I’ve thought about some version of this for a long time, although I don’t know that I ever had a phrase for it before: an endowment for continuity.
I don’t expect immortality. I don’t expect the things I’ve made, or the bands I’ve been in, to matter forever. I don’t think the Coctails need to be remembered forever. I don’t think Mudhead does. I certainly don’t think my own photographs or records or whatever else I’ve made need to somehow survive indefinitely.
That isn’t really what I’m after.
What I want is a buffer.
I want to know that when I die, all of this doesn’t immediately become a bunch of flat files full of random crap that somebody else has to figure out. I’ve seen enough old material now to know how quickly context disappears. You find something and know it matters, but maybe nobody remembers exactly what it was anymore, or where it happened, or why somebody saved it in the first place.
I would rather do as much of that work myself as I can.
And I think that’s partly what I’m doing with my personal Coctails archive right now. I’m creating a container for it. The timeline is a container. Mudhead can have a container too. My own work can have one. They don’t necessarily all need to become one gigantic archive with my name on it. I actually like the idea that they remain somewhat independent and overlap with other people’s archives.
Because that’s another thing I’m starting to understand.
Leo from the Human Observation Lab has all of these videotapes and recordings he made in Kansas City, including recordings of us, and he’s digitizing that material and it’s eventually going to the UMKC library. I’m finding that a lot of David Goodrich’s material is moving in that direction too.
I find that incredibly exciting.
These are people who were part of this scene when it was actually happening, and now, nearly forty years later, they’re trying to figure out how to carry the evidence of it forward. Not because anybody thinks everything needs to be immortalized, but because they have all this stuff and they know what it is. They know enough to understand that if they don’t do something with it now, eventually somebody else is going to be looking at it without that knowledge.
And I suddenly started thinking that maybe this is what that DIY scene is now.
We used to figure out how to put out our own records, book our own shows, make flyers, find places to play and get in a van and take all of it somewhere else. Nobody was waiting around for an institution to tell us how to do it.
Now some of the same people are sitting on thirty or forty years of recordings, videotapes, photographs and ephemera and trying to figure out how to preserve it.
Like Aadam Jacobs.
Maybe that’s that old scene now.
And I’m part of that now too.
One thing I’m particularly interested in with Leo’s material is the photographs. From what I can tell, most of the attention naturally goes toward the videotapes and recordings, because those are obviously important and they need to be digitized before the formats become even harder to deal with. But somewhere there are photographs too, and probably negatives.
That’s one place where I actually have something useful to contribute.
Rather than just asking somebody to send me JPEGs of old pictures, I’d love to help go back to the original negatives wherever possible and make really good archival scans. That’s something I know how to do. And if those images ultimately become part of an institutional collection, then there would be high-resolution files attached to them from the beginning rather than somebody someday trying to reconstruct them from an old Facebook post or a tiny scan somebody made twenty years ago.
That starts to make this feel less like me simply building my own archive and more like participating in a larger network of people doing the same thing.
Then there’s still this other thing I’ve been thinking about for myself, which I’ve been calling a foundation. Maybe that’s an overly grand word for it, but I actually kind of like it.
I don’t mean a foundation in the sense of creating some big organization devoted to promoting me or these other things after I’m dead. I’m thinking about something much more modest and practical. I’m trying to figure out whether there is some amount of my own money I can set aside so that when I die there is a person, or some simple mechanism, responsible for keeping the important domain names renewed and making sure the digital archive doesn’t just disappear because a credit card stopped working.
Maybe there are also physical things that haven’t found an institutional home yet, and there’s enough money for somebody to hang on to those for a while rather than having to make an immediate decision about them.
That might be all the foundation ever does.
I really like that idea.
It isn’t an attempt to dictate what happens to everything forever. If the University of Iowa wants part of something someday, great. If UMKC becomes the right home for something connected to Kansas City, great. Maybe some things stay distributed among different collections. Maybe something I think is important now turns out not to be important to anybody fifty years from now.
That’s okay.
What I don’t want is for the decision to be made accidentally.
I joined Mudhead when I was eighteen. I spent basically the first three years of my adult life in that band, which was really the entire life of the band. It was over by the time I turned twenty-one. I was playing in clubs before I was even old enough to drink in them.
That was 1987. Next month that will have been forty years ago.
It’s strange to even say that.
And now I’m looking backward and discovering that pieces of that time still exist because people saved them. Some of those people are now actively doing the work of making sure the material survives them.
I don’t know if Motley thought much about that while he was alive. Maybe he did. But it’s been really moving to discover how much of him remains because other people cared enough to preserve something.
And of course those people aren’t going to be here forever either.
There’s almost a second disappearance that happens when the people who remember what everything means disappear too.
So maybe this is the moment to do it.
I don’t have children who are automatically going to inherit all of this, and in some ways that makes the question clearer for me. I don’t want somebody someday opening drawers and boxes and hard drives and feeling this obligation to figure out what Barry wanted them to do with all of it.
I can make those decisions now.
I can decide what deserves a container. I can put enough context around it that somebody else has a chance of understanding it. I can help other people do the same thing when I have something useful to offer.
And then maybe I can leave behind just enough money to keep the lights on for a while.
An endowment for continuity.
Not immortality.
Just enough time for the next person to decide whether they want to carry it any farther.
