Spencer Coppins was DNA Lounge’s general manager in the 1980s and 1990s. He was also a singer, an MC, and pretty much single-handedly started the “Swing” revival in the 80s. He passed away a few months ago, and as his friends were cleaning out his place, they came across a big pile of VHS tapes of old DNA Lounge shows!

Jason Scott of Internet Archive was kind enough to digitize them for us. And these nearly-40-year-old VHS tapes turned out to be of surprisingly high quality! The very high resolution scans of the raw tapes are at Internet Archive.

I’ve also split them apart and uploaded them to YouTube, so here’s a playlist of more than 24 hours of live performances at DNA Lounge spanning the years 1988 through 1992! Plus some other stuff.

We are also hosting a memorial for Spencer on the afternoon of Sat, Apr 4. If you knew him, please stop by!


From jwz via this RSS feed