Friends,

As you may have seen in our Twitter feed this week, Dave Segal wrote a great piece on Northwest recording engineer Kearney Barton (as in Wheedle’s Groove Kearney Barton) in the latest edition of The Stranger. Check it out online HERE!

Sadly, Kearney’s health is quickly deteriorating and he had to retire after over six decades of recording Northwest music.  Our friend and mastering guru Dave Cooley has been helping Kearney sell his music gear to cover health bills.  The man’s legendary custom build, one-of-a-kind, Langevin recording console is now on eBay – check out the listing for full info and photos. It’s pretty incredible–The Kingsmen, The Standells, The Sonics, Earl Hines, Paul Bley, and many others recorded on this very console.

Kearney has arguably recorded more music than anyone in the entire Pacific Northwest, dating back to 1958, including rock, jazz, sitar music, country, psych, folk, operas, classical, radio jingles, the list goes on and on – Quincy Jones to The Sonics.  His significance to Northwest music history cannot be understated.

We’re currently working with Kearney, his family, and the University of Washington to digitize thousands of analog reels from Kearney’s endless audio archive, and eventually release some of this material on CD/LP/Digital. The University is now preserving over 1,500 reels, but we’re looking to find a safe place – ideally a local Seattle museum – to house the remainder of the archive and then locate funding to pay for months of professional digitizing.

Please spread the word.  We could use your help.