Man-of-a-thousand-interviews Larry Katz is sharing his tapes with the world

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Following the shutdown of the Real Paper in 1981, Katz joined the Boston Herald as an arts writer. Over more than a quarter century there, he amassed a treasure chest of 90-minute audio cassettes filled with interviews of a 20th-century who’s who of pop and rock music, from Prince to Bob Marley, Roy Orbison to David Bowie and Lou Reed.

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Katz took a buyout from the Herald in 2011. Several years ago, he began transcribing his interviews — there are nearly a thousand of them — and posting them to his website. He called it The Katz Tapes.

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[...]

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The next step after launching the website was to find a home for the tapes themselves. Katz considered a few archives, including the Library of Congress and the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University, which claims one of the country’s largest music-related collections. In the end, however, he decided his tapes should remain in Boston.

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[...]

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Mecagni introduced Katz to Tom Blake, the Boston Public Library’s manager of content discovery.

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“Tom is often the linchpin” for this kind of project in Boston, she says.

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Within a matter of hours Blake had secured a set-aside to fund the digitization of Katz’s tapes. Members of the public are welcome to browse the collection on the Internet Archive. The tapes themselves now reside at Northeastern, where Mecagni and her team plan to complete the transcripts and make them available as a reference tool.

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https://www.bostonglobe.c...ith-world/

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Mirror of the article here: https://www.msn.com/en-us...r-BB1gkcZ8

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Link to his website: http://thekatztapes.com/

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The Katz Tapes on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/katz-tapes

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Here is his interview with Prince from 1981: https://archive.org/details/bpl-prince

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Interview with Tony M: https://archive.org/detai...ony-mosely

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Interview with Levi Seacer Jr.: https://archive.org/detai...cer-levijr

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(Updated/corrected title)

[Edited 5/9/21 14:30pm]

Is this the interview where Prince speaks on how this is a lucky break that won't last, and maybe he'll go to college and work in the film industry as a gaffer? That was a hilarious old interview.

Apparently that 1981 interview was not for the Boston Herald, but for The Real Paper, one of the Boston area's leading weekly alternative newspapers which closed down in June 1981: https://www.upi.com/Archi...361166400/ The interview was published on 2 April 1981.

According to the notes on https://archive.org/details/bpl-prince , the interview was done on 3/17/81 (17 March 1981) at Parker House, which I assume is this hotel: https://www.omnihotels.co...rker-house .

What a waste of time.

I can't hear what Prince is saying. It's just resonance.

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Hardly listenable.

Should be cleaned.

I only understand some words.

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It was easier to hear Prince's words the longer the interview went on. At first, he was quiet and of few words, then he warmed up. Start halfway in.

Thanks heaps for posting these links