Oceanside Tape Project: Recovery Speaker Tapes

Oceanside Tape Project
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The Oceanside Tape Project is a recovery audio preservation project focused on digitizing old A.A. and AFG/Al-Anon speaker tapes and helping move them into XA-Speakers for long-term public access. These recordings come from conventions, conferences, roundups, workshops, group anniversaries, central office collections, tape libraries, and local rooms across the recovery world. Many were recorded decades ago on cassette and passed from hand to hand before podcasts, streaming, and digital archives existed. Our role is simple: find the tapes, digitize them, identify them as carefully as possible, and help keep the message available. This podcast shares selected recordings as part of that preservation effort — voices from A.A., AFG/Al-Anon, and the wider recovery tape tradition, carried forward one tape at a time. oceansidetapeproject.substack.com

  1. 5h ago

    Clancy I. — Venice, CA — AA

    Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can. By June of 1999 Clancy Imislund had been sober forty-one years and had run the Midnight Mission on Skid Row for a quarter century. The Desert Pow Wow gave him the assignment that starts everything: Steps One, Two and Three. They are the surrender steps — admit the thing has beaten you, concede that something bigger might not have, and hand it over — and Clancy had a first-hand claim on all three. He had arrived in Los Angeles in 1958 with nothing left to sell but a pint of his own blood, and the blood bank turned him down. The Mission fed him and pointed him at a meeting. He never had occasion to start drinking again. This is the earliest Clancy tape in the Oceanside collection, and it sits at the front of a run that follows him across the next decade: Singleness of Purpose at the Southern California convention in 2000, the South Bay Roundup that same spring, the Host City meeting at the 2002 Pow Wow, Coincidences, Inches and Seconds in 2006. He died in 2020 at ninety-three with sixty-two years of sobriety behind him. On this tape he is teaching the three steps that bought all of it. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

    Clancy I. — Venice, CA — AA

  2. 1d ago

    Bob D. — Las Vegas, NV — AA

    Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can. By the time Bob D. of Las Vegas took the podium at the Orange County AA Convention in April of 2010, he was one of the most listened-to AA speakers in the world — a man whose recorded voice has probably worked more Steps with more strangers than any sponsor alive. Sober since 1978, he made his name not as a storyteller but as a teacher. The recorded catalog is a working curriculum: Big Book seminars and multi-part studies — many taught jointly with Scott L., Kent D., Polly P., and others — alongside talks on sponsorship, We Agnostics, spiritual principles in relationships, and a power greater than ourselves. The archives that keep the classic voices, AMOT among them, file him on the same shelf as Chuck C. and Clancy I., and his workshops and retreats carried the material across the country and well beyond it. What made him rare was the combination: a genuinely dark drinking history, told with raw honesty, in service of precise instruction. Plenty of speakers can hold a ballroom with the wreckage. Bob D. held it with the repair manual. This tape catches him at Costa Mesa in 2010, thirty-two years sober, doing what the whole catalog does: taking the Big Book apart in front of an audience and handing the pieces back in working order. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

    Bob D. — Las Vegas, NV — AA

  3. 2d ago

    Don — AFG

    Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can. The label says Don, and Don opens — but this is a two-voice talk, and the second voice is his wife. Don and Robin B. of Placentia took the Al-Anon open forum at the 17th Orange County convention on the topic that describes their whole marriage: the miracle of conventions and service. Don came into Al-Anon through a hospital outpatient program, strictly — he informed everyone — to support the alcoholic in his life. The alcoholic left; the program stayed. A friend volunteered him into a literature commitment he never offered to take, the commitment turned into a habit of service he never broke, and at an AFG convention closing meeting he looked across a crowded room at a woman he did not know. He turned fifty the year of this tape. She was sitting to his left when he told the story, wearing his ring. Robin’s half is the harder road. In Al-Anon since November of 1983 out of the Covina Group, she walked in from an abusive first marriage entered at eighteen, survived cancer, and — thirteen years into the program, looking fine on the outside — got as far as a locked bathroom and a saved bottle of pain pills before the phone rang. It was a friend made through convention service, who told her to flush them while she listened, then to tell three people at her home group that night. She did both. By the weekend of this talk she was the incoming chairman of the AFG convention where they met. Two people who kept signing up for service they did not want, and got a marriage, a family, and — in the plainest sense available — a life. The miracle of the topic, delivered as a demonstration. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

    Don — AFG

  4. 3d ago

    Chuck C. — Laguna Beach, CA — AA

    Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can. Chuck C. — Chuck Chamberlain of Laguna Beach, California — was one of the great old voices of Alcoholics Anonymous: sober in January 1946, widely recorded, widely quoted, and dangerous in the best possible way. His message did not flatter the alcoholic. It did not pat the disease on the head and call it misunderstood. Chuck spoke about surrender, vision, awakening, and the necessity of a new way of living with the authority of a man who had stopped negotiating with the bottle and found, to his own apparent surprise, that God had better terms. He became best known through the talks later circulated as A New Pair of Glasses, recorded at the Pala Mesa Men’s Retreat in 1975. The title is not ornamental. Chuck’s great subject was perception — the alcoholic’s poisoned little lens, the terrible private logic that makes ruin look reasonable, and the spiritual change required to see anything clearly at all. His tape trail reaches back into AA’s early recording history: Beverly Hills in 1953, St. Louis in 1955, state conventions, roundups, retreats, International Convention appearances, and late talks still circulating from the early 1980s. He also testified publicly in 1969 as a recovered alcoholic and AA member, speaking for recovery without turning anonymity into theater. Chuck C. belongs in the archive because he helped shape the language of AA spirituality for generations of listeners. Not soft spirituality. Not parlor spirituality. The kind with consequences. A new pair of glasses, yes. But first, darling, the old eyes had to surrender. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

    Chuck C. — Laguna Beach, CA — AA

  5. 4d ago

    Martin; Harvey; Debbie Davis — AA

    Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can. Debbie Davis is an AA speaker from California, publicly tied to Concord, with a recovery-audio trail that reaches back to a 12 Step Workshop recorded in 1976 and forward into later AA conference work. Her name appears in the 2001 Desert Pow Wow Longtimers Meeting, which fits the shape of the record: not a single appearance, not a stray cassette, but a speaker with long AA mileage and a message built around the Steps themselves. Recovery.Audio preserves her as a longtime member of Alcoholics Anonymous with multiple recordings in circulation, including workshop material rather than only story talks. That distinction matters. A story can open the room. The Steps are where the alcoholic finds out whether they came for relief or for change. Debbie Davis’s public trail gives us a woman carrying AA across decades, from older workshop recordings to later convention invitations. The geography widens — California, Desert Pow Wow, South Australia — but the assignment stays the same: take the thing that saved your life and make it available to the next person. There is an old authority in that kind of speaker. Not performance. Not theater. Continuity. The voice of someone who has stayed long enough to know that recovery is not an event, not a feeling, not a weekend glow from a convention ballroom. It is practice. Steps. Service. Repetition. The small honest actions that keep an alcoholic from drifting back into the clever little prison of themselves. Debbie Davis carries that older AA current: long memory, practical structure, and the plain insistence that the program is not something to admire. It is something to do. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

    Martin; Harvey; Debbie Davis — AA

  6. 5d ago

    Kelly — AA

    Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can. The tape is credited to Kelly, and she opens it — but this is a full Shady Bunch II panel on practicing these principles in all our affairs, and four voices take the microphone in turn. Kelly, sober since September 26, 1984, came to AA through the back door: a Seattle newspaper reporter who visited meetings with a notepad to research a five-part series on alcoholism, and a year later was on her face. By her own count she then spent twelve years undrunk — sober in body, unsurrendered in everything else — until a sponsor put the Big Book between them and ended the negotiation. She carries the message from the Bellflower Big Book Group. Three more follow. Bob Christensen started drinking at twenty-two, drank for thirty-four years, and found the program at fifty-six, twelve-stepped out of the San Fernando Valley by two large men in a small pickup trThe tape is credited to Kelly, and she opens it — but this is a full Shady Bunch II panel on practicing these principles in all our affairs, and four voices take the microphone in turn. Kelly, sober since September 26, 1984, came to AA through the back door: a Seattle newspaper reporter who visited meetings with a notepad to research a five-part series on alcoholism, and a year later was on her face. By her own count she then spent twelve years undrunk — sober in body, unsurrendered in everything else — until a sponsor put the Big Book between them and ended the negotiation. She carries the message from the Bellflower Big Book Group. Three more follow. Bob Christensen started drinking at twenty-two, drank for thirty-four years, and found the program at fifty-six, twelve-stepped out of the San Fernando Valley by two large men in a small pickup truck. Steve Lopez of El Monte, sober since January 21, 1985, spent a quarter century in medical device marketing and once mistook Beacon Street martinis for belonging. And Marion Walleen of Claremont closes the hour with thirty-eight years of sobriety and a borrowed line she has adopted as a program: kindness is my religion. One session title — a full-time job — and four working demonstrations of what the job pays.uck. Steve Lopez of El Monte, sober since January 21, 1985, spent a quarter century in medical device marketing and once mistook Beacon Street martinis for belonging. And Marion Walleen of Claremont closes the hour with thirty-eight years of sobriety and a borrowed line she has adopted as a program: kindness is my religion. One session title — a full-time job — and four working demonstrations of what the job pays. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

    Kelly — AA

  7. 6d ago

    Kathy; Maileena; Sandy; Harry — AA

    Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can. A participation meeting is the convention handing the microphone to the room, and on the Saturday morning of the 2002 Desert Pow Wow the room turned out to be deep. The voices come fast: Sandy, sober since the 31st of August, 1968. Kathy, sober since the 3rd of January, 1982. Greg Dorst of Covina — the sobriety capital, he calls it. Speakers up from Long Beach and Cathedral City, down from Running Springs, names like Jackie Clark, Alan Rosencrantz, John Hirsch, Megan, Scott, Danny, Robin, Carol, and Kim surfacing for a few minutes apiece and giving way to the next hand. No single life story carries this tape. The sum does: a cross-section of Southern California sobriety on one hotel-ballroom morning — thirty-four years and nine years and everything between, stacked shoulder to shoulder in folding chairs. Conventions book their headliners for the evenings. The mornings are where you hear what the program actually sounds like at street level, and that is what this recording preserves. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

    Kathy; Maileena; Sandy; Harry — AA

  8. Oct 27

    Ron W.C. — AA

    Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can. Ronald — Ron W.C. on the cassette label — is a Los Angeles story: he grew up in the city, and the drinking and the recovery both happened inside its geography. His talk at the 2003 Desert Pow Wow returns more than once to his first two years of sobriety, the stretch where the program either takes or does not. For him it took — he stood at an Indian Wells podium to say so, one more L.A. drunk who thought he would never make it and then did, a day at a time, until the days were worth recording. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

    Ron W.C. — AA
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About

The Oceanside Tape Project is a recovery audio preservation project focused on digitizing old A.A. and AFG/Al-Anon speaker tapes and helping move them into XA-Speakers for long-term public access. These recordings come from conventions, conferences, roundups, workshops, group anniversaries, central office collections, tape libraries, and local rooms across the recovery world. Many were recorded decades ago on cassette and passed from hand to hand before podcasts, streaming, and digital archives existed. Our role is simple: find the tapes, digitize them, identify them as carefully as possible, and help keep the message available. This podcast shares selected recordings as part of that preservation effort — voices from A.A., AFG/Al-Anon, and the wider recovery tape tradition, carried forward one tape at a time. oceansidetapeproject.substack.com

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