Advertise on podcast: Oceanside Tape Project: Recovery Speaker Tapes

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. Butch and Larcine G. worked the Desert AA Pow Wow’s Family Meeting on June 22, 2002 — one program, two chairs: he from the AA side, she from Al-Anon, a marriage built across the divide the disease creates. Larcine, of Hawthorne, California, built a substantial reputation of her own: recorded at the North Shore Roundup at Vancouver’s Hyatt Regency in 2011, on the Beartooth Mountain Conference roster in Montana in 2014, and teaching relationships workshops that paired her Al-Anon voice with an AA counterpart — the same architecture as her marriage. Together, she and Butch kept appearing on speaker programs for years after this tape: anniversary meetings in 2010, joint bookings as late as 2020, two decades of being asked back as a set. A Family Meeting asks a couple to take the marriage apart honestly in front of strangers, and to do it as a team — the drinking years and the watching years told side by side without either account flinching. Butch and Larcine G. spent the better part of twenty years being asked to do exactly that, because they did it well. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

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. Mari Gallagher got sober in 1984, and by the time she stood at the Desert AA Pow Wow podium her story had already been on the road for the better part of two decades. She is a Canadian voice on a mostly American circuit — Toronto, and later Markham, Ontario — and the rooms kept sending for her anyway: the Desert Pow Wow in Indian Wells in June 2006, the Crested Butte Mountain Conference in Colorado in 2011, the Beartooth Mountain Conference in Montana in 2016. Her Pow Wow talk was preserved and later anthologized on “AA Speakers: Women in Sobriety, Volume 2,” and the archives that keep her recordings file them under two tags that rarely sit together: funny, and old-timer. That is the woman on this tape: decades of continuous sobriety, a border and half a continent crossed to tell a ballroom of strangers the truth, and the rare gift of making them laugh the whole way through it. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

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. Marty J. was a Canadian AA speaker with the timing of a radio man and the message of an alcoholic who had learned that cleverness is not the same as recovery. Sober since the mid-1970s, Marty’s tape trail moves through Canadian and American AA rooms under several catalog locations: Toronto, Red Deer, Richmond, Vancouver, Omaha, Kamloops, and the Orange County convention circuit. The cities shift. The voice remains the point. Public descriptions call him funny, and that matters. Not because AA needs entertainment, but because a funny speaker can get past defenses that would stop a solemn one at the door. Marty J. seems to have understood that rhythm: let the room laugh, then walk them toward the thing they were trying not to see. His later talks show a man concerned with the interior work of sobriety — reason, faith, surrender, and the bridge between a mind that wants proof and a life that requires trust. That is dangerous territory for alcoholics. We are often willing to understand ourselves to death, provided no one asks us to change. Marty J. carried a different proposition: recovery as movement. Not merely thinking better. Living differently. Toronto to Orange County. Canada to the circuit. A voice with comic timing, spiritual pressure, and the old AA insistence that the head alone will not save an alcoholic from himself. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

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. Barney Morris — Barney M. on AA tapes — was a La Jolla, California AA speaker and a former television newsman whose life had the strange architecture AA loves: public success on the outside, private collapse underneath, then service work that finally made the man usable. Before AA, Barney Morris had been a broadcaster in the old hard-news world: Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Diego. He anchored, reported, moved between major stations, and spent years in front of cameras explaining the world to other people while his own life was coming apart in quieter rooms. His AA story did not begin with humility. The good ones seldom do. Barney came in with the résumé, the voice, the house over the San Fernando Valley, the professional polish, the opinions, the children, the wreckage, and the old fatal belief that intelligence ought to be enough. AA had other plans. The public Barney M. tapes show a man who learned recovery through action before he learned to like it: coffee commitments, floors, greeting, picking up newcomers, reading the Big Book, calling a sponsor, showing up when his head had better ideas. His message was blunt: getting sober is not the whole problem. The deeper problem is living sober without letting fear, ego, grievance, and self-pity rebuild the bottle in another form. That is why Barney’s talks still have voltage. He was funny, but not decorative. He could use a joke like a crowbar, pry the room open, and then walk straight into the real subject: surrender as daily practice, service as medicine, and AA as the pit stop where alcoholics get enough power to go back into the world without drinking. Barney Morris died in 2003 after a long public broadcasting career and a long AA speaking life. The tapes keep the better part of both: the voice trained for news, stripped down by recovery, and put to work carrying a message no camera could manufacture. La Jolla AA. Television polish burned down to usefulness. A man who finally found the story worth telling. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

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. Jay P. of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, was flown across the country for the 2007 Desert Pow Wow — an Atlantic beach town speaker booked into a California desert resort in the middle of June. He had the record to justify the airfare. Seven of his talks sit in the public recovery-audio archives, and the trail includes the Capitol City Conference in 2004, a few years before this Indian Wells booking. That is the working definition of a circuit speaker: not a man who spoke once at his home group and got taped, but one whose story kept earning invitations from committees that had never met him. What survives on this cassette is the reason those invitations kept coming — a South Carolina voice carrying the same message into a room three time zones from home, on the theory that has held the fellowship together since 1935: it does not matter where the drunk is from, only that he is talking to another one. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

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. Larcine G. of Hawthorne, California, spoke at the Orange County AA Convention in April of 2010 — one stop on an Al-Anon speaking career that this archive happens to document across a full decade of its own. The Oceanside tapes catch her three times: at the 15th Orange County convention in February of 2000, on the Desert Pow Wow family meeting in June of 2002 alongside her husband Butch, and here in Costa Mesa in 2010. The wider record runs alongside it and keeps going — the Georgia Al-Anon convention in 2002, the Greeley Stampede in Colorado that same winter, the North Shore Roundup at Vancouver’s Hyatt Regency in 2011, the Cornhusker Roundup, the Flint River Roundup as recently as 2023. Her talks have since crossed into the podcast archives, where an Al-Anon voice from a small city in the South Bay still turns up in rotation. Two decades of invitations across four time zones, and the same subject every time: what it costs to love an alcoholic, and what is left of you when you stop trying to run the disease. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

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. A Catholic nun from the Bronx walked onto the Desert Pow Wow stage in June of 2008, and the room got the last thing it expected from a habit: a comedian. Sister Maurice D. is one of the more unusual voices the circuit produced — a religious sister who is also a recovered alcoholic, and who tells the story with a bluntness and a comic timing that the recovery archives keep noting before they note anything else. The listings that carry her talks describe an amusing lady with a solid message, and the pairing is the point: she does not use the veil to soften the drinking years, and she does not use the drinking years to sell the veil. What she carries instead is the awkward, unfashionable proof that faith did not keep her out of the disease and the disease did not put her out of the faith. She had to get sober the same way the man in the back row did — one alcoholic at a time, in a folding chair — and then go back to work. Indian Wells, June 2008: a New York nun with a drinking story, making a desert ballroom laugh at the truth. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

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. By June of 1999 Clancy Imislund had been sober forty-one years and had run the Midnight Mission on Skid Row for a quarter century. The Desert Pow Wow gave him the assignment that starts everything: Steps One, Two and Three. They are the surrender steps — admit the thing has beaten you, concede that something bigger might not have, and hand it over — and Clancy had a first-hand claim on all three. He had arrived in Los Angeles in 1958 with nothing left to sell but a pint of his own blood, and the blood bank turned him down. The Mission fed him and pointed him at a meeting. He never had occasion to start drinking again. This is the earliest Clancy tape in the Oceanside collection, and it sits at the front of a run that follows him across the next decade: Singleness of Purpose at the Southern California convention in 2000, the South Bay Roundup that same spring, the Host City meeting at the 2002 Pow Wow, Coincidences, Inches and Seconds in 2006. He died in 2020 at ninety-three with sixty-two years of sobriety behind him. On this tape he is teaching the three steps that bought all of it. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

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. Howard P. of Gilbert, Arizona, was booked into the Desert Pow Wow in June of 2006, and the desert kept asking him back — this archive holds him again the following June, leading a session on relationships in sobriety. Outside the desert he is one of the better-documented teaching voices on the circuit. Eight of his talks sit in the public recovery-audio archives, and their titles read like a syllabus for the interior work: what Step Four showed him about being immobilized by fear, low self-esteem and the entanglement of the past, a program that works for atheists, and above all Step Eleven — meditations on the Twelve Steps, and an instruction he is remembered for, to mark the spot where you last saw your higher power pass and go sit in that window again. He carried the material well beyond Arizona: the Monterey Bay Area Roundup in 2003, a Day of History in Tempe in 2008, workshops going back to the early nineties. That is the speaker this tape catches: not a man telling a drinking story, but one teaching a room how to sit still long enough for the eleventh step to do something. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

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. David and Karen S. of Newport Coast took the 2009 Desert Pow Wow stage together — a couples talk, David leading off, Karen closing. Her sobriety date is February 25, 1977: thirty-two years by the weekend this tape was made. A marriage with three decades of sobriety inside it is its own kind of qualification, and the joint talk is the desert convention’s oldest specialty — two people telling one story from both ends, the drinking years and the recovery years held up side by side. That is what an Indian Wells ballroom heard in June of 2009, and what this recording keeps. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

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. Jack C. of Hagerstown, Maryland, spoke at the Desert Pow Wow on the sixteenth of June, 2007, and by then he was well into a national speaking run that would last another five years. The public record holds him at the 30th Rhode Island State Convention in Newport in 2006, on a 2011 recording still sold by the speaker-tape services, and finally at the Erie Spring Conference in 2012 — the last lead he gave before he died. Three of the major tape houses carry him, which is its own quiet endorsement: the people who made their living knowing which talks people asked for twice kept him in the catalog. He was a lawyer by trade, and the tapes that survive him are remembered for the storytelling. This one catches him in the middle of that stretch, a Maryland voice in an Indian Wells ballroom, five years from the end and still being asked to come out and tell it. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

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. Candice M. of Long Beach, California, spoke at the 2007 Desert Pow Wow in Indian Wells in June of that year, and the recording joins a trail that was already gathering speed. Another recording caught her at home in Long Beach that October, and the invitations kept widening from there: the Georgia State Convention in Macon in 2009, a Steps Six and Seven workshop preserved from Atlanta, a Los Angeles talk in 2017, and a place on the speaker list kept by the Harbor Area Central Office — her own local AA office — in Long Beach. Her story eventually crossed into the podcast era through Sober Cast and the video archives, where it circulates under titles that spell out the arc plainly: from darkness to light. That arc is the message she carried into the desert in 2007: a woman’s account of alcoholism told without cosmetics, and a recovery convincing enough that rooms from Southern California to Georgia kept asking her to tell it again. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

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. Father Leo Booth of Long Beach, California, came to the 20th Orange County AA Convention in the spring of 2005 carrying one of the stranger résumés in recovery: an English priest who nearly drank himself to death, then spent the rest of his life warning people that religion itself could be abused like a bottle. Born in Manchester, England in 1946 and trained in theology at King’s College, London, he was an ordained priest with a working parish when the drinking caught up with him — a near-fatal car crash, driving drunk, that ended in treatment and a sobriety that held. Lecturing on recovery took him first around England and then, in 1981, to the United States; by 1984 he had settled in Long Beach, where he ran his organization Spiritual Concepts, served as spiritual advisor to treatment centers, and became a certified addictions counselor with a parish of his own. His books made the argument his talks embodied: Spirituality and Recovery, Say Yes to Your Life, and most famously When God Becomes a Drug, which put a name to religious addiction and religious abuse and earned him invitations from Oprah and Good Morning America. On the AA circuit he was simply Father Leo — a fixture from the program’s 50th anniversary Founders Day in Akron in 1985 onward, an accent from Manchester delivering the least pious spirituality in the room. That is the voice on this tape: a priest telling a Costa Mesa ballroom that God is not a slot machine, sobriety is not a theology exam, and the spiritual life begins where the performance of it ends. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

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. Coincidences, Inches & Seconds is a title only an old man can earn. When Clancy Imislund gave this talk at the AA Desert Pow Wow in June of 2006, he was seventy-eight years old and forty-eight years sober, and he had spent most of those years measuring how close a life comes to not happening at all. His own margins were famously thin. A blood bank on Skid Row turned him away in 1958 for not having enough iron to sell a pint — and sent him up the street to the Midnight Mission, where a meal came with a meeting attached. That referral, worth nothing on paper, produced sixty-two years of sobriety, forty-six years running the Mission itself, the founding of the Pacific Group in Brentwood, and a sponsorship lineage that reached from Skid Row cots to Hollywood. Inches and seconds, all the way down. By 2006 Clancy was the closest thing the desert convention had to a returning institution — this archive alone holds him at the Pow Wow in 2002 and again on this weekend, sharing the June program with speakers flown in from as far as Texas. He would keep at it nearly to the end, which came in 2020, at ninety-three. The talk on this tape is the veteran’s version of the story: not how bad it was, but how narrow the escape — and what a man owes the coincidences that let him live long enough to be useful. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe

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 session title on this tape — Our Lives Will Be Transformed — comes from the promise Al-Anon makes to people who arrive certain that the problem sleeping in the next room is the only thing that needs fixing. Maria S. of Los Angeles drew that assignment at the 19th Orange County AA Convention in Costa Mesa in April of 2004. It was not her last word on the subject. The convention brought her back in 2007, and the wider circuit kept calling after that — Colorado’s Crested Butte Mountain Conference in 2013, Nashville’s Music City Roundup in 2017 — until her recorded story outlived the cassette format entirely and settled into the podcast archives, where it still circulates. Transformation is an easy word to say from a podium and a hard one to document. A speaking trail that runs thirteen years past this tape is documentation: the same woman, the same program, the same promise — kept long enough that strangers in three time zones asked to hear how. Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe