Osiris Podcast Profile: The Tapes Archive

Phil Freeman hosts the Osiris Media podcast Burning Ambulance. Below, Phil profiles fellow Osiris podcast,The Tapes Archive.

Interviews with musicians are much more than a source of information about their latest album or their current tour. They provide an insight into how that artist thinks about their art, about the world around them, and subjects you’d never expect. And digging out vintage interviews can often be like opening up a time capsule.

This is the appeal of The Tapes Archive, which gathers previously unheard interviews recorded mostly in the 1980s and 1990s (the earliest is from 1978) with a broad range of musicians and other creative types, like author Kurt Vonnegut and comedians Bill Maher, George Carlin, Joan Rivers, Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. Many of the people interviewed are dead now, including four of those six, as well as singer-songwriter John Prine, John Entwistle of The Who, Neil Peart of Rush, Frank Zappa, Shannon Hoon of Blind Melon, and Rick James. Others are still very much alive, though, which makes it fascinating to listen to their perspectives from back then.

The interviewer is Marc Allan, a retired journalist from Indianapolis who spent decades writing for local and national outlets of various sizes, logging hundreds of interviews in the process. Most of that material would doubtless have gone unused; as a journalist of 20+ years’ standing myself, I know that only a fraction of what’s recorded even during a 20-minute phone call with an artist winds up in the final feature, and when you’ve recorded an interview that runs an hour or more, you may wind up with about ten minutes’ worth of pertinent quotes that end up on the printed page. The rest just fades into memory, preserved on a moldering cassette or as a digital file on an external hard drive somewhere.

Allan held onto his tapes — over 300 of them — and a few years ago his friend Alan Berry heard them and decided they needed to be shared with fans who would surely be thrilled to hear these long-forgotten and never before published conversations.

What makes these interviews fascinating is, obviously, the opinions and perspectives being expressed by the artists, not only about their own music and the status of their career at the time they were recorded, but also about the broader music scene or life itself. Sometimes a surprisingly personal moment will pop up, as when former Guns N’ Roses guitarist Izzy Stradlin, interviewed in 1993 just after the release of his debut as a leader, Izzy Stradlin and the Ju Ju Hounds, talks about Marc’s favorable review of the album — in Stradlin’s former hometown paper, the Indianapolis Star — being faxed to him on the road by his father. Allan and Stradlin then move into a short conversation about the guitarist’s feelings about his home state, which changed somewhat during the time that he joined Guns N’ Roses, moved to Los Angeles, quit Guns N’ Roses and moved back.

As a journalist, it’s also impressive to hear a skilled peer at work. Allan rarely asks dumb or goading questions — he’s not trying to “poke the bear,” and he doesn’t leave artists many openings to reply with a surly “yeah” or “no.” He’s able to draw them out without being confrontational, leading conversations down the kind of interesting detours that make for compulsively readable articles…and great podcasts.