Oceanside Tape Project: Recovery Speaker Tapes

Oceanside Tape Project

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. 20h ago

    Earl H. — 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. Earl H. was one of those AA speakers whose recordings kept circulating because the rooms knew what they had: humor with a pulse, truth with teeth, and enough wreckage behind the laughter to keep it honest. His tape trail places him at the Desert AA Pow Wow in Indian Wells in 1992, with later recordings carrying his voice through the wider speaker circuit. Public listings out of Studio City, California, connect Earl H. with talks like “Dead Man Talking,” “Catching the Buzz,” and “Staying Sober” — titles that sound almost theatrical until you remember that in AA, the dead do occasionally learn to speak. Earl’s appeal was not polish. It was voltage. He could be funny, yes, but not in the harmless way. The best AA humor has a small blade tucked inside it. It lets the room laugh just long enough to lower its guard, then slips the truth between the ribs before denial can get its coat. That is why voices like Earl H. matter in the archive. They remind us that recovery is not solemnity. It is not marble, incense, and a pious little face. Sometimes it is a man at a microphone, telling the truth so sharply that the room laughs first and understands later. Indian Wells, Studio City, Erlanger, New York — different rooms, same old miracle. A drunk lives. Then he talks. And somehow, somebody else does too. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

    Earl H. — AA

  2. 1d ago

    Cliff R. — 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. Cliff Roach — known on many tapes as Cliff R. from Oceanside, California — was one of those AA speakers whose voice seemed built for travel: Bakersfield, Redding, Fort Walton Beach, Portage, Nashville, Marietta, Indian Wells. The man did not merely have a story. He had mileage. His Desert AA Pow Wow talk on the Twelve Traditions belongs to a particular and necessary corner of AA: the part that keeps the miracle from becoming a personality contest with coffee. The Steps may save the drunk. The Traditions keep the room from being strangled by the sober. Cliff’s tape trail shows a speaker trusted not only with story, but with structure. That matters. A good drunkalogue can stir the blood, certainly, but the Traditions require something sterner: memory, humility, restraint, and enough experience to know what happens when alcoholics with opinions mistake themselves for architects. Cliff Roach carried that message across decades and state lines. Oceanside to Indian Wells. California to Florida. Indiana, Tennessee, Georgia. Different rooms, same warning: AA survives because no one owns it, no one crowns themselves king of it, and no one gets to improve it into ruin. A fine old lesson, darling. Especially for alcoholics, who can turn even salvation into real estate if left unsupervised. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

    Cliff R. — AA

  3. 2d ago

    Panel of 4 — 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. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

    Panel of 4 — AA

  4. 3d ago

    Rita Guetta; Susie W. — AA / AFG

    Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes are a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can. Rita Guetta and Susie W. were Al-Anon / AFG speakers at the Southern California Convention Al-Anon Closing Meeting in October 1993. A closing meeting is not a decorative assignment. It asks a speaker to gather the room, steady the message, and send people back into their actual lives with something stronger than convention enthusiasm. Al-Anon knows that return trip well. The hotel lights go off, the banquet room empties, and the family disease is still waiting at home with its shoes on. Rita Guetta and Susie W. carried the Al-Anon message in that final room: not as an accessory to AA, but as its necessary counterpart. Alcoholism does not stop at the drinker’s skin. It moves through kitchens, marriages, children, telephones, bank accounts, bedrooms, silence, and dread. Al-Anon is where the people caught in that weather learn they are not the storm. Their tape belongs in the archive because it preserves the family side of recovery at the point where people most need to remember it: just before they leave. Not control. Not rescue. Not martyrdom polished into virtue. Freedom — handed back quietly, one closing meeting at a time. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

    Rita Guetta; Susie W. — AA / AFG

  5. 4d ago

    Karen Maloney — AFG

    Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes are a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can. Karen Clausell Maloney was an Al-Anon speaker from Columbus, Ohio, and Lake Whitney, Texas, with the kind of family-recovery footprint that does not happen by accident. She was active in Al-Anon for more than four decades, sponsored hundreds of women, and, with her husband Don, carried the AA and Al-Anon message at conventions around the country. She spoke at the Desert AA Pow Wow Al-Anon Luncheon in Indian Wells in 1992, part of a long life in the rooms where she became known as a “Big Book Al-Anon.” A delicious phrase, really. Al-Anon with teeth. Not lace curtains and polite suffering, but recovery with a spine, a sponsor, a home group, meetings, service, and the unnerving little habit of telling the truth. Karen’s message matters because Al-Anon is where control goes to die properly. Not dramatically. Not with violins. Usually it dies in small humiliating installments: one more meeting, one more phone call, one more decision not to manage someone else’s wreckage as if vigilance were a sacrament. Her obituary says she sponsored hundreds of women. That is not a statistic. That is a procession. Hundreds of frightened, furious, exhausted women sitting across from someone who had learned the difference between love and rescue, between loyalty and self-erasure, between carrying the message and carrying the alcoholic. Karen Maloney belongs in the archive as one of those Al-Anon voices that did not merely survive the family disease. She learned its machinery, found the exit, and spent the rest of her life pointing other women toward the door. Quiet work, perhaps. But quiet is not the same as small. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

    Karen Maloney — AFG

  6. 5d ago

    George D. — New York, NY — AA

    George D. of New York, New York, was not merely an AA speaker with a microphone and a good suit. He was a General Service man — past trustee, past G.S.O. general manager, and one of those rare alcoholics who could speak about service without making it sound like a committee report embalmed in coffee. His known sobriety date is October 1961, and by the time he spoke at the Southern California Convention General Service Speaker Meeting in 1993, he had already carried decades of recovery into the engine room of Alcoholics Anonymous. Not the glamorous part, if such a thing exists. The necessary part. The part where minutes are taken, delegates gather, trustees rotate, literature survives, and the hand of AA remains where it is supposed to be: available. George D. also became associated with AA history itself, including the New York landmarks where the Fellowship’s early story still breathes through brick, stairwell, kitchen, church, and office. That matters. A movement without memory becomes a slogan factory, and AA has never survived on slogans alone. His public speaking trail continued well beyond the 1990s, including PRAASA in Irvine in 2019. That gives George D. the long shadow of a man who did not simply get sober and sit down. He stayed in the structure, stayed in the history, stayed in the work. AA needs its firebrands, certainly. It also needs its custodians — the men and women who understand that the miracle must be carried, protected, translated, published, financed, argued over, voted on, and passed along without anyone getting too drunk on importance. George D. was one of those voices. New York AA. General Service. History in his pocket. And enough sobriety to know that the machinery matters because, somewhere, one more drunk is still looking for the door. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

    George D. — New York, NY — AA

  7. 6d ago

    Kathy Heakin — Cincinnati, OH — 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. Kathy H. of Cincinnati, Ohio, was an Al-Anon speaker whose message traveled from the Desert AA Pow Wow in Indian Wells to later Al-Anon recordings and roundup rooms across the country. She spoke at the Desert AA Pow Wow Al-Anon Luncheon in 1991, a room that would not have needed performance so much as recognition. Al-Anon has its own particular weather: the quiet panic, the over-functioning, the watchful little rituals mistaken for love, the private exhaustion of trying to manage a disease that has no interest in being managed. Kathy H. appears in the public tape trail as a Cincinnati Al-Anon voice trusted with the Steps, and later as an Ohio speaker at the Rushmore Roundup in South Dakota. That is a long walk through family recovery: from luncheon speaker to Steps presenter to roundup voice, carrying the message that the family disease does not end just because someone finally names it. Her place in the archive matters because Al-Anon is not the footnote to AA’s drama. It is where the people standing near the blast learn they are allowed to live, too. Kathy H. carried that message: not control, not rescue, not martyrdom in a better dress. Recovery. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

    Kathy Heakin — Cincinnati, OH — AFG

  8. Jul 30

    Sterling Watch — Greenville, SC — 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. Sterling W. of Greenville, South Carolina, was an AA speaker whose voice traveled the circuit from the Desert AA Roundup in Palm Desert to Springtime in the Ozarks, Akron Founders Day, Columbus, and Atlanta. That is not the itinerary of a man invited once by accident. That is the trail of a message people kept sending for. His known recordings place him in Palm Desert in 1990, Akron in 2002, Columbus in 2008, and Atlanta in 2010 — two decades of rooms, podiums, hotel ballrooms, styrofoam coffee, and that peculiar AA electricity that appears when one alcoholic tells the truth well enough to make another sit still. Public listings describe Sterling W. as a speaker from Greenville, SC, with a message rooted in the old, unfashionable essentials: recovery, self-worth, fellowship, and the kind of hope that does not arrive dressed as optimism. It arrives because someone has lived through the wreckage and can still stand there, amused and useful, without needing to impress anyone. Sterling W. belongs in the archive as a Southern AA voice with mileage on it. Palm Desert, Akron, Columbus, Atlanta — different rooms, same assignment. Tell the truth. Give it away. And leave the door open for the next drunk trying very hard not to look desperate. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

    Sterling Watch — Greenville, SC — 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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