The Booth Tapes

Andre Coleman, seventy-one, lifted the reel from its box and set it on the deck. The box was marked in his own hand, OCT 3 1981, and the logbook on the table beside him carried the same date in the same hand, written the night he recorded it in the booth at the Warehouse, where he had taped Frankie Knuckles’ sets from 1979 until the club closed in 1982. He had kept the forty-three reels ever since in the front room of his greystone two-flat on South Homan Avenue in North Lawndale, five miles west of the Loop, and he wanted the record to say he had been there, in the booth, with the deck running. He had driven a CTA bus for thirty-one years and lived now on a pension of 1,840 dollars a month. He threaded the tape through the guides, turned the take-up reel until the leader caught, and pressed play.

The room filled first with room noise. Chairs scraped. Somebody laughed near the booth. Then the bass came up under it, and the crowd found the beat, and Frankie Knuckles worked the records the way he always had, one hand on the fader and one on the next record, letting a song run long enough for the floor to trust it. Andre sat back in his chair and listened with his eyes closed. At one minute twelve seconds the needle skipped on a worn groove and dropped hard into the next bar, a small catch in the music that the dancers never noticed and that he had heard a hundred times since. He let the set run.

When the side ended he stopped the deck and wrote nothing down. The date was already in the book. He had written it in 1981, in the booth, with the deck still warm, and a date once written was never altered.

He was putting the reel back in its box when the front door opened and Marcus, nineteen, came in with his record bag over his shoulder and a small player in his hand.

“Grandpa, listen to this before I go,” Marcus said. “It’s my opener tonight.”

Andre nodded toward the chair. “Play it.”

Marcus set the player on the table and pressed play. A house track filled the front room, clean and bright, the kick drum steady, a piano line looping over it, a vocal sample cut into pieces and laid back down in order. It was good music. Andre listened to the whole track, all the way to the end, the way he listened to everything his grandson brought him. When it finished, Marcus watched him.

“Well?” Marcus said. “The catalog says it came off a 1981 Warehouse tape. Does it sound like the room?”

Andre looked at the player, then at his grandson. “It sounds like a room with nobody in it,” he said.

Marcus laughed, but not quite all the way. “That’s the point, though. They cleaned it up. You can hear everything now.”

“It’s a clean track,” Andre said. “I don’t hear anybody dancing to it.”

Marcus packed the player away. He had a Friday set at the Douglass Park field house, and he played it every week, opening with a Second Set track the catalog said came from a 1981 Warehouse tape. He loved the act. He loved the tracks, and the way the crowd at the field house moved when the piano line came in.

“Tonight will go fine,” Andre said. “Play it like you mean it.”

Marcus grinned and left, the screen door banging behind him. Andre stayed in the front room with the reel boxes and the logbook. The roof had leaked in the night, and a bucket stood on the floor beside the boxes, half full of brown water.

The woman from the catalog came after lunch. She knocked twice, polite, and stood on the porch with a folder under her arm until Andre opened the door.

“Mr. Coleman,” she said. “I’m Carla Voss, designated representative for Meridian Catalog, sponsor of record for Second Set. May I come in?”

Andre let her into the kitchen and set two mugs on the table. She laid the folder open between them. Inside was a form with twelve lines, one for each tape, and a pen clipped to the top.

“Your name came up in our archive work,” she said. “You taped Mr. Knuckles’ sets at the Warehouse, from the booth, 1979 to 1982. We have twelve tapes from 1981 in the archive, and our attestation needs the signature of the man who recorded them.”

Andre read the first line. It named a tape and a date. He read the second. He did not reach for the pen.

“One thousand dollars a tape,” Carla said. “Twelve thousand for the morning. I speak for the catalog, and what I tell you here binds the act.”

She turned the folder to the session record, a page with a line for his name.

“I want to be plain with you,” she said. “The catalog charges for candor. If I tell you how the audit stands, this visit goes into the archive with your name and the hour on it. You owe both, sign or not.”

Andre looked at the empty line. “Tell me,” he said.

“The act will pass its audit with or without your signature. The archive is consistent, and the audit measures consistency. Your signature would make the record stronger. It would not decide whether the act passes. The audit needs the chain to end somewhere outside our own deposit. Your signature is the one name that does that.”

She left the form and the pen on the table. “Take your time,” she said. “I’ll come by at nine in the morning.” At the door she turned back. “One more thing. There’s a way to put your name in the record besides this form. Ask me then. The price is your answer in your own words, for the record. Give it and I’ll tell you.”

After she left, Andre carried the form into the front room and set it beside the logbook. He read the twelve lines against his forty-three dates, one by one. None of the twelve dates matched a reel he had recorded. He had heard the act’s tapes, the ones they had released, and they were clean. No room noise. No crowd. No needle drop. His reel of October 3, 1981, had all three, and the needle dropped at one minute twelve seconds. The catalog kept its tapes sealed in their package. He could not open it to lay one beside his reel, and no one at the catalog had ever asked to open his boxes. All he had to go on was the listening: what the act had released against what he had heard in the room.

He sat with the form a long time. Twelve thousand dollars was a lot of money for one morning. The roofer’s quote, folded in the kitchen drawer since April, put the work at 11,400 dollars, and the rain came in over the tape boxes. Twelve thousand would fix the roof and leave six hundred dollars over. He did the subtraction twice in his head and got the same number both times.

His daughter Denise, forty-four, came by that evening, driving over from her place. She emptied the roof bucket into the kitchen sink and set it back beside the boxes.

“Mount Sinai put me on nights next month,” she said. “More money. Less sleep.”

Andre nodded. She saw the form on the table and did not pick it up.

“What would the money fix?” she asked.

“The roof,” Andre said. “Eleven thousand four hundred. Six hundred left over.”

She nodded and did not ask him to sign. She made tea, set a mug beside him, and took her coat from the hook. “Early shift,” she said, and let herself out.

That night the rain came back after midnight. Andre got up, emptied the bucket, and moved the boxes off the wet spot. In the dark he could hear the needle drop the way it sounded on his reel, and then the clean track Marcus played at the field house, with no room in it at all. He stood in the front room with the logbook open on the table and ran his thumb down the dates. He picked up the pen from beside the form and set it back down. Twelve thousand dollars would fix the roof. His name on twelve tapes that were not his would not wash off.

In the morning he went to the kitchen table and sat down with the form in front of him. He carried the deck in from the front room, set it on the table, threaded the October 3 reel, checked the date against the logbook, and pressed play. The room filled with the set, the crowd, and the needle drop at one minute twelve seconds. He stopped the tape right there. He took the reel off the deck, put it back in its box, and set the box with the others. Then he picked up the form and the pen, carried them to the front door, and waited for Carla Voss to come back for them.

When she knocked at nine, he handed her the folder. The form inside was unsigned.

“I can’t sign it,” he said. “Those aren’t my tapes.”

Carla opened the folder to the session record. Under his name she wrote: Refused, in his own words. Tapes not his. She let him read it, then closed the folder.

“Your answer, on the record,” she said. “If you want your own name in the record, the spectrum hears a man in person, on LaSalle Street. It won’t change the rating, and it won’t pay.”

“Thank you for your time, Mr. Coleman,” she said. “The audit will go ahead as planned.”

After she left, Andre carried the deck back to the front room, put on his coat, and took the bus downtown to LaSalle Street, to the spectrum office. Carla had told him the panel heard a man in person. The clerk at the desk listened to him and gave him a petition form.

“The spectrum certifies recorded acts,” the clerk said. “The audit reads the filed record. It doesn’t go outside it. A petition is a filing. Once I take it, your name stays in the record whatever the panel decides. No taking it back.”

Andre filled it out in his own hand: his name, Andre Coleman, and his contribution, forty-three reels recorded at the Warehouse from 1979 to 1982, each dated in his logbook the night it was recorded.

“The panel sits Saturday mornings,” the clerk said. “They hear walk-in petitions.”

The panel sat at a long table that Saturday morning. A woman at the end of it looked up from his petition.

“One thing first, Mr. Coleman,” she said. “A hearing goes in the record. Your answers and the ruling go into a sealed annex, under your name, in the act’s file. That is the price of a ruling. Do you want the ruling?”

“Go ahead,” Andre said.

“What did you record?” she asked.

“Forty-three reels at the Warehouse, 1979 to 1982,” Andre said. “Each dated in my logbook the night it was recorded.”

“Where are the reels now?” she asked.

“In boxes in my front room, on South Homan Avenue,” Andre said.

“Have you ever deposited them with anyone?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “I kept them myself.”

“Then they count from the day they’re deposited,” the clerk said. “A date in your own book doesn’t count at audit.”

The woman wrote his name and his contribution in a sealed annex to the act’s record. The clerk stamped the petition, handed Andre a copy, and filed the annex in a drawer. Andre folded the copy into the back of the logbook.

The next week, Second Set passed its audit. Andre read about it in the paper the catalog sent him, a short notice with the act’s name and the word passed beside it. On Friday, Marcus played his set at the Douglass Park field house and opened with the same Second Set track. The crowd moved when the piano line came in. Marcus came by the flat the next day and told his grandfather the set had gone well.

Andre said nothing about the annex.

The next Sunday, Marcus came to the flat with his own records under his arm. Andre moved the tape boxes away from the wet spot on the floor, set the bucket under the drip, and carried the deck into the kitchen. He threaded the October 3 reel, checked the date against the logbook, and pressed play.

The room filled with the set, the crowd, and the needle drop at one minute twelve seconds. This time he let it play through. Marcus sat beside him at the kitchen table, listening, his records still in their sleeves.