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In a suburban backyard outside of Sacramento, I open the door to a giant shed, step inside and get smacked in the face by floor-to-ceiling shelves of music history.
VHS tapes. Cassette tapes. Reel-to-reels. DATs. Other formats I don’t recognize, and can’t pronounce. Nearly 20,000 of them, all filled with live shows, demo recordings and concert footage.
Down a narrow path through this obsolete physical media, I turn a corner to find Shayne Stacy, 57, sitting at a desk with three monitors and occasionally fiddling with a nearby U-matic machine, an out-of-date piece of video hardware used by TV stations. On the screen, viewed for the first time in 40 years, is a 1980s new wave band performing on a long-lost cable access show from the Central Valley…