Here's something that's so unbelievable that, if I didn't trust the guy who told me about it, I would say it had to be bullshit.
A good friend of mine, Roger Holman, is quite an excellent musician/singer/songwriter. About ten years ago he recorded a bunch of his own songs. He picked out enough to make an album worth of demos and recorded them onto a cassette tape. Even if they didn't go anywhere he figured he would still have a record of all the work he'd done.
He didn't have much of a chance to do anything with them. His wife passed away, he moved to Branson, Missouri to do find a full time performance gig, eventually moved back to Oklahoma.
Somewhere along the line he lost that cassette tape he'd made of his best material. That kind of thing happens all the time. What are you going to do, huh? Consign it to memory, that's about all. So that's what Roger did.
But check this out.
A couple of weeks ago he went to a pawn shop in Oklahoma City for some reason or another. He was checking out the tapes when he happened upon one that looked familiar. Upon further investigation he discovered that IT WAS THE VERY SAME TAPE HE HAD LOST ALMOST TEN YEARS BEFORE!!!
I think that's incredible. The only thing I can think of that comes close to that is when I found a copy of Charles Dickens' "Nicholas Nickleby" in a bookstore over 20 years after I'd sold it (to a different bookstore at that).
I can just picture the surprise and delight on his face when he snatched that sucker up. It was priced at $1.00...so cheap because, to any other customer, it was little more than a curiosity. Have you ever done that? It's a lot of fun to buy these tapes and videos that were recorded by total strangers. It's like getting a small glimpse into someone else's world. Most of them don't have labels on them so you never know what you're getting. It might be a rehearsal tape from a garage band that were only in it for kicks. It might be a couple of kids goofing off. It might be a recorded lecture from a college course. You just don't know, and that's what makes it so fun. You can always record over the tape if it turns out to be nothing interesting.
I can just see Roger telling the story of the tape's disappearance and eventual recovery to the guy behind the counter.
And I can almost hear the sarcasm dripping from the clerk's voice as he says, "Congratulations on your successful music career."
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