The Water Tape
Courtesy of Dick Goodman
This candid photo is a mate to several other snapshots that Calin Coburn found among his grandfather's effects. We wondered why Bob Nolan had kept these pictures until we heard the following story from Dick Goodman.
When Bob and I drove up to Bishop on that first fishing trip to the High Sierra in 1978, Bob took along a little portable tape recorder. We were staying at Robert Wagoner’s place in Bishop and one afternoon Wagoner happened to see Bob out in the backyard crouched down by a small stream. Wagoner had a large pond fed by a little tributary of the Bishop Creek. The stream flowed into the pond at one end and out the other and through the corner of the corral so Wagoner’s horse had access to the water. Bob had set this tape recorder down on the ground just a short distance from the corral fence and right next to this little stream.
When Wagoner asked him what was going on, Bob answered, “Well, I want to record the sound of this rippling water so I can have something to relax and listen to when I get home.” Then he left the machine and came back into the art studio to visit with the rest of us. The recorder continued to run until the whole tape was filled with the sound of that rippling water.
The day after we returned home from that trip I got a phone call from Bob Nolan. He’s chuckling as he tells me, “Dick, you know that recording I made of Robert’s stream? Well, I’m setting here in my easy chair listening to it and I have my eyes closed and I’m listening to the sound of that water and all of a sudden I hear this loud ‘Snort!’ It jerked me right up in the chair and I thought, ‘What in the world was that?’ Then I figured it out. It had to be Robert’s horse! The darn horse must have stuck his head down through the corral fence to check out the tape recorder and then let out that big snort!” We both got a big laugh out of that one.
Later that same year, Bob was in the recording studio doing his new album, “Sound of a Pioneer,” for Snuff Garrett. Snuff told me later, “We took a break and Bob decides to lie down on the studio couch and relax a while. The engineer and I were up in the sound booth talking when all of a sudden we hear what sounds like some kind of static coming though the speakers. The engineer starts twisting knobs and flipping switches, trying to figure out where the noise was coming from when it finally dawned on him!....The microphone in the studio area had been left on. When Bob lay down on the couch to relax, he’d turned on his little tape recorder to listen to that rippling water sound and it was being picked up by the “live” mike and carried up into the booth!”
This "Water Tape", as it came to be known by Nolan aficionados, became something of a legend. Bob's friends would recount the story with affectionate humour.
If anyone else had decided to record the sound of a stream, no one would have paid attention but, because this was Bob Nolan, the little tale was told and retold. His friends understood, or accepted, Bob's love of Nature and privacy. Those who didn't understand simply wrote the story off as another example of Bob Nolan's eccentricity.
Today we can find a machine that makes similar soothing sounds in nearly every home in America but, at the time Bob taped the sound of that bubbling stream, it was deemed highly unusual behaviour - and just like Bob Nolan.