"The young thinks only of now.
The old thinks only of yesterday.
When shall a man think of tomorrow?"
-Chabis Yodofsky
I should start this off by declaring myself if not in, then most certainly approaching, that "old" category. That's not to me a bad thing. Bill Haley and Comets were hip when I was a youngin, Elvis's "Hound Dog" was top ten before my age reached that nice round number, and my own career as a working musician closely matched that of the Beatles. But what brought the words above to mind was my recent experience of seeing my bands recordings from the sixties -- recordings I and the other band members had long thought forgotten -- suddenly come back to life pressed in new pristine vinyl.
The band was "The Abstracts" whose one released recording, "Always Always" never truly made the charts. The band had been together just two and half years, made some noise, and then were (I thought) completely forgotten. Then in the past year all that changed. And in April our first LP -- from recordings made some 45 years ago -- was a recommended selection of the month in England's Record Collector magazine.
I won't go into the details of how this came to pass. That is not my purpose here. What is is this: To encourage all my fellow musician friends here on GaragePunk Hideout to think beyond today. To take steps now to preserve what you are doing for posterity.
In this The Abstracts were lucky. Well, I guess it was luck. For certainly I had not foreseen that anyone would care 45 years in the future (I.e., today) that pristine versions of our then unreleased studio recordings would interest anyone. Nor that someday a record producer would be asking us to share what photos we had of the band. And yet we'd saved those things.
"Only once before in all the records we have produced has a band been able to provide photos of this quality" Those were the words of the record's producer.
And good quality recordings. Not just of the studio sessions but live tracks too. Tracks that showed posterity what the band had meant to our fans back then. As Mike Stax put it in his recent Ugly Things review:
"Abstractmania? Who knew?"
For The Abstracts this has been a real trip. A totally unexpected one. One totally out of mind when we were 16 and 17 year olds making music back in the mid-sixties.
So here is the point...
This could be your band's future too.
But only if you preserve it.
-Don
