The astute observer will have noticed I hadn’t posted to this blog for a week or so, after an extended run of almost-daily reports. I’ve been busy with other stuff (such as a trip to Boston).

But also, I ran into complications I’m still trying to figure out, as described below.

I mentioned that the next tape was “R2 – Rolling Stones Part 2,” which is Side 2 of “Beggar’s Banquet,” then (going purely by the written list, which is incomplete this time) “Exile on Main Street,” and “Goat’s Head Soup,” and “Get Yer Ya Yas Out.” At the very end is “Brown Sugar” and “Sway,” presumably from the beginning of “Sticky Fingers.”

I have now checked, and again, the enclosed list is accurate, so that’s another tape down, leaving forty-two.

After that was a tape that for reasons I do not remember I recorded at 7.5″ per second instead of my usual 3.75. It’s got the Broadway cast of “Hair,” and Dr. John’s “Gris Gris” and… okay, the third album listed is “Easy Rider,” but I didn’t know whether it was the soundtrack, or the Byrds’ album by that name, or what. It doesn’t say. There’s no track listing, just the three album titles on the box. Doesn’t say which “Easy Rider.”

So I played it and found out.

It’s selections from the soundtrack — at the higher speed there wasn’t room for the entire thing. So there’s “The Weight,” “Wasn’t Born to Follow,” “If You Want to Be A Bird,” “Kyrie Eleison,” and “Don’t Bogart That Joint,” and that fills it out exactly to the end of the tape.

The quality is decent, but not great, so do I save this, or add those two albums (I already have “Gris Gris”) to my buy list?

I saved the tracks from “Easy Rider,” and obviously didn’t need “Gris Gris,” but “Hair”…

Actually, “Hair” was already on my wish list, but here it is… hmm.

Oh, what the hell. I clicked the button on Amazon, and downloaded “Hair.”

…and the digital album has a lot more on it than the original LP. This is interesting.

The MP3 edition of “Hair” includes about twenty minutes of music that didn’t fit on the original LP, though I pretty much knew all the songs from other places. However, there seems to be a glitch — “What A Piece of Work Is Man” suddenly jumps to a piece of “Walking in Space” at the end. Redownloading it from the cloud didn’t help.

Also, the music had all been remastered, and on a few songs I liked the old mastering better — “Walking in Space” and “Three-Five-Zero-Zero” in particular don’t feel quite right. (The right channel is weaker than it should be, for one thing.) I could probably fix it with the equalizer in iTunes, but it’d be a nuisance.

That prompted me to decide to copy the version I had on tape after all — except that (a) it doesn’t include “Good Morning Starshine” at all; I now remember that I did that on purpose because I’d heard the song too damn often and thought it was excessively dippy, and I was running short of space on that side of the tape (the tape runs out less than three seconds after the end of “The Flesh Failures”), so I left it out,
and (b) there are some bad skips in “Walking in Space,” “Three-Five-Zero-Zero,” and “What A Piece of Work Is Man” that I didn’t notice during the initial copying. I mean, about half of “What A Piece of Work Is Man” is missing. I needed to remount the tape to see whether those skips are on the tape, or something that happened in Audacity, and that meant I had to fish the tape out of the disposal bin upstairs.

So I needed to check the tape, and I’m considering buying “Good Morning Starshine” from iTunes to replace the faulty copy from Amazon. Yes, Amazon should fix/replace it for free, but I don’t know how to make that happen and it’s worth the 99 cents to not bother with it.

The tape does not skip; it was an Audacity problem. I re-recorded that part and finished fixing it this afternoon.

But the unfortunate re-mastering and the munged “What A Piece of Work Is Man” on the download are still at issue.

Forty-one tapes remain.