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. 12h ago

    Don Mitchell — Orange, 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. Don Mitchell of Orange got sober in 1978, and when he stood before his home county’s convention in April of 2004 he had twenty-six years to account for. He spent part of the hour accounting for other people’s instead — his talk reaches back through the voices that carried him, including a man he quotes who got sober in 1941, when the Big Book was two years old and the program had barely reached the map. That is how the message actually moves: not archive to listener but hand to hand, 1941 to 1978 to a Costa Mesa ballroom in 2004 — and a local man with a quarter century sober passing along what was passed to him. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

    Don Mitchell — Orange, CA — AA

  2. 1d ago

    Jim M. — Pasadena, 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. Jim M. of Pasadena spoke at the 17th Orange County convention in March of 2002, and the tape carries the kind of line that keeps a recording in circulation: seven years sober, he notes, and if there’s anything back there gaining on you — the statute of limitations. That is the register of the talk: a Pasadena alcoholic in the first decade of the work, funny about the wreckage without being casual about it, telling a Costa Mesa ballroom what the running was like and what stopping cost. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

    Jim M. — Pasadena, CA — AA

  3. 2d ago

    Babs Black — Dallas, TX — 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. Babs Black of Dallas came into Al-Anon in the early 1970s, and by the time she spoke at the AA Desert Pow Wow in June 2001 she had spent close to three decades turning her family inheritance into working material. The inheritance was the disease itself. She had been around it — her phrase — this damn disease all her life, and described herself as coming from a long line of long-suffering women: a career woman who always considered herself among the great self-sacrificers of her generation, and who liked to warn audiences that her own mind is not her friend. The archive that keeps her Georgia recording notes what every room discovered live — a great sense of humor, and a favorite of many in the program. Her tape trail runs from a joint appearance with Al-Anon co-founder Anne B. at the Desert AA Roundup in 1983, through the West Virginia Al-Anon Conference in 1989 and the 44th Georgia State Convention on Jekyll Island in 1997, to this desert stage in 2001 — nearly twenty years of the same correction delivered with a Texas smile: stop suffering beautifully, and start living. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

    Babs Black — Dallas, TX — AFG

  4. 3d ago

    Diane B. — Mission Viejo, 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. Diane B. of Mission Viejo grew up in Chicago and its suburbs, and the family disease and its recovery eventually carried her the width of the country to Orange County’s Al-Anon rooms. On this tape from the 18th Orange County convention she shares the session with Jeremy O., a two-voice AFG hour. The family disease travels the same way its members do — from wherever the drinking was to wherever the recovery is — and this recording holds one Midwestern-born version of that journey, told to a Costa Mesa ballroom in the spring of 2003. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

    Diane B. — Mission Viejo, CA — AFG

  5. 4d ago

    Craig Schreiner — Leawood, KS — 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. Craig Schreiner was born into AA’s own geography: he grew up in Akron, Ohio, the town where a New York stockbroker met a local surgeon in 1935 and the whole program began. He got sober a long way from it, settling in Leawood, Kansas, on the Kansas City side of the state line. That is the shape of this 2002 talk at the 17th Orange County convention: an Akron kid raised in the shadow of the program’s birthplace, carrying the message west to a Costa Mesa ballroom — the geography of AA folded into one life, delivered by a man who introduces himself on the tape with his full name and no apparent interest in hiding. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

    Craig Schreiner — Leawood, KS — AA

  6. 5d ago

    Vince V. — 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. Vince V.’s story starts in New Jersey and bottoms out on the Southern California coast — by his own telling, he once arrived in Newport Beach in a stolen hearse, with a young woman beside him he did not know. There is a bench on the Balboa Peninsula in the story, in early September, and a moment when the remaining options had narrowed to a mission on Skid Row. The voice on this tape belongs to Venice AA by the spring of 2002, telling the 17th Orange County convention how far it is from the hearse to the podium — an East Coast drunk remade inside the middle of Alcoholics Anonymous, which is where, he says on the tape, he lives now. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

    Vince V. — Venice, CA — AA

  7. 6d ago

    Betty; Harvey; Oldtimers speakers — 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 cassette label names Betty and Harvey, and both speak — but the 2002 Pow Wow Oldtimers Meeting was a roll call, and the roll was long. Admission to the microphone was twenty years of continuous sobriety or more, and the room cleared that bar with decades to spare. Kathleen’s sobriety date is September 4, 1958 — forty-four years by this weekend, sober since before most of the room was born. Bud Andrus counts from December 30, 1974; Monica from November 12, 1974; Eric Moll got sober in 1975. And the names keep coming off the tape: Albertine, Martin, Alex, Sarah, Fred, Larry Wilkes, Dave Pistol, Jerry, Len, Carol, Gay, Jane of Palm Desert — each with a few minutes, a date, and whatever wisdom survived the mileage. Add the numbers on this one tape and the combined sobriety runs well past three centuries. That is what an Oldtimers Meeting is for: proof, stacked one podium turn at a time, that the thing holds. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

    Betty; Harvey; Oldtimers speakers — AA

  8. Sep 11

    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 Heakin of Cincinnati, Ohio, grew up in an Irish family where the drinking arrived a generation before she did and the coping came dressed as comedy. Her grandfather came over from the old country with a bottle riding in his back pocket; the family’s founding legend had him slipping on icy steps, feeling liquid spread through the seat of his pants, and sighing with relief — thank God, it’s just blood. When Kathy asked her mother years later whether he had been an alcoholic, the answer came back flat: of course not. We didn’t have enough money for him to be an alcoholic. He was just Irish. The family curriculum was humor, service to others, and above all silent suffering — suffering only counted if you never mentioned it. She grew up convinced that when alcohol finally turned up in her own life, the right words at the right moment would cure it. Al-Anon is where she learned no such words exist. She spent the next three decades lending that lesson to other people. From this June 2002 luncheon talk at the Desert Pow Wow, her recorded trail runs backward to a Twelve Steps presentation at the 1998 Cornhusker Roundup and forward through roundups and conventions into the mid-2020s — the Beartooth Mountain Conference in Montana in 2025, a Stateline recording in late 2024 — where she was still being introduced as one of the finest Steps teachers on the family side of the program. The message never wandered far from home: you can love your history, laugh at it even, and still refuse to keep living it. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

    Kathy Heakin — Cincinnati, OH — AFG
See All (73)

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

Information