He’s Saving 20,000 Tapes of Underground Music and Making it Free to All

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Shayne Stacy, 57, sitting at a desk with three monitors and occasionally fiddling with a nearby U-matic machine, an out-of-date piece of video hardware used by TV stations.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.

On any given day, this is where you’ll find Stacy, the founder of the nonprofit Sacramento Music Archive. Just a half-hour’s drive from Sutter’s Mill and its famous California discovery, Stacy tends methodically to his own goldmine: a mass of underground music from Sacramento, the Bay Area and beyond that he’s gradually digitizing and sharing with the world, including rare early footage of Nirvana, Metallica and Green Day.

“You’d think it’s like this big rock and roll party in here. It’s like this. It’s very quiet, with me working at a keyboard,” Stacy says with a laugh.

I first became aware of Stacy’s work during the pandemic, when I noticed people posting video footage of punk shows held 30 years ago that I’d attended, or, even more irresistible, that I’d heard about but been too young to see. I soon found that for those of a certain age and musical bent, scrolling the Sacramento Music Archive was like watching one’s life flash before their eyes: a young Rancid finding their footing at Berkeley Square, Mr. Bungle covering Top 40 radio hits from 1989 in Guerneville, or Maximum Rocknroll founder Tim Yohannon throwing pies at Screeching Weasel at 924 Gilman.

As for shows that had been uploaded before, like Operation Ivy’s final show? Stacy consistently seemed to have the best sources, and sometimes from multiple camera angles, too. What’s more, he had over 5,000 shows from all over Northern California from the past 50 years, by punk, metal, modern rock, funk, thrash and indie bands — famous names and obscure footnotes alike. And, remarkably, it was evident he still went out to shows, and filmed new bands.

Who was this one-man Library of Congress for West Coast Gen Xers? I had to find out.

Preserving punk history

Born in Auburn in 1967, Stacy had a typical 1970s childhood of watching Scooby Doo and collecting sports cards. When he was 15, he went by himself to see Iron Maiden and the Scorpions at the Sacramento Memorial Stadium, in 1982, and he still remembers its impact. “As soon as I felt that sound pressure hitting my chest, I’m like, ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever seen,’” he says.

The Bay Area was a cradle of thrash metal at the time, with bands like Exodus, Possessed and Metallica just starting out. Soon, Stacy was bringing cheap tape recorders to shows, and sharing the results with other fans who traded tapes through the classifieds in the backs of fan magazines. In 1987, after witnessing the El Sobrante punk band Isocracy, who routinely threw heaps of garbage all over the crowd, Stacy had an epiphany.

“There’s paper all over the floor, and it’s just a chaotic environment, and I said to myself, ‘I have to buy a video camera to document this stuff,’” Stacy remembers. “I stopped all of my excess expenditures, making five bucks an hour, and saved for four months to buy my own video camera.”

Between 1988 and 1992, Stacy estimates, he filmed 240 shows, driving to venues in Sacramento or the Bay Area every weekend. Trading with others through the mail, he amassed even more tapes. But there was a downside: he began seeing his own footage, of shows by Primus and Nirvana playing at the Cattle Club in Sacramento, bootlegged and sold by others for profit.

“It was like, no fun anymore,” Stacy says. “This was supposed to be a hobby I enjoyed, and it turned into this point of frustration. And so I quit. I quit for 10 years.”

YouTube brought him back. Stacy says it “liberated” everything: the fans didn’t have to pay $30 for a grainy VHS tape anymore, the copyright holders got paid — not enough, but something — and he got to enjoy his hobby again. He rushed out and bought the best cassette decks and VCRs he could find, and got to work.

One person who noticed the quality of Stacy’s work early on is Wayne Vanderkuil. “I work at Stanford in visual preservation, reformatting, and he had similar equipment to what we have here,” Vanderkuil says. “I was incredibly impressed.”

During the tape-trading days, Vanderkuil amassed his own collection of metal bands playing at Ruthie’s Inn, Wolfgang’s or the On Broadway. They sat in storage for 25 years, untouched, he says. “I thought, ‘No one’s ever gonna hear these. I’ll drop dead tomorrow, and there goes history.’”

Instead, he donated his tapes to Stacy. Vanderkuil is now president of the board of the Sacramento Music Archive, newly incorporated as a nonprofit, which will allow Stacy — who worked at Intel for 27 years and recently accepted an “incredibly generous” buyout offer — to take donations and apply for grants. Most importantly, it’ll set up his life’s work to continue into the future. As it stands, only about 5% of the tapes in the archive have been preserved digitally so far.

“This is clearly becoming a bigger project than I’ve got time left,” says Stacy.

‘He really is the go-to’

Publicity and word-of-mouth creates another problem: the piles are growing. Everyone, it seems, has old tapes they want to donate. Waiting to be digitized in the archive are 500 cassettes of free jazz, reel-to-reels of D.R.I. rehearsals at The Vats and hundreds of videos and soundboard recordings from 924 Gilman. Stacy now has over 25 different collections from DJs, sound engineers, record store owners, zine editors, promoters, cable access hosts and fans.

One of them is Arica Pelino, who recently traveled from three states away to Stacy’s archive with a suitcase full of tapes. Pelino toured with Green Day in 1991, and filmed many of their early shows, along with dozens of other bands from the East Bay like Econochrist and Lungbutter. Her tapes sat in storage for more than 20 years, unseen.

“If I didn’t meet Shayne, it would still be sitting in boxes,” she says.

She and Stacy spent two days going through her collection, including 22 early Green Day shows that no one had ever seen before, she says, along with backstage footage and early demos.

“Shayne really is the owner and the keeper for all of us,” Pelino says. “There’s no one I’d rather do it with. He does a great job, he’s extremely detail-oriented and he puts his all into cleaning up the audio and video. He really is the go-to archive for Northern California, and has captured a significant part of the music scene.”

Another donor, Rick Sylvain, who in his 12 years working at Berkeley radio station KALX helped start the long-running KALX Live! show, with bands playing in the cramped studio.

“It was kind of stinky sometimes — they spilled a lot of beer in there — but it was fun, and I taped everything,” he says. “Some of these little bands, it was their one big moment in the sun, and I wanted them to feel like they were stars.”

One little band that fulfilled that promise of stardom was AFI, who would go on to headline arenas. Thanks to the Sacramento Music Archive, Sylvain’s cassette of AFI’s 1994 visit to KALX is now the band’s earliest live recording on YouTube.

Large companies and record labels have taken notice, and Stacy’s provided them with material for a Nirvana box set, a Pavement film, and various documentaries. He talks just as enthusiastically, however, about forgotten bands like The Donner Party or the Slambodians. He’s especially excited about a recent estate sale find of reel-to-reels from a member of Red Asphalt, the early punk band, who lived in Sacramento.

And that brings him back to the original purpose of the archive, one it’s clearly outgrown: to legitimize and honor Sacramento as its own distinct music scene. He accepts that “Sacramento Music Archive” is a bit of a misnomer for a massive collection covering the the Bay Area and Northern California.

But he likes the name.

“I’ve always felt like Sacramento has always been the red-headed stepchild of California,” he says. “The Lakers make fun of the Kings, Southern California makes fun of Sacramento. It’s a cow town, right? So having something that’s culturally enriching, that has the Sacramento label on it, I’m fine with it.”

The Sacramento Music Archive can be found at its official website and YouTube channel. Subscribers can join the archive’s Patreon to vote which shows in the archive will get digitized or posted next, or to arrange filming a concert from scratch.