To tape, or not to tape
Transcribing a taped interview is its own kind of hell
I spent much of today copying microcassette tapes of some interviews I did back in the day to the hard drive.
There aren’t many of them, though. One interview I did with Kenny Neal ahead of a show he did in San Diego, one with Baseball Hall of Fame sportswriter Ritter Collett of the Dayton Journal Herald (and later Dayton Daily News), one with San Diego bluesman Tom “Cat” Courtney, one with his keyboardist “Mighty” Joe Longa, a short post-game radio interview with the San Diego Padres’ Tony Gwynn, and a whole bunch with San Diego band leaders Jeannie & Jimmy Cheatham.
Over the years I’ve interviewed everyone from legendary singer Tony Bennett to bestselling author Lee Child, talk show host Dick Cavett to TV and film star Ed Asner, impressionist Rich Little, insult comedian Don Rickles, and 1970s rock guitar royalty Robin Trower.
Never taped any of those interviews.
Which might seem a waste, and I suppose I wouldn’t mind having tapes of the Bennett and Asner interviews in particular.
But I realized early on that taping an interview was problematic on multiple fronts.
I guess the technical issues are the easiest to dispense with. Before cell phones, you could get an adapter for your tape deck that had circular microphone pickups that you slid over the earpiece to capture both sides of the conversation on tape. With cell phones, there is software you can get to record both sides of an interview. Once you have it set up, it’s not terribly difficult.
There is the legal requirement, in California, to let the person on the other end of the phone know you are taping the interview. Again, most established public figures have no problem with that — the tape will settle any questions of accuracy in the resulting article.
But I will say that the few times I wanted to tape record an interview in person with a local musician, I could see them tensing up.
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