You know, at typically a little over three hours each, these tapes are going to take awhile.

I thought I’d start with an easy one, i.e., one I thought was blank.

It wasn’t. It turns out to have the complete King Biscuit Flower Hour show of a 1977 concert by the Grateful Dead at Arizona State University.

The broadcast wasn’t the whole concert, maybe half of it, plus one song, “Terrapin Station,” from another show somewhere. Despite the “Flower Hour” name, it was a ninety-minute show; after trimming out ads and announcements it’s about eighty minutes of music.

It’s pretty good stuff. There’s some hum — my recorder’s pre-Dolby — and some bits where the treble fell off, but the quality is mostly a pleasant surprise, given that it was recorded over thirty-five years ago on a machine that’s now well over forty years old.

And I’m surprised it’s from as recently as ’77; I didn’t think I was still using the reel-to-reel that late.

Anyway, the Dead. Yeah. Eighty minutes, eight songs; they weren’t exactly in a hurry. When Buddy Holly first recorded “Not Fade Away,” it took two minutes, seventeen seconds. When the Dead performed it that night in Tempe, it took 27:58. (Admittedly, it opened with a drum solo and included their own song, “Black Peter,” stuck in the
middle.)

The rest of Side 1 of the tape was filled out with an apparently-random assortment of Jethro Tull — it sounds as if I’d had an entire side of Tull, and taped over the first eighty-plus minutes of it. I just skipped the Tull; it’s all stuff I already had.

I don’t know what’s on Side 2; I haven’t played it yet.

You know, most of these tapes are labeled; I don’t know why this one wasn’t.

But that’s one side down, leaving 49.5 tapes to go.