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.

Next in the stack: An 1800-foot 3M/Scotch tape in an unlabeled box. There’s an enclosed song list, though, calling it “Album Assortment,” which says that Side 1 is Pink Floyd’s “Animals,” “New World Record” by the Electric Light Orchestra, and the first four songs from Foreigner’s self-titled album.

Side 2, it says, is “Leftoverture” by Kansas, “Hotel California” by the Eagles, and two singles: “Outlaw Man” (more Eagles) and “We Ain’t Got Nothin’ Yet” by the Blues Magoos.

The list (which has most but not all of the individual track titles) is accurate. For most of the tape there’s no perceptible tape noise at all — that’s what happens when you use high-quality tape and a decent stereo to record an album. However, there’s some slight “muffling” due to high-frequency loss, especially on “New World Record.”

I already had “Animals” and “Leftoverture,” and the other stuff is all available fairly cheap, so I thought I might just toss this and buy the rest, instead of spending my time editing.

But naah. I didn’t edit and save “New World Record” or “Foreigner,” but I went ahead with “Hotel California” — it was such a clean recording it seemed stupid to waste it.

I knew I had “Outlaw Man” on “Desperado,” so that went straight into the bit bucket. Turns out I also already had the Blues Magoos song — that was from one of my own singles. Didn’t catch that initially. I MP3ed it, then realized the duplication and tossed the new copy.

Still haven’t decided whether I want to bother going back to “New World Record” or the fragment of “Foreigner.” I saved the Audacity file, just in case I decide I do.

The tape, though, is finished and discarded.

That leaves thirty-five.

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.

On to the next tape: “Assortment #4,” mentioned here before.

The enclosed index card lists eight tracks — three studio cuts by Led Zeppelin, all of which I had; three tracks by the Eagles, two of which I had; and two live tracks by Zeppelin, which I did not have. I played those, and the list was accurate — but that wasn’t the end. There was a lot more that wasn’t listed anywhere.

Specifically, Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” — the single version, a minute shorter than the album cut, and I decided I don’t need that since I do have the album. Then Bad Company’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy,” which I did not have. Then two concerts from the King Biscuit Flower Hour, featuring Blondie and George Thorogood and the Destroyers.

So that’s interesting.

I tossed out the three studio tracks by Zeppelin, transferred “Take It to the Limit” to MP3, and tossed the other two Eagles tracks (which I had listed with the wrong titles).

The two live Zeppelin tracks turn out to be Side Three of “The Song Remains the Same.” I’m cool with that. They’ve been added to the collection.

I dumped “Heart of Glass.”

Those KBFH concerts — they’re less than half an hour each. Maybe they were a two-artist show? Or parts of two differents shows?

Anyway, they’re all squared away now — sorta. The thing is, when I went looking for dates, I only found KBFH shows for these bands from later than internal evidence indicates these to be. The playlists didn’t match, either. From the stage chatter on the Blondie set it’s from mid-1978, where the Blondie KBFH that turns up as a bootleg is from December 1980. I couldn’t find any record of a 1978 show.

So I swiped the cover of one of the 1980 bootlegs and used that, even though it isn’t right.

As for Thorogood, he did several KBFH, but this appears to be from earlier than any that I’ve found listed. It’s from a concert in Cleveland, but that doesn’t seem to help — they play Cleveland a lot. In fact, they’ll be there again later this year.

So I pasted up a cover using the KBFH logo with the name of the band lettered in.

The sound quality on the Blondie one isn’t all that great — I think I recorded it off a radio with less-than-perfect reception. The George Thorogood one is just fine, though, and the band was having a good night.

As for Side 2, which I didn’t play until a couple of days later: Twelve minutes (three songs and some stage chatter) of Devo in concert followed by eighty-five minutes of blank tape.

Nice to have the Devo — which is not King Biscuit Flower Hour; I don’t know where it’s from, but it’s off the radio, and the partial station break on the tape doesn’t fit the KBFH pattern. The playlist and other details lead me to think it’s a July 1980 appearance in Cincinnati, but how these few minutes of it wound up on the radio, I don’t know.

So that leaves what, thirty-seven?

Oh, this is fun. I had exactly one tape that admits to being less than 1800 feet, so I figured I’d get that out of the way. It’s 1200 feet, or just over an hour per side. The box is labeled “Kantner-Slick/Starship/Sunfighter.”

The box lies.

In faded tiny lettering it also says “I/Dance.music/Bach harpsichord/medieval.” This part is merely unhelpful, rather than flat-out wrong. I’ve recorded Side 1. I have not yet identified most of the music on it. The first three tracks are all piano and/or flute (or recorder, or pennywhistle, I’m not sure) dances. They don’t match the beginning of any album in my collection.

I think this might be something Jody put together (or had me put together) for a performance by Ring o’ Bells, her Morris troupe.

And it was quite likely recorded live, not off a record.

There are five tracks of that, and then Bach’s Concerto in C Minor for Two Harpsichords — but it isn’t the same version I already had from my Nonesuch collection; I don’t recognize it as a recording I’d heard before. Then there are a few more Bach pieces that I haven’t identified yet, though one sounds familiar — it’s about 25 minutes of Bach in all, I think — and then some random medieval music I also haven’t yet identified.

The Bach and medieval stuff is off records — it has that background hum, where the live stuff doesn’t.

Where did I get this music? And why?

Jody’s long dead, but I asked my other sisters if they know anything. Ruth thinks she may be able to identify some of it.

Meanwhile, the other side of the tape actually is Kantner & Slick’s “Sunfighter” and selected songs from “Blows Against the Empire,” which I don’t need. Already got ’em from LP/CD.

I think this means I flopped the sides, because the box has the Kantner/Slick stuff listed first. I have two empty reels for exactly such a purpose — play the tape onto take-up reel A, but then instead of rewinding it back onto its own spool you run it onto take-up reel B. Then you put it back on its own spool, and the sides are swapped.

I must have done that with this one at some point.

Which is probably what that faint “I” on the box is about.

I’ve transferred everything from Side 1, even though I can’t identify most of it, which means I can toss the tape.

Thirty-eight tapes left. And I still have some sorting and identifying to do on material off some of the fourteen that have been discarded.