March 6, 2014:

“Cutting Through,” a 1992 promotional tape from Columbia Hard Music, has made its debut in my collection.

I mean that literally; it was still in the shrink-wrap. I’d never opened or played it; it’s just been sitting there, waiting for me to have time.

It’s seven songs by various metal bands — the regular packaging says six, but the shrink-wrap had a label announcing a bonus track by Circus of Power. Also included: Collision, Cathedral, Alice in Chains, Warrant, Cry of Love, and Rob Halford. The Halford song says it’s from the soundtrack to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and it took me a moment to realize it meant the movie, not the TV series — 1992 was well before there was a TV series.

There’s a certain sameness to all of these, really, but they aren’t bad.

And no, I don’t know where I got the tape. It was probably a convention freebie, maybe at an ABA.

Also on today’s agenda: “The Unicorn,” by the Irish Rovers. A surprisingly short album. The cassette also has the songs in a completely different order than the LP or CD — I mean, completely different, not just a couple swapped to make the sides come out even. They also repeated the title track in the middle of Side 2 for no obvious reason. I rearranged everything back to the order from the LP.

It’s Irish folk songs and some pseudo-folk songs, including a few serious revolutionary songs and a few comic songs, making for some odd contrasts. Eleven songs in all, which might seem reasonable for an album, but the longest on here is well under four minutes, and a couple are less than half that.

But it’s good to have.

March 6, 2014:

And today I have restored Nicolette Larson’s “Radioland” to its rightful place in my music collection.

It’s only nine tracks, each about three minutes, so it’s a surprisingly short album, and honestly, I only really like about half of it, but I like that half a lot. I used to keep this in the car, back when I had a car with a cassette player, and I played it a lot. Mostly for the title track.

I always sort of wondered what happened to Larson, so today I looked her up and learned that she shifted over to country, then died young of liver failure that may have been the result of drug-induced damage. What a shame!

Since “Radioland” was so short, I went ahead and did a second tape — one labeled “10 Sketches – Radio Pirates.”

You probably never heard of the Radio Pirates — at least, not this group; I’m aware others (including a band) have used the name. The Radio Pirates were a comedy group out of Wisconsin that was more or less headed by Scott Dikkers and Jay Rath. In 1992 they bought the rights to do a radio adaptation of my short story “The Drifter” — I’ll be getting to that tape later. This one was sent to me by Scott Dikkers as a sample of their work, to help convince me to let them have the rights cheap. He sent at least two others, as well, which I’ll get to later; I played the others and liked them, am not sure whether I ever listened to this one.

If the name Scott Dikkers sounds familiar, it’s probably because in 1993 the Radio Pirates broke up, and he devoted his time to another comedy project he owned: The Onion. Where he’s twice been the editor, and where he’s been very involved in their multi-media online empire.

Anyway, these sketches are all short — the longest is a little over four minutes. In fact, all ten together did not fill the first side of a C-60 tape, and the second side was blank. (I played it, just to be sure. Blank.) They’re inventive, all amusing, but not often really funny. They’re very well produced, though, and even when spoofing current events (e.g., the elder George Bush, or the Robert Mapplethorpe brouhaha) they haven’t dated badly.

March 7, 2014:

Well, crap.

The next tape I picked from the pile was “Dream Police,” by Cheap Trick. It didn’t sound very good, so I tried rewinding it back and forth, to loosen up sticky spots and realign the tape with the heads, Sometimes this helps when a tape has been sitting unplayed for years.

This time it made it significantly worse, intolerably muddy, whereupon I said, “How much would it cost to just download it?”

Six bucks. It’s worth six bucks to me to not spend possibly hours messing with a bad tape, so I bought it off Amazon and tossed the tape.

And I then discovered that it’s not really a great album. Not as good as I remembered.

Oh, well. It’s in the collection now.