The Audio Kitchen

There was a time when coming of age was a short intoxicating ride. Even in an otherwise mundane life, a window of recreational opportunity would open when you’d get your first taste of independence and grownup rights, only to slam shut forever when weighty duties and obligations set you on the treadmill of adulthood. Whether you had to fight a war, take up chores at the factory or farm, or were lucky enough to go to college– there wasn’t a lot of time to make all your youthful indiscretions come true before you had to settle down and work and breed and be responsible, until the end.

To blame? Well, there’s plenty to go around. The draft is gone. The many choices of birth control and “family planning” made a big difference. It brought more women in the workplace and kept a lot of folks footloose far past their twenties. People wait much longer to get married, and there’s really no big stigma about getting married at all. More people don’t have kids at all, or have them well into middle age. And then there’s the complete fetish of life-long adolescence– through regimens of supplements and hormones or the horrors of botox and plastic surgery.

So with this post let us hearken back to simpler times, when coming of age was still an event. When the onset of adulthood was arousing and revelatory. And what made it so spectacular was that it was so fleeting and temporary.

To actually hear these ripening juveniles in their heyday, you have to dig back a few decades. These two offerings were created with separate technologies. Two are homemade discs (or records) featuring a gathering of friends. The others are clandestine telephone recordings captured with a reel to reel deck. I don’t have dates on any of these artifacts, but I’d guess the discs are from the late 40’s or early 50’s. The tapes are probably from the mid-1950’s. At least that’s my guess. And beyond content, what I really appreciate about all of these recordings is the richness of the regional accents. Something else that’s also disappearing in this future we inhabit.

The natives are puckered up and restless in this mock radio drama, recorded as a memento of a weekend trip to Panther Lake, and the memorable necking party that ensued. As someone beats out a jungle rhythm on a cardboard box, exaggerated smooching sounds are heard as the narrator hints at the terrors of kissing in the dark. When the drums and lip smacking abates, the group improvises a dark farce based on the scary radio shows of the day.

Looking around online, I see there’s a Panther Lake resort with cabins up in northern New Jersey. I’d say there’s a good chance that this is where these funlovers made these recordings so many years ago.

While the side one was entertaining, side two is a more factual account of the weekend. They all sound youn enough (except for Helen, who sounds like she’s already on a two pack a day habit). It’s Sunday night and I believe the big necking party must have occurred the night before. But at this point the festivities are winding down, and they’re discussing their disparate destinations and where they’ll be tomorrow. Some will go back to work. Another has exams. And one fellah is heading out to Indianapolis for the big race, which would put this soiree right before Memorial Day– the traditional yearly kick-off of vacation season.

This bunch is far from wild. You might say they were rather square. And there’s no mention of drinking (except for some hot cocoa). And having grown up a generation after these folks, the “necking parties” I remember were part of our social scene when we were more like fifteen or sixteen (and we were drinking). I’d guess the kinds on this recording were at least 19 and older. However, it sounds like a swell time was had by all.

The Art Of Lying  4:44
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“Well, she should be by now,” he says in frustration. “Every other one was.” What? A quid pro quo of dating and dining for some hubba hubba "affection"? Yes, times have certainly changed. But guys? Not so much.

It wasn’t that long ago that one of the most important social networking tools in the house was a little blinking box next to the telephone. Not only did cell phones and voice mail kind of eliminate the need for answering machines, but more people take advantage of all sorts of ways to type to each other through the ether these days. While all that telecommunication doesn’t really leave artifacts behind for us to dig through, there is a lurking bounty of audio treasures out there from the golden era of the answering machine– many thousands of cassettes (and microcassettes) filled with communiques and intimate details of human lives that have been left behind in piles of resale goods. When I’m wondering through a thrift store I never pass up lifting the lid of an old answering machine to see if there’s an oyster in there.

More than most home recordings, incoming message tapes are often candid documents. And they can provide some of the most intriguing red meat in the found sound business. While there’s an inherent awareness of being recorded that comes along with leaving a phone message, the more urgent or emotional the message is the less likely the caller is going to have posterity on his or her mind. Immediacy trumps self-awareness.

These four recordings are complete artifacts, with all the messages in the order they appeared on the tape. At least two of these tapes have chunks of captured conversation between the messages.The most likely cause is when the phone is answered after (or at the same time as) the machine has been triggered and keeps recording for a while as long as it’s getting levels. And some answering machines actually have a button you can push that simply engages the recorder to capture the call. Either way, getting some back and forth on the phone can be a big bonus, offering a taste of the personality of the owner of the machine and perhaps providing context for some of the messages left behind.

About three minutes in the tone shifts drastically. It’s incoming wrath from a spurned girlfriend. Or perhaps just an episode of serial dating gone all wrong. I suspect that the first half of the tape with all the birthday joy may have been recorded at a later date. The first onslaught from her you hear starts in mid-sentence. Rewinding the answering machine and then letting new messages collect from the beginning would cause this effect. Some moving moments may have been lost.

As the curtain rises on the melodrama we hear the victim holding back tears, wishing and hoping that Mark might have been just a blt more emotive at their break-up scene (which may have just taken place an hour or two before these calls come in). But since he’s either holding is feelings back or doesn’t have any, she’s chosen to lather up his answering machine with her feelings until he finally feels something. Bottom line, she’s doing her part to make sure he is not happy. Which might be tough with a bevy of broads dialing him up around the clock.

It all started at some social event. Apparently in some small way she gave him some grief about not spending enough time helping her out with her kids (or something like that). And then he “totally and completely yelled” at her in front of “a whole bunch” of their friends. Not a good idea, in retrospect. But it does engender some cogent dark comedy for the record.

I don’t want to spoil the plot before you hear the tape, but let’s just say that she’s so unflinchingly merciless that it’s hard to imagine Kevin would ever take a call from her again. And the end of this tape is sadly telling. Perhaps there are people you can win over lovers by shoving them away, but I’m not so sure they’re the ones you’d want to stick around. Cooler heads and nicer folks move on to more friendly and fertile territory. And while it’s good to be direct, cruelty is problematic. And isolating.

Although the last two furious females may have been lacking in clarity of mind flailed their men over the phone line, they seemed sober enough. For the next offering, this clearly is not the case.

Like Kevin’s girlfriend, the hammered hussy takes aim at the manhood. Only she derides his prowess in the profit column instead of the bedroom. And her insults are vulgar schoolyard stuff. Shamelessly crude and a lotta fun. You might wanna shoo all the small children and bible bangers out of the room before you listen to this one.

And to wind things up, we have Frank and Bess. And this incoming message tape is a little different than the other three. It’s longer and you actually get to hear several of their conversations between them. And there’s none of the belligerence and backbiting so evident of all the other tapes here. Yet, I find this rather sedate and relatively uneventful recording the most depressing of the bunch.

The star of this tape is the resonant self-absorbed voice of Frank himself. As it’s recorded from his phone line, he’s louder and clearer than all the other voices calling in. And besides talking about a lot of nothing (mostly weather and processed meat products) he just groans, sighs, yawns and exhibits an extremely annoying fake laugh over the course of his conversations with Bess. But all he really wants to do is get off the phone.

Frank’s Answering Machine  31:28

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Instead of the coda to a meltdown, the repeated calls from Bess follow a more sedate and ambiguous break-up. The details aren’t readily easy to discern, but the main point is that he’s just moved far from her neighborhood and that the separation coincided with the conclusion of an intimate relationship they’ve shared. And perhaps they lived together. I’m not sure. And Bess? Nice. She sounds very nice. So how did a nice girl like this end up in a matching set of ugly break up tapes? It’s the cruelty.

“That kind of devalues it,” she says, unhappy that he can’t be nice too.

“Yeah, I know,” he says. An indignity she ignores. Not only that, but a minute or two later she starts to get worked up in the other direction and mentions that she’s all wrapped up in Frank’s bathrobe, luxuriating in his odors. “Your SICK,” he squirms, finding her intimate affection patently offensive.

Seems to me, that would be the perfect moment to challenge Frank’s manhood, let alone his emotional depth. But unlike the wronged women on the other tapes, Bess never lashes out or takes him to task. And you know, if she just would have ripped into the moron it would have made this tape a lot more entertaining, and probably would have provided the best results for all concerned.