March 2, 2014:

Tonight I squared away the soundtrack album to “The Little Mermaid.”

This one got played a lot when the kids were little; it was a favorite for long car trips, for one thing. It holds up just fine — it may well be the best soundtrack Disney ever produced.

And someone long ago sent me a tape of Kate Bush music that I’m pretty sure all duplicates albums I already had. I’ll play it to make sure the listings are correct, but it looks like another one I won’t copy.

March 2, 2014:

Yeah, the Kate Bush tape is just what it says, and I do have all the music. Off it goes.

March 3, 2014:

Today’s album: “1989 Windham Hill In-Store Play Sampler.” Which was a freebie I picked up at a gift shop in Shepherdstown, WV back in (unsurprisingly) 1989.

I have a theory that the sales rep distributing these to shops had extras, so he just left them on the counter at the store I got it at, because it doesn’t seem to be intended for consumer use, but for in-store play.

Windham Hill, for those who don’t know, was a label founded by a pianist as an outlet for himself and his friends. Initially they only did instrumental music; later they added a jazz line that allowed vocals but was still mostly instrumental. Windham Hill was one of the top “New Age” labels of the ’80s and ’90s.

They eventually got bought up by BMG, which then had no idea what to do with the label, so it gradually withered away. The name and backlist belong to Sony now, but they haven’t released a new title in several years.

Anyway, this tape had seven pieces on the first side by Windham Hill artists I never heard of, and four from Windham Hill Jazz on Side 2. It’s actually quite pleasant, but not exactly catchy or involving.

One track is a medley of two Hendrix songs, “Castles Made of Sand” and “Little Wing,” done in an easy listening/light jazz style, which amazingly does not suck. It works better than you’d think.

The rest is all original instrumentals by people like Philip Aaberg or Nightnoise.

It’s nice enough to listen to, but I doubt I’ll play it very often.

March 4, 2014:

When I was a kid, I had a 78 RPM record of stories about the Lone Ranger; maybe more than one, I’m not entirely sure anymore. Decca Records had issued a four-record set in 1951, and my family had at least part of a set, though I’m pretty sure we didn’t have the fourth one.

The originals were lost long ago, but somewhere along the way I later acquired copies of #2 through #4, probably from a yard sale or antique shop, and I copied those to MP3 months, or maybe years, ago.

But I didn’t have the first one, “He is Saved by Tonto,” and there was a second edition which replaced the really lame fourth story, “He Helps the Colonel’s Son,” with a much better one, “He Meets the War Horse,” and I didn’t have that.

But in November of 1986 a guy in Virginia, probably inspired by something I said in my column in The Comics Buyer’s Guide, sent me a cassette tape with all four second-edition stories on it, along with the 20th-anniversary “Lone Ranger” radio show from 1953. I have his name and the date because it’s still in the mailing box, with postmark and return address.

So tonight I copied that.

Alas, the quality wasn’t that great; they’d been recorded at very low volume, from I don’t know what source. Didn’t sound like the records. So, scratchy as my three records were, I kept those versions and did not replace them with the taped ones.

I did, however, add the first story, and “He Meets the War Horse,” and the 20th anniversary radio show.

To do so I had to fiddle with stuff on Audacity I’d never used before, filtering out the tape hiss, boosting the volume, and so on, as well as speeding everything up to compensate for my slow tape deck. Took a lot of work, but they came out pretty decent.

And they aren’t bad. Ending my collection with these instead of “He Helps the Colonel’s Son” is a major improvement.

March 5, 2014:

Almost ninety minutes of Pat Benatar in concert, from two stops on her “Precious Time” tour in 1981, recorded in Austin and Dallas and broadcast on the King Biscuit Flower Hour. I taped it off the radio.

Surprisingly solid quality throughout, despite the several steps from performance to MP3; seventeen tracks of music (and an eighteenth introducing the band), but she did “Heartbreaker,” “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” and “Hell is for Children” at both venues, and they’re all on here, so only fourteen different songs. The versions of those three songs are different enough to be worth keeping them all.

For the iTunes cover art I pulled a publicity still off the web, from about the right time period — she’s in a purple zebra-striped leotard, very ’80s.

I was a pretty big Benatar fan back then, but I began to lose interest when she drifted from rock toward pop; when “Love Is A Battlefield” became a huge hit, that was pretty much it for me. Listening to this tape I remembered how much I liked her music before that.