More on the Crocodile Cafe's Music Archive

These are photographs of the new listening stations for the Crocodile Cafe sound archives located at the University of Washington's Media Center. As you can see, the computers hosting the archives (as well as their monitors) are located beyond the glass in a secure area. There has been a lot of talk in music forums about why these files aren't made available online. The basic reason is the University of Washington may own the recordings, thanks to the donation by Jim Anderson, but they do not own the rights to the intellectual content captured on the recordings, which is still owned by the bands. Most of the bands are totally stoked to know they have a few live shows archived in the University's collection for future generations of people to listen to, but they don't want unauthorized reproductions of those live shows. As the Media Center's librarian John Vallier says, "We want to be sure that we are working on the side of the artists here by both preserving their legacy and protecting their intellectual content."

So yeah, if you want to listen to them, you actually have to visit a library. For Seattlelites this is no big deal, I read a recent statistic that 80% of all people in the Seattle metro area (which is somewhere around 3.3 Million people) own library cards. If you're out of state, this just gives you another reason to come visit our wonderful city!

Crocodile Café Sound Collection

I last reported on the Crocodile Café sound recordings back in last October. I now have the mother of all updates...

First, the background. Audio engineer/sound man from Seattle's long running rock club the Crocodile Café recorded every show he did at the club and saved the recordings on a series of hard drives. After some negotiation, in October 2008 Anderson donated the original digital recordings to the University of Washington's Ethnomusicology Archives. For the past year the University of Washington Libraries' Media Center has been going through over 2,800 hours of live music recordings, copying them to put them in a streaming format, cataloging the shows, and letting bands that didn't want to be part of the archive opt out. Now before all you grunge fanatics go crazy about rare soundboard recordings of Nirvana, Soundgarden and Mudhoney, the donation only included recordings from shows that occurred between May 2002 and December 2007. So the early grunge era isn't really represented in the archive. But there are an insane amount of great bands and shows, you can see the preliminary list here. I'm gonna crack up if I here myself singing into the mic at the Bronx show when the singer jumped out into the audience.

Will you be able to access these recordings online? No.

Will you be able to burn copies of the recordings? No.

Will non-students be able to listen to them? Yes.

Shocking, I know, but you will actually have to set foot in a library to hear them. This is a historical archival collection that will be open to the public beginning Wednesday, August 12th. The collection will be made available via iTunes on two dedicated listening stations at the UW Libraries' Media Center. The Media Center is located on the mezzanine level of the UW's Undergraduate Library, it's hours and location can be found here.

An update on the Crocodile Cafe soundboard recordings

The Stranger recently finally reported on a story I wrote about back in March concerning the archive of the soundboard recordings from the Crocodile Cafe getting donated to the University of Washington by soundman Jim Anderson. Check out their blog story here, Anderson chimes into the conversation and provides a little bit more information.

Not much has moved along in the project since I mentioned it seven months ago, Anderson says the official announcement that it's happening is coming soon. Apparently it's taken a long time to organize the files, which are on a series of hard drives, and their has been some discussion of how they will be hosted at the Undergraduate Library Media Center. For music fans anxiously awaiting this awesome resource, I think you have to cool your jets. It's possible this project could take a long time, possibly years, to get up and running. Funding something like this may prove hard as the state squeezes the University of Washington's budget, plus it's fifteen years of live recordings to organize, convert to a streaming format, and to serve to the public in a way that won't be ripe for bootlegging.

Let's hope the project gets rolling soon though! I know Nirvana fans especially are dying to hear the recordings of the band on stage, as well as the banter between band members and the crowd between songs and during set up that often isn't present on the crowd-recorded bootlegs of their shows. Anderson explains, "What makes this collection unique is that in archival recordings from other clubs, there’s not a whole lot of the between song banter. I did blanket recordings, and was able to capture everything... Bands and people talk about politics, sports, events, the environment, equipment issues, technology, and so on. There’s a lot of stuff that gives you the flavor of what people were thinking and talking about at that point in time."

Plus, the sound quality I've heard on the recordings Anderson gave to bands (he'd offer to burn a copy of the show for a band for a small fee) were excellent. The Nirvana live music in particular should be a lot better than bootleg recordings done from the crowd that most people have heard of Nirvana playing at the Crocodile Cafe.