The Music Will Never Stop 63

Okay, after reel #Z came reel #D: “David Bowie,” it says.

The enclosed song list (which, as usual, has some omissions and a few wrong titles, because I guessed at the titles from listening, I didn’t copy them off the albums) is accurate as far as it goes.

What we have here is Side 1 of “Hunky Dory,” followed by all of “Space Oddity,” “The Man Who Sold the World,” and “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars,” and then all of “Aladdin Sane” except the title track.

Apparently I didn’t care for Side 2 of “Hunky Dory,” or for “Aladdin Sane (1913-1938-197?).”

My collection already held “The Man Who Sold the World,” “Ziggy Stardust,” and “Aladdin Sane,” from CD, so I didn’t need to bother with those. That left three sides of early Bowie.

Now, the thing here is that the quality is inconsistent, but in the opposite direction from, say, the Isle of Wight festival. It starts off pretty weak, but then gets steadily better as the tape goes on, until a few minutes into Side 2 it’s as good as I could reasonably ask.

Unfortunately, the stuff I didn’t already have was at the beginning.

I re-recorded the side of “Hunky Dory,” in hopes of getting a cleaner copy. It did come out better on the first couple of tracks, but after that I couldn’t hear any difference, so I didn’t bother to re-do “Space Oddity.”

I tweaked the bass and treble levels, and managed to get acceptable MP3s of everything I wanted, though there’s still some audible tape hiss in places. Mostly right at the beginning.

By the way, I know it’s the 1972 issue “Space Oddity,” and not any of the other incarnations of that album (which started out as just “David Bowie,” in 1969), because it’s missing the song “(Don’t Sit Down),” which wasn’t true of any earlier versions. They didn’t all list it, according to the audiophile websites, but they all included it until the 1972 re-release.

And I know it’s not a later version because I’m pretty sure I recorded this circa 1973. So it must be the ’72.

So, three sides of Bowie added to my library., and another tape down. Twenty-four to go.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *