Charles Rice Goff III
In addition to his own Taped Rugs label, CR Goff has released tapes on many other labels. This one was on Ecto Tapes from Oklahoma.
This Goff side project,-ING, put this one out on the distribution system called Kentucky Fried Royalty, a project run co-operatively between Lord Litter, Stephen Parsons and myself. It was meant as a way of doing worldwide releases by regional distribution.
As for your questions, sheesh, I can’t remember a first trade at all. In the late 1970’s, I started giving away cassettes with my music on them to people interested in noncommercial recordings, in underground/college radio, or in me personally. I did this for years with no reciprication (in the form of a tape anyway) in mind whatsoever. I did receive some tapes from people during this period, but most of these I got from people I knew already or from people whom I was interested in working with somehow.
As I recall, the first tapes that I got from people in the “cassette culture” were actually paid for with US currency or with international money orders. Some of these tapes I bought at independent record stores — others through ads in the underground cassette press. After these initial purchases were made, I started to trade tapes with a few of the artists who were connected to the cassettes I purchased. This helped to build my notoriety in the cassette culture, led to more artists I could trade with, and eventually led to me receiving unsolicited requests from artists who wanted to trade tapes with me. It was all such a gradual process though, the first actual trade is lost in my memory.
During my initial explorations of the cassette culture, I often got the impression that I needed to prove the validity of my own recordings to potential traders before the act of trading could begin. So around 1986 or so, I just started sending out tapes to artists who had their addresses posted on compilation tapes, in print reviews from underground mags, or in tape label catalogs. Due to the slowness of the post and the high price of mailing letters, I figured it was better to just send a tape and ask for a trade rather than going through this months long process:
1) send a letter asking to arrange a trade
2) wait for a response from a busy or distracted artist
3) send a tape
4) wait again to receive a tape in trade
It was all a crap shoot, and while in many cases I got a nice recording and a positive review of my own tape in exchange, I often received no response at all, or occasionally would receive an offer to buy a tape from the person who had received my unsolicited tape for free.
