Zen author and philosopher Alan Watts is lauded as the foremost interpreter of Eastern thought for Western audiences; his wit and wisdom are as relevant now as they were during his lifetime. Watts’s British accent was first broadcast on the listener-sponsored Pacifica radio station in the Bay Area in the late ’50s, and soon his words spread all over America through public talks, recordings, books, and on screen. With his portable tape deck, Alan’s son Mark Watts captured hundreds of hours of his father’s improvised seminar sessions that took place before live audiences on their Sausalito houseboat and on the road.
Years later, he dug up these recordings and digitally remastered select gems for the series The Essential Alan Watts in the mid-’90s. This is Alan Watts in the most informal of settings. He’s relaxed, candid, and spontaneous, and it feels as if you’re right there with him in his houseboat living room. His spirit comes through in these psychedelic Californian ruminations, intriguing incantations, and compelling thoughts on existence.
Two decades later on the other coast, Jas Walton found these recordings.
“I listened to them on the train every day for months—I’d be underground on the subway, totally lost in that world. Alan Watts is so good at condensing these mysterious cosmic questions into manageable ideas; it’s just the most reasonable thing I’ve ever heard. He talks with such a great cadence and natural rhythm, and that was what stood out to me the most. One day on a whim, while experimenting with making chord progression loops at home in Brooklyn, I just decided to drop Watts’ voice in and see how it matched up rhythmically. Some things would work and some things wouldn’t, and so then I thought, ‘Well, I can just kind of nudge this word a little late or nudge that phrase a little early,’ and then one day I got totally carried away and thought, ‘You know what, I have all afternoon, I’m gonna be strict about every word falling in line.’ That was the first one that I did, and then I kind of got the hang of it.”
—Jas Walton
credits
released November 4, 2015
Recorded by Alan Watts in the late ’60s in a private home in Ojai
Sessions recorded by Mark Watts during ’70 and ’71 on the Vallejo houseboat in Sausalito
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