My Personal Lost Media

I’ve been reading about Lost Media. These are movies, TV shows, video games, and music that are thought to no longer exist. Some end up being found, like some episodes of “Doctor Who” from the early 1960s, copies of which were found in Nigeria. Others only live in a handful of people’s memories.

I have some Lost Media from my personal life.

When I was a kid, many amusement parks and carnivals had a “record-your-voice” booth. You’d step into the machine, sing or talk into a microphone, and the audio would be transferred to a cheap record made of plastic or heavy cardboard. It was a souvenir that was never intended to stand the test of time.

We had two of these records when I was growing up.

The first was my father singing the Jerome Kern standard “They Didn’t Believe Me” when he was courting my mother. That record eventually wore out and deteriorated.

The other record was of me at age three singing “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” That one was made of yellow-coated cardboard which got bent one day and was never playable again.

I only wish we had copied them onto tape before we lost them.

Some other of my lost items were stolen.

In the 1980s I drove a car that had no cassette player, so I used to put a boom box in the passenger seat. One day, I made the mistake of leaving the passenger-side window open without realizing it. When I got back into the car, the boom box and a case of tapes were gone.

Among those tapes were the only copies of home recordings I’d made over the years.

I was home recording long before I owned any sort of multitrack machine. I used to record one part, then play it back while recording the next part on a second tape machine, and so forth.

I’d copied some of the more conventional songs onto a tape for my girlfriend (now my wife) called “My Greatest Hits.” So some of those were preserved, albeit in pretty crappy dubs. At least I have them.

But some of the pieces were more experimental ones, usually done with my brother Tim, and can never be duplicated or recreated.

There was one called “No” which was built on a repeating 7/4 guitar figure, to which Tim added percussion, and we had our younger brother Sean (who was probably only five or six at the time) moan the word “no” over and over on top of that. Truly spooky.

Then there was “The Monitor.” I worked for a security company at the time where we used audio to listen for break-ins. But when one of these monitors broke it emitted an interesting whooshy electronic sound, which I recorded, and Tim improvised a story which we fed through various effects to make his voice almost unintelligible.

“Cadence d’Appliance” was a percussion cadence played on household items like a typewriter, pots and pans, and a spoon banging on the handle of a coffee mug which broke partway through, causing much laughter.

I remember there was a piece called “Oh, My Aching Head” where we used the title phrase recorded from a Looney Tunes cartoon at the beginning and end, but I have no memory of what happened in between.

I’m sure there were others as well. But none will ever be heard again.

Unless the thief is still enjoying them today.

I doubt it.