About Oceanside Tape Project: Recovery Speaker Tapes
The Oceanside Tape Project is a recovery audio preservation project focused on digitizing old A.A. and AFG/Al-Anon speaker tapes and helping move them into XA-Speakers for long-term public access.
These recordings come from conventions, conferences, roundups, workshops, group anniversaries, central office collections, tape libraries, and local rooms across the recovery world. Many were recorded decades ago on cassette and passed from hand to hand before podcasts, streaming, and digital archives existed.
Our role is simple: find the tapes, digitize them, identify them as carefully as possible, and help keep the message available.
This podcast shares selected recordings as part of that preservation effort — voices from A.A., AFG/Al-Anon, and the wider recovery tape tradition, carried forward one tape at a time.
oceansidetapeproject.substack.com (https://oceansidetapeproject.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)
Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can.
The cassette label reads Karla D.; on the tape she introduces herself as Carla Downing, of Orange, California — an Al-Anon voice speaking at her home county’s convention in the spring of 2007.
The Orange County convention has always run its Al-Anon track on local strength — members from the surrounding towns telling the family side of the disease to the people living inside it — and this recording is that tradition working: a woman from Orange, a few miles from the hotel, giving the 22nd convention what the program gave her.
Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe (https://oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)
17 Oct 2026
Bob L. — Glendale, CA — AA
Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can.
An AA Longtimers meeting is where a convention puts its proof, and the 2007 Desert Pow Wow put Bob L. of Glendale, California, on that podium in Indian Wells.
He had the miles for the room. His recorded trail reaches back to the St. Andrews Speakers Group in Saratoga in January of 1981, runs through San Diego’s Old Town Speaker Group in 1994, and reaches the South Bay Roundup in Torrance in 2002 — California AA, decade by decade, the same Glendale voice showing up on tape across twenty-six years and counting by the time this one was recorded.
Longtimers meetings run on a different fuel than the main-stage story. Nobody needs the wreckage retold at year thirty; what the room wants is the arithmetic of staying — the ordinary days, the meetings attended when nothing was wrong, the sponsees buried and married and promoted. A man recorded across four decades of California rooms speaks that language natively. In June of 2007, at a resort in the desert, Bob L. spoke it to a ballroom that came to hear exactly that.
Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe (https://oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)
16 Oct 2026
Otto M. — Plano, TX — AA
Everything will be free forever. But your donation will help us continue the work and perhaps hire help because 100.000 tapes is a lot of tapes and currently its just me doing the work when I can.
Otto M. of Plano, Texas, came to the 21st Orange County AA Convention in April of 2006 as a Texas voice with a coast-to-coast habit — his recorded trail runs from the Maine Area Roundup in 2004 to a Southern California convention stage in 2009, with this Costa Mesa weekend sitting between them.
His story carries a piece of AA lineage in it. As a newcomer, Otto heard Dr. Paul O. speak — the physician whose page on acceptance became one of the most quoted passages in the Big Book’s story section — and he has said the experience changed his life. That is how the circuit propagates: a new man hears an old one, gets well, and twenty years later is the voice on somebody else’s cassette.
By 2006 Otto M. was that voice — a Plano alcoholic invited from Maine to California, carrying the same message that once caught him: acceptance, worked steps, and a life that no longer required managing from a barstool.
Get full access to Oceanside Tape Project at oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe (https://oceansidetapeproject.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)
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