For my next tape I pulled out one labeled “Isle of Wight/Alice Cooper/Beatles Singles/Salty Dog Rag/Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy/more.”
It has issues. Half an hour into the first side, I knew that some was not recoverable.
The first track from the 1970 Isle of Wight festival is Sly & the Family Stone’s medley of “Stand!” and “You Can Make It If you Try,” and I managed to get a marginally-acceptable, if somewhat fuzzy, MP3 of that, but the following two numbers by Cactus I just can’t get clean enough. For some reason they were recorded at very low volume — maybe I was trying to reduce distortion, I don’t know — and I simply can’t recover a strong enough audio signal to be worth saving.
And there doesn’t seem to have ever been a digital release of this stuff, so replacing it won’t be easy.
David Bromburg’s “Mr. Bojangles” (I’m hearing a lot of covers of that song lately) isn’t usable, either.
Ten Years After and Procol Harum are just as bad, maybe worse. Leonard Cohen, too. And Hendrix, and Miles Davis.
And on Side 2, Alice Cooper is even worse. This isn’t from the festival; it’s the album “Easy Action.”
I don’t know what went wrong with this tape. On Side 2 there are moments when it almost seems as if something’s trying to slip back into alignment, but… it never happens.
…and the signal finally starts to clear up some on “Beautiful Flyaway,” the eighth track on Side Two of the tape. It’s still not good, but at least it’s recognizable as music now.
Huh. After “Easy Action” is “School’s Out.” It’s not on the enclosed song list; there’s a skipped line, which I guess represents the entire album.
I already have “School’s Out,” of course, so the lousy quality doesn’t matter.
And then we have the Beatles — “Revolution,” and “Hey Jude” — also not on the list. Also already in my collection.
The quality is still unacceptably low, so it’s a good thing it doesn’t matter.
After that came “Hey Jude” and “Revolution” and a rendition of “Salty Dog Rag” I don’t recognize that might be Red Foley, and the tape concludes with Bette Midler covering the Andrews Sisters, and Simon & Garfunkel’s “59th Street Bridge Song.”
Why on Earth didn’t I re-do this when I first made it? The quality here is dreadful!
I tried cleaning and demagnetizing the heads, and with judicious use of Audacity’s filters managed to get the quality up to the point where I could salvage five tracks (the first four from the festival and “Salty Dog Rag”), less than half an hour out of the entire three hours plus. But that’s it.
That got the stack down to thirty more tapes, three of which aren’t labeled. I’m almost done playing through the first of those; as I suspected, it’s blank. Twenty-nine to go.