Emma! Fred! Steve! Time Travel Surprise

[gerisullivan]

Sometime in the process of unpacking and settling into The Zeppelin Hangar, two VHS tapes I didn't remember having turned up. By the time that happened, my VCR had broken, so they went unwatched until yesterday. And while I was watching them, benyalow used his DVD recorder to convert the tapes so I now have them in digital form, and can watch them again and again whenever I please.

Which is how it came to be that right now, while I'm typing this LJ entry, I'm also watching and listening to the likes of fredcritter singing "Quinn the Eskimo," coffeeem singing "Downtown," and skzbrust drumming along through it all. And more...so much more. Emma, from the delightfully ridiculous "Goober Peas" to Mark Henley's "November Song," which still grabs me after all these years. I expect it always will. Likewise, Fred's renditions of "Ripple" and "Red Dancing Shoes."

The tapes don't say, but memory tells me willshetterly was the videographer. The first tape has partial coverage of a concert at Borders Books on February 5, 1993. That would have been the Borders in Bonaventure, next to Ridgedale Mall in Minnetonka. The Fabulous Lorraine Garland joins in for a few tunes, looking very fetching in Fred's hat.

Early on, there's a bit of baby noise, and Emma mentions "...our celebrity cute baby guest." That most likely was Gavi; she would have been about 6 weeks old at the time. And since they were in a bookstore, Steve of course had to sing "Railroad Bill." So many memories...all the way back to Marc Glasser performing it at the fallcon after Chicon IV, thereby introducing Andy Breckman's song to Minneapolis fandom...

The rest of that tape and the second are from a show at the New Riverside Cafe a week later, February 12th, 1993. Dakoka Dave Hull and Adam Stemple sit in during that show. Tasty!

I'll gladly provide DVDs to Will and the musicians upon request, and will check with them about also making the DVDs available to the Usual Suspects. (Most likely, I ended up with that set of VHS tapes under the same "Usual Suspects" method of distribution.) Then again, it might be better to have someone who knows how to insert chapter breaks, song titles, and other info early on in this process. Right now, it's all arbitrary; I think of the digital capture I have as being very much a raw form.

The overall quality is much higher than any of the audio tapes I recorded at music parties in the 1980s and early 1990s. It's more along the lines of the tapes Jack WINOLJ recorded at The Little Music Party That Smoked, and even fishbliss's digital tapes from that same party. The lighting at Borders is nice and bright; the stage at the New Riverside Cafe is darker, leading to a grainy picture, and there's much more coffeehouse background noise there.

I'm thrilled to have this record of these shows. Big fun, and then some.

Comments

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

Noted. Shocked! I don't currently have tape duplicating equipment; if/when that changes, I'll dup tapes from The Little Music Party That Smoked and send those your way, too. (I'd like to digitize all of those, too, though that process really needs someone who's good with sound.)