The Music Will Never Stop 58

Next up: A tape labeled (in faded, hard-to-read ink) “Bangla Desh/Atlanta Pop Festival, Mountain/Live At Leeds, The Who/Roger & Wendy/Let It Be.”

I’ve played through Side One, which is (going by Wikipedia) sides 1 through 5 of the original three-record set of “Concert for Bangla Desh.” (The spelling wasn’t standardized as a single word until a few years later.) There’s an enclosed track list, which looks accurate if somewhat incomplete.

It was kind of noisy, but Audacity seems to have filtered it effectively.

Except I have a problem. It all appears to be slow. I don’t know what turntable I was using; I know the tape recorder’s speed is okay, as most of the stuff I’ve done matches the official runtimes pretty closely, but this one… well, it doesn’t match the times listed on Wikipedia. Every single track is longer than Wikipedia says it should be.

On the other hand, Allmusic.com gives times much closer to mine.

So is Wikipedia screwed up on this one? Usually they give the times straight off the album, and they’re pretty close. Anyone have a copy of the original album for comparison purposes?

I think Wikipedia is just wrong this time. I’m not going to bother speeding it up.

According to the box and enclosure, Side Two includes three tracks from “Live At Leeds” and both sides of the Beatles’ “Let It Be” single, and those are already in my collection. The other stuff is all new, though.

Anyway, I finished converting “Concert for Bangla Desh,” and the one long piece by Mountain from the Atlanta International Pop Festival, but that left the Who, Roger & Wendy, and the Beatles, of whom I only wanted to keep Roger & Wendy.

The song list is accurate, so far as it goes, but it doesn’t list any of the individual tracks for “Roger & Wendy,” which is unfortunate. Several songs are easy covers — “Something” (which is on the same tape by its author. George Harrison), “Mr. Bojangles,” etc. Some are originals, and proved difficult. I identified one from an image of the label for Side 2, and there’s another where I found the title (“The Wind”), but cannot find the slightest trace of who wrote it. I can’t find an image of the label for Side 1 anywhere.

Another, “Acne Blues,” I found attributed to Dave van Ronk in one place, but it doesn’t show up in any of van Ronk’s discographies. The song does turn up in another band’s discography (Gallagher & Lyle), but from three years after Roger & Wendy did their version.

This all gets very confusing. The original album, “Roger & Wendy,” was “re-released” in 2009 as “Love, Rog & Wem” (which is what was hand-written on the cover of every copy of the original private release), but it’s different — there are five acknowledged bonus tracks, but there are also other changes no one mentions anywhere, i.e., “The Wind” is cut from nine minutes to three, and “Horny Night” is replaced with “Motorcycle Madness.”

The original vinyl album now sells for about a grand, in the unlikely event you can find a copy for sale. I know I taped a friend’s copy, but I don’t remember which friend; I suspect it was the late Glenn Cooper. No idea where he (or whoever it was) got it.

I hadn’t heard the Roger & Wendy album in a long time!

(It’s fairly obscure, I guess. It was released on the Horny Records label in 1971, and there were allegedly only 500 copies made.)

It’s all done now, and I did indeed discard the Who and Beatles, since I already had those.

I’ve also added some other stuff to my collection today, in addition to the tape. We needed to order a replacement part for some garden equipment, and the cheapest way to do that was through Amazon, if we put together a large enough order to qualify for free shipping. The easiest way to do that was to buy some CDs of the albums that I had on tape that weren’t good enough quality to transfer, so I did — “Hey Jude,” “Foreigner,” “I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama,” and “Big Brother and the Holding Company.” All of those except “Hey Jude” include AutoRip, so I downloaded those and played through them this evening, and they’re now in my collection. The actual CDs should arrive in a few days.

I have other albums on my list, both stuff I had on tape that wasn’t good enough to save, and stuff I just want but don’t have yet, and I’ll use those to fill out future orders to free-shipping level.

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