipped out when my treasure trove started appearing. Turned out I had the first new Ramones concert to be released in over a decade – the thing actually charted in Italy when a bootleg company put out my concert, right down to the cover art I designed! Many other shows turned out to be historic, including one of only two known recordings of Spirit’s 1984 reunion concerts, this one at the Rodeo in La Jolla.

It’s been incredibly rewarding to get so much positive feedback, from tapes I never dreamed I’d be able to share with the world all at once. I may refuse to use cell phones, but I sure do love the internet! We have around three dozen vintage San Diego concerts on the Reader site now too, as part of a publicly shared Local Concert Database. Here's just a few of the historic shows you'll find there (contact music@sandiegoreader.com if you want to contribute):

Arthur Lee & Love 7-23-94 Flash Café: Includes "Feathered Fish," only performed live one other time with Lee.

Camel 2-13-79 Roxy Theater, Pacific Beach: Not the commonly circulated evening show, but the rarely heard early performance.

Ian Hunter & Mick Ronson 10-12-88 Bacchanal: Show #15 of the 60 Shows in 60 Cities tour.

So then I got my old Sony SuperBeta HiFi machine back, one of the highest quality consumer videotape recorders ever made, and I started re-living the 1980s, starting in 1983. Soooo many long forgotten TV shows, music performances, and obscure movies I taped off TV, well into the 90s. This, too, was an unexpected pleasure, and I've climbed into my time machine pretty much every night for the past year and a half. I even found lots of San Diego band performances from groups I'd almost forgotten about, like the Monroes, best known for their new wave-pop hit “What Do All the People Know.”

Some nights after a session of duping beta tapes, I went to bed with my face hurting – I’d been smiling and laughing for hours!

And then that project became ten times more rewarding when I created my BetaGems YouTube channel and started sharing my videos. Just over a year later, I have around 700 videos posted, with 314,000 views, 822 subscribers, and countless positive and encouraging comments from viewers. Those really make my day, hearing from a fellow time traveler. And I hear from several each day. Another joy I never imagined, just a few years ago.

The BetaGems channel includes many San Diego bands in rare TV performances from the 1980s, including a 1983 video of influential garage band, the Tell-Tale Hearts that hit 1200 views within days of uploading. "The band had only been together for less than half a year at that point," recalls Mike Stax, who currently fronts the Loons. "We'd just recorded a demo of four or five songs at Studio 517, which was a rehearsal space and sometimes an informal live music venue at 517 Fourth Avenue, in what's now the Gaslamp District, then just a rundown part of downtown. That demo was what we lip-synched to on the TV show."

Fellow Tell-Tale Heart Ray Brandes told the Reader he'd been looking for that time capsule from a long-gone world for 30 years. Now it's finally online, a nearly forgotten moment that turns out to have been captured in digital amber,

It kind of feels like what’s happening all over the world is the final period at the end of an epic chapter. I’m glad I spent the last few years going over what went before – I’d never really done that, other than my annual autobiographical features for the Reader, and those are usually just confessionals about stupid stuff I’ve done.

Everything now is new, and nothing will ever be like it was before.

But it never really can be, can it?