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. 15h ago

    Johnnie H. — Long 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. Johnnie H. of Long Beach drew the Twelve Traditions at the 2009 Desert Pow Wow — the assignment conventions hand to someone who has been around long enough to know why the Traditions exist. He had been around a very long time. The public record puts him at a Midwinter Conference in Midland, Texas in January of 1971, and the trail runs forward from there for four decades: a Long Beach anniversary meeting in 2001, Culver City in 2005, Stockholm in 2004, the Southern California convention in Bakersfield in 2012 speaking on sponsorship. This archive alone holds him three times — the Traditions again at the 2007 Pow Wow, sponsorship at the 2008 Pow Wow, and this 2009 session. The Steps keep the individual alcoholic sober; the Traditions keep the fellowship alive long enough to be there when the next one walks in. It is the less glamorous half of the program, and it is usually given to a speaker with enough mileage to have watched groups tear themselves apart over money, property and prestige. Johnnie H. had that mileage several times over, and the desert kept handing him the microphone. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

    Johnnie H. — Long Beach, CA — AA

  2. 1d ago

    Sister Bea M. — Brea, 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. Sister Bea M. was born in Ireland, came to Southern California in 1964, and gave her life to God before she ever admitted she could not manage her drinking. That order of events is the whole joke, and she tells it better than anyone. She is a nun and an alcoholic, and her talks are famous on the circuit for being funny — the discovery of the margarita, the growing suspicion that she did not drink the way the other sisters drank, the slow arithmetic of a progression that does not care what you are wearing. Having already handed her life over once, she found she still had the Twelve Steps ahead of her, and she took them. The record has kept her: the Cornhusker Roundup in Omaha, a Dallas talk on the Promises, a listing at her own Harbor Area central office, and a published release of her story. This archive holds her twice — at the Antelope Valley convention in Lancaster in June of 1999, and here at the 21st Orange County convention in the spring of 2006, a woman from Brea explaining to a ballroom that a habit is no defense against a disease, and that grace does not exempt anybody from the work. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

    Sister Bea M. — Brea, CA — AA

  3. 2d ago

    Karla D. — Orange, CA — 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 cassette label reads Karla D.; on the tape she introduces herself as Carla Downing, of Orange, California — an Al-Anon voice speaking at her home county’s convention in the spring of 2007. The Orange County convention has always run its Al-Anon track on local strength — members from the surrounding towns telling the family side of the disease to the people living inside it — and this recording is that tradition working: a woman from Orange, a few miles from the hotel, giving the 22nd convention what the program gave her. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

    Karla D. — Orange, CA — AFG

  4. 3d ago

    Bob L. — Glendale, 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. An AA Longtimers meeting is where a convention puts its proof, and the 2007 Desert Pow Wow put Bob L. of Glendale, California, on that podium in Indian Wells. He had the miles for the room. His recorded trail reaches back to the St. Andrews Speakers Group in Saratoga in January of 1981, runs through San Diego’s Old Town Speaker Group in 1994, and reaches the South Bay Roundup in Torrance in 2002 — California AA, decade by decade, the same Glendale voice showing up on tape across twenty-six years and counting by the time this one was recorded. Longtimers meetings run on a different fuel than the main-stage story. Nobody needs the wreckage retold at year thirty; what the room wants is the arithmetic of staying — the ordinary days, the meetings attended when nothing was wrong, the sponsees buried and married and promoted. A man recorded across four decades of California rooms speaks that language natively. In June of 2007, at a resort in the desert, Bob L. spoke it to a ballroom that came to hear exactly that. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

    Bob L. — Glendale, CA — AA

  5. 4d ago

    Otto M. — Plano, TX — 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. Otto M. of Plano, Texas, came to the 21st Orange County AA Convention in April of 2006 as a Texas voice with a coast-to-coast habit — his recorded trail runs from the Maine Area Roundup in 2004 to a Southern California convention stage in 2009, with this Costa Mesa weekend sitting between them. His story carries a piece of AA lineage in it. As a newcomer, Otto heard Dr. Paul O. speak — the physician whose page on acceptance became one of the most quoted passages in the Big Book’s story section — and he has said the experience changed his life. That is how the circuit propagates: a new man hears an old one, gets well, and twenty years later is the voice on somebody else’s cassette. By 2006 Otto M. was that voice — a Plano alcoholic invited from Maine to California, carrying the same message that once caught him: acceptance, worked steps, and a life that no longer required managing from a barstool. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

    Otto M. — Plano, TX — AA

  6. 5d ago

    Ann M. — Menifee, CA — 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. Ann M. of Menifee holds a distinction few speakers at any convention can claim: her recovery began at this very convention, and she spent years repaying the debt — serving on the committee, and taking a turn as its chairman — before standing at the 2008 Al-Anon Luncheon podium as its featured voice. She dedicated the talk to the memory of her husband, and the story she told reaches back through the long version of the family disease: a domineering first marriage, a business built and carried, years of Al-Anon doing its slow work on a woman who had spent a lifetime managing everyone’s life but her own. A luncheon speaker who found her recovery in the same hotel where she gave this talk: the convention, in the most literal sense, introducing one of its own. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

    Ann M. — Menifee, CA — AFG

  7. 6d ago

    Chuck Lem. — Superior, MI — 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. Chuck Lem. of Superior, Wisconsin, was an Al-Anon speaker with the kind of geographic reach that only comes from being asked back — a voice from the far northern edge of Wisconsin, across the harbor from Duluth, whose message traveled to ballrooms on both coasts and most of the country in between. His recorded trail runs through the Gulf Coast Roundup in Fort Walton Beach, Florida in 1996, the Mid-Winter Conference at Hilton Head, South Carolina in 2006, and the Marietta Roundup in Georgia that same spring — a decade of Southern conference rooms for a man from the shore of Lake Superior. The Orange County convention talk on this tape, given in Costa Mesa in April of 2003, sits squarely in the middle of that run. Al-Anon’s men have always been outnumbered at the podium, which makes a male voice with a ten-year circuit trail worth keeping. The program’s central discovery — that you can love an alcoholic without going down with them — lands differently coming from a man who learned it the long way and then spent a decade crossing the country to say so. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

    Chuck Lem. — Superior, MI — AFG

  8. Oct 13

    Sheila Armstrong — Oklahoma, OK — 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. Sheila Armstrong’s sobriety date is December 15, 1984, and everything before it reads like a study in how the disease moves through a family. Her parents divorced before she was old enough to register it. Her mother, an alcoholic who found it hard to care for her children, left in the middle of the night; Sheila did not see her again until she was eighteen. The family moved to California to be near her father, a longtime AA member who got sober, married a woman from the program with two children of her own, and assembled a blended household Sheila later summed up with a dry shrug: it was not the Brady Bunch. She and her father spent years estranged. She drank and used through several marriages — through pregnancy — until, fresh out of ideas and desperate, she walked into AA and, as she liked to put it, stayed until she caught alcoholism. It was her mother’s death from the disease that finally mended things between Sheila and her father, who died with long sobriety of his own in the late 1990s. By this Desert Pow Wow talk in June 2002 she was eighteen years sober, an active sponsor out of Norman, Oklahoma, with a recorded trail through Montana, Nebraska, and Iowa and a platform style audiences describe as humor shot through with tearful joy. She measured her own recovery in prayers — from Help me, to Give me, to the one she said she was still growing into: Use me. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

    Sheila Armstrong — Oklahoma, OK — 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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