Back before we called it voicemail, or at least when voicemail meant something different and more specific. The world had the humble answering machine. We're not right now, but we'll call you about if you leave the name and number. If you aren't of the age to remember. The answering machine was a physical audio recorder that plugged into your
phone line. You couldn't call into it remotely. You had to wait till you got home to check your messages, and they were the source for a lot of seinfeldt gas. Most answering machines recorded on cassette tape. Your magnetically recorded message will be saved until you recorded over it or change the cassette. When I was a little kid, my family had a different kind of answering machine. It was actually tapeless. I think it was a Sony and it was digital. That's my dad, a man who's not apt
to forget a piece of telephone technology. It was like a little tower with a big push button on top that would blink once you had a message. In addition to play and shuttle, it had a record button for your greeting. But on this machine you could also record your own messages. Directly into it, like a voice mobile
function on your phone. I think the idea was if you were the husband and wife passing, you know, running kids around and stuff, that you could leave each other messages on it if you were just standing in front of it, like you wouldn't have to call it on your non existent cell phone, because none of us had cell phones back then. I don't think Mom and I ever ever used that, but you used it because you
liked hearing yourself recorded. It sat on top of my parents bureau, so I must have had to climb on a duel or something. But I spent untold hours talking into this device. Um, my voice is going to come out all weird and staticky from the spring, recorded it and played it many many times. If you recorded multiple memos then hit the play button, it would run them all back to back in the order in which they were created. To a young me, this was absolute magic.
By this method, and in a spirit of endless experimentation, I'd fill the tiny hard drive with recordings structured as imaginary shows. I have no idea what about I'm not sure I did then, probably just whatever came to mind. I've listened through it a hundred times and pieces as I built my episode up and a few times over as a finished product, and wait for my parents to check their messages. I have great parents, so they listened through with at least feigned enthusiasm. You eat it, but
sooner or later we need the space. And with the click of a button, it was all gone. This is your grandmother? Is anyone there? It's over? Okay? See after it's gone, it's all by okay. Soon enough, I'd make another, and none of those were saved. This tape I've been playing is the closest thing I have left. It was actually recorded on micro cassette, which looks just like a regular cassette tape, shrunk down to a quarter of the size.
My next fascination after answering machines. Here I'm wandering around my dad's office with his handheld voice recorder. Inside my dad, I sound about ten round. I made lots of tapes like this, but as far as I can find, this is the last one I have left from this early in my life. Do I wish more had been saved, especially those early answering machine productions, I don't know, I guess so it's comparable to a baby picture an old yearbook or some other keepsake, maybe the most like a
Sunday school craft project for Mother's Day. Ragged and potentially embarrassing, however sentimental, but it's ephemeral. It's a fleeting moment and it's gone. Even though I was young, I knew that at the time. It's these moments. This show fixates on lost materials, dropped threads, forgotten stories, ephemera in the way that it's intertwined in our lives, all those things tangible and intangible that you wish you could take just one
more look at before they vanish into the past. America has produced like lots and lots of stuff, just piles of stuff, and it's sitting around in storage spaces, and we keep making it and buying it, and then what do you do with it? And it's got to go somewhere. The fact of the matter is is all day long, every day, there are warehouses full of stuff getting just pushed off a cliff, getting shoved off into the abyss and being destroyed all day every day. That's the Nagaski
who runs the Canary Records label. A friend of mine, uh Steve Smolean, who's a record guy like me said that what he loves is being the guy standing at the edge of the cliff waving his arms going, wait, no, let me look at those first before you throw them away. I think there might be some good stuff in there, there might be some stories. Well, I don't think we should throw all those away yet, because museums can't handle it. The big cultural institutions can't handle it. There's just too
much stuff. You know, they're getting donated piles of stuff all the time. The fact of the matter is they don't always know or care. They're looking for specific things that relate to specific narratives, so you always need somebody who's looking for a different story. We have a season ten episodes of stories from that realm, of things that were just barely saved and in some cases not saved at all. A bizarre tale of two infamous New Yorkers booby trapped their home and turned it into the shield
fortress of a missing chapter of American music history. There hasn't been a guess culturally that they matter, so they got thrown in the garbage. A decade's worth of original television lost to the airwaves. It's over. You're gonna see something else the next second, and nobody's ever going to see a piece of music that's defied convention for seventy years.
I had students write down the sounds they heard during it, and one girl said, I never realized there was so much to listen to and what could only be called an audio mystery. It said nothing on it and it clearly had been recorded, which intrigued me. What is this going to be? These stories and more given new life, if only for a glimpse. There's times I can't help but feeling like that little kid again, talking into a
machine that I'm sure won't save anything I say into it. Also, is this podcast a piece of ephemer in the making, a forgotten story about forgotten stories? Only time will tell the Ephemeral debuts. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, the I Heart Radio app, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And learn more at Ephemeral, dot show and of Messages