Next up: 2400 ft. “Professional quality” Realistic tape, i.e., Radio Shack, with no reel number or date, but under “subject” it says “ROLLING STONES FM/LIVE.”
You’ve probably already guessed — yes, it’s the King Biscuit Flower Hour again. A 90-minute one, actually — the regular show and a follow-on interview with Mick Jagger.
I’ve identified it as an October 1973 concert that KBFH used at least four times, in ’74, ’75, and the ’80s. The interview wasn’t included on the bootlegs that are my best reference source, so I can’t place it. The interviewers are Peter Cooke and Dudley Moore, though.
I recorded this in either ’74 or ’75, but I don’t know which.
I screwed up the beginning when I was recording it, so after a few minutes of lousy, impossibly-low-volume music there’s my voice saying, “Oh, shit,” and then a click as it switches from microphone to line feed. And despite what Bill Minken of KBFH says, it’s not really ninety minutes; after about 88 minutes there’s a little dead air, then the WYDD DJ comes on and says, “They told me it was ninety minutes!”
As an interview, the interview is worthless; it’s Jagger and some others screwing around, with questions like, “So this second track — it came after the first, did it?”
Still, there’s a moderate amount of good music in there, and some of the interview is actually funny.
I didn’t try salvaging the opening. I missed “Gimme Shelter,” and have catalogued the rest as starting with Track 2, rather than 1.
And a 2400-ft. tape at normal speed is over two hours long per side, so what’s on the rest?
Well, a few minutes of WYDD, with “Mr. Bojangles” by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and another song or three I don’t remember right now.
After that I turned off WYDD, and from that point on there’s nothing I want to keep. First comes “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” and “Within You Without You” played at 7.5 IPS, and then it’s back to 3.75 IPS for the very end of the tape and all of Side 2, where we find the rest of Side 2 of Sgt. Pepper, followed by the Vanilla Fudge album “The Beat Goes On,” then “The Mason Williams Listening Matter,” and finally “Early Steppenwolf.”
All of which are already in my collection, and in much better quality.
So I just needed to clean up and edit to MP3 the Stones stuff and maybe a couple of those songs off WYDD, and I’m done.
There were four songs from WYDD. “Mr. Bojangles” was first, and it’s not the hit single, it’s a live version. Definitely worth saving.
After that, though, we have an Eric Clapton song, Seals & Crofts, and Loggins & Messina, none of them very good. I don’t know why the DJ thought that would be a good set to play after the Stones, but I’ve saved them all anyway, as a “various artists” album entitled WYDD, because the crossfades made it hard to split them up cleanly.
All done now.
Thirty-four left. Next up: The Blank Box.
Is anyone at all reading these?
I’ve been reading them but they are kinda dull. Except for the part where you obsess about the same kinds of things that I do.
So what sort of thing do you obsess about? I can focus on that more, maybe.
I just meant that going through all of your old recordings and meticulously cataloging them is the kind of thing I like spending my time doing. Currently don’t have the time but this series has given me hope that someday I will. But it is probably more exciting to the cataloger than the observer.
I also didn’t mean to come across as dismissive of what you’ve been blogging. It has been interesting enough that I’m still reading and I noticed when you were absent.
Obviously you can write whatever you feel like writing but I find stories about your writing career, either past or present, to be more interesting. I once had delusions of being an author myself (until I discovered it was, you know, hard, and required more discipline and focus than I usually have).
If I become discouraged with your blog, I’ve got three or four of your books stacked up to be read yet so I could just get off the internet and do that. And reading the mind control archives reveals several titles that you released with smaller publishers that I’ve missed.
I rarely comment anywhere so this has been pretty long winded for me but I wanted to assure that there’s at least somebody out here.
I forgot:
Thank you, both for your books and your blog!
Oh, you’re welcome!
Stories about writing — well, yeah, I expect most people to find those more interesting, though honestly, I’m not all that interested in them right now. I’m not getting much writing done lately; I don’t know why.
I originally started going through my old records because we were getting ready to move, early in 2009, and wanted to reduce the stuff we had to move. Once I started, though, it became an ongoing project, because I realized I had all this stuff I hadn’t listened to not just in years, but in decades.
So — first the LPs, then the singles, then the cassettes, now the reel-to-reel, and the end is in sight, if still a little blurry in the distance.