Chatham, MA · April 1982
Ten songs from a Cape Cod that thinks it's the Caribbean.
In the spring of 1982, Denny Cove walked into a Chatham bait shop with a stack of cassettes and a borrowed four-track. Over seven days, between the hum of the ice machine and the gulls outside the screen door, he laid down ten songs about the islands he was living on.
The album was never officially released. The master cassette traveled in a coat pocket, then a tackle box, then — by some path nobody traces anymore — into a lobster trap that sat on the seafloor off Chatham for forty-two years.
It surfaced in 2024. A marine audio specialist in Woods Hole spent four months drying, baking, and re-spooling the tape. Every song was intact. Straight Outta Chatham is that record.
The studio was a working bait shop on Route 28 in Chatham — wooden floor, screen door, a freezer chest of frozen squid against one wall. The owner asked only for quiet during customer hours. The microphone stood three feet from the ice machine, which is audible on every track if you know to listen for it.
In April 2024, a Chatham fisherman pulled a barnacled wire trap from sixty feet of water and found a sealed plastic bag wedged beneath the parlour. Inside were a Maxell XLII cassette, a folded handwritten tracklist, and a single dried bay leaf. The tape was waterlogged but legible.
Denny picked up Jamaican patois from a deckhand named Winston during a fog bank off Nova Scotia, eleven days into the crossing from Boston. By the time the ship reached Hyannis, the cadence had taken hold. He has spoken in it ever since, sincerely and without affectation.
"I reach my island on a Tuesday."
— "Port of Hyannis (First Light)," Side A, Track 1