Alan Watts

Alan Watts is a speaker and lecturer whose spoken work survives in hundreds of hours of talks, recorded on vinyl disks, magnetic tape reels and audiocassettes between 1960 and 1973. Recordings made in a radio booth at KPFA in Berkeley came first. In the late 1950s a few live seminar sessions were taped in New York and broadcast on KPFA to his growing radio audience. They were among the first recordings to capture the more playful and engaging side of Watts with a live audience. They were so well received that they led to a fundraising effort to buy a high-quality portable recorder, a Swiss Nagra tape deck.

Most of the field recordings were made in the sixties and early seventies by Watts himself, the sound pioneer and humorist Henry "Sandy" Jacobs, and Watts's son Mark. Early sessions were mostly recorded on the East Coast, and later in California during his extensive West Coast tours. His various LPs were recorded in Jacobs's studio in Sausalito, California.

Mark had been recording his father's talks for five years when, in 1973, the two conceived the Electronic University as an outreach project. The Essential Lectures were gathered in 1971 and the Essentials video series followed in 1972. The first "courses on cassette" arrived in 1973, beginning with The Essence of Buddhism.

That work continues today as the Alan Watts Org, which curates and shares his talks as downloads, streaming series and podcasts. It presents the original, authentic recordings and discourages AI imitations of his voice.