I’ve decided to do next all the tapes that aren’t Concertape 44-1018 — that was my standard type, and most of what I had, but there were a few others mixed in. 44-1018 was cheap 1,800-foot stuff.
Today I played my last Concertape that’s not that specific type — it’s 44-1060A. It’s 2,400 feet instead of 1,800, which means it’s a bit over two hours a side. The box says “Woodstock I & II/Atlanta Pop Festival, Part One.”
The majority of it is indeed from the albums Woodstock I and Woodstock II, which I already have in my collection — I probably taped it off my own LPs. The interesting (at least to me) thing is that I re-edited them. I cut John Sebastian’s “I Had A Dream,” for example, and moved it to go with “Rainbows All Over Your Blues.” I may have trimmed out some (not anywhere near all) of the stage announcements and crowd noise, and I inserted stuff from the second album in where I thought it belonged on the first, so that for example Canned Heat’s “Woodstock Boogie” comes immediately after “Going Up the Country.” Which is, according to the 40th anniversary set, exactly where it actually came.
I also inserted Mountain between Sha Na Na and Country Joe Macdonald, but I don’t know why — I didn’t know what order the acts appeared in, and in fact, Mountain actually performed after that. Maybe I just liked the transition better that way.
And you know, this is the first time I’ve noticed that Woodstock II includes Hendrix stuff that apparently isn’t on the supposedly-as-complete-as-possible 40th anniversary set. I’ll want to check on that — it may all be in that medley that the 40th treats as a single track.
Anyway, this is interesting, but I won’t be keeping any of the Woodstock music. The Atlanta Pop Festival, on the other hand — I never had that on an album. I’m guessing either I somehow got hold of Columbia’s “The First Great Rock Festivals of the Seventies” set long enough to tape it, or I recorded it off the radio; I have another tape here in the stack that says it has the Isle of Wight festival, which was also on that album.
The sound quality is okay, but there’s a definite background hum.
Over an hour into Side 2, still on Woodstock, where I did indeed put “I Had A Dream” together with “Rainbows All Over Your Blues.”
iTunes says the two Woodstock albums add up to 3 hours and 46 minutes. Close. I think I wound up with 3:43 of Woodstock on this tape.
And the tape finished off with 27 minutes from the second Atlanta International Pop Festival, from 1970, featuring Johnny Winter, Poco, the Chambers Brothers, and the Allman Brothers. Which I needed to clean up and edit a bit. I ran noise removal on it.
It all came out pretty well, and is now in my collection. I wonder whether Part Two of the Atlanta festival is somewhere in the stack of remaining tapes? I haven’t noticed it.
Thirty-six more to go. Thirty-two of them are Concertape 44-1018.