Today’s first tape was a recording of a panel at Dimension Con, March 27, 1982. The panelists included William Gaines, Al Feldstein, Jack Kamen, Marie Severin, and Jack Davis, some of whom hadn’t seen each other for twenty years or more.

If you recognize the names, you know what the panel was about — E.C. Comics.

I was not at that convention, but a reader sent me the tape.

Alas, the sound quality isn’t very good, and I wasn’t able to clean it up very effectively; I suspect an actual sound engineer could have done it, but I can’t.

Still, it’s good to have it.

I also had a tape labeled “Lawrence Watt-Evans RB.” I assumed from that label that it was me on a panel, or being interviewed, or something, but I had no idea what RB meant.

It meant “Reality Break.” It’s a radio interview. From internal evidence I place it in 1994 or ’95, when RB was only on WREK Atlanta, not yet syndicated.

Reality Break was a podcast for a couple of years, I see, but it started out on radio as a half-hour show.

The tape quality is really excellent, though I cranked the volume up a little. The material — well, it’s a pretty good interview, but there were a few things.

For one, the theme song they played at the beginning and end of the show, while clever and very professionally done, is much too long — it takes up at least three or four of the thirty minutes.

For another, I noticed some annoying little mannerisms in how I talk. What’s really annoying about them is that I still have them, and my kids each picked up some of them (though not the same ones).

And finally, I told some flat-out lies in the interview, and I don’t know why. Specifically, I said that my first non-fiction sale was my column in the Comics Buyer’s Guide, that I’d never tried writing any sort of non-fiction for money at all before that.

Which isn’t true. I wrote feature articles for a local newspaper called the Bedford Patriot back in 1972, when I was a senior in high school. Didn’t pay much, but it was actual money for writing non-fiction. I don’t see how I could possibly have forgotten that during the interview.

Very odd.

Anyway, the interview pretty much filled Side 1, and Side 2 was blank, and it’s all neatly filed away on my hard drive now.

March 19, 2014:

Back in 1991, a self-help guru named Richard Sutphen decided he wanted to expand his New Age publishing empire into horror. He created an imprint, Spine-Tingling Press, and wrote a few stories and novels.

He recorded at least some of them as books on tape, and distributed one to the membership of HWA, presumably in hopes of recruiting writers and maybe garnering a Stoker.

I never got around to listening to it until today, when I copied “Bone Thrower” to MP3.

It’s an okay story — novelet length, I guess. Very violent, almost verging on splatterpunk. There are some viewpoint issues, and the opening flashback is clearly there entirely to be a grabber opening; it is not the logical place to start the story. The ending is a bit cliched. And looking at this and the only other Sutphen story I’m familiar with (“Snake Dance,” which I think I mentioned here), I think Sutphen’s got a thing about snakes.

I was surprised to discover the last nine minutes of the tape are taken up with a preview of another story, “Freaklink.”

The transfer went smoothly, the never-before-played tape was flawless.

I am not surprised that Spine-Tingling Press only lasted a couple of years.

March 20, 2014:

Next up: “A Leader of Cheeseheads,” by Jay Rath’s Old Time Radio Pirates. Not quite forty minutes of political satire from 1991, six skits about then-governor of Wisconsin, Tommy Thompson.

I’d only ever played this once. It’s still in perfect condition. It copied easily, first try.

The humor’s only so-so, I’m afraid. It’s not that it’s badly dated, it just wasn’t that great to begin with.

Jay Rath’s Old Time Radio Pirates shortened their name to the Radio Pirates after this, as seen on a couple of preceding tapes. This is another of the samples Scott Dikkers sent me when he was negotiating for the rights to “The Drifter.”

March 21, 2014:

Started one that’s going to take awhile…

March 25, 2014:

Done. “The Best Fantasy of the Year 1989,” edited by Orson Scott Card and Martin H. Greenberg, with introductions by Orson Scott Card, from Dercum Audio, is now in my MP3 collection.

Which I have because one of the ten stories therein is my own “Windwagon Smith and the Martians.”

It’s an odd assortment, really. I don’t much like the Benford (“We Could Do Worse”), for example.

There were a few crashes along the way, one of which fortunately wiped out a recording that was kind of fuzzy; it came out better on the second take.

I have two more audio anthologies, but I’m going to leave them for later; this was hugely time-consuming, though not difficult. For now it’s back to single-tape stuff, be it music or con panels or letters or whatever.

March 26, 2014:

Today I was either out or busy most of the day, so I only did a very short tape — “They Came for the Candy,” by the Radio Pirates. It’s a parody of the 1938 Mercury Theatre “War of the Worlds” — in this version the Martians aren’t invading so much as trick-or-treating.

It’s fun. Only about half an hour in all. Not fall-on-the-floor funny, but amusing.

No problems with the conversion to MP3.

March 27, 2014:

Half a tape today. At some point in the last twenty-five years, someone sent me a tape entitled “Indigo Girls Sampler.” It’s a few tracks apiece from four Indigo Girls albums.

I did the first side, with five songs from “Indigo Girls” and five songs from “Rites of Passage,” today. No problems at all; everything came out very well.

I’d heard a few Indigo Girls pieces before, but I never had any of their albums, just one or two tracks I’d picked up somewhere. It’s good to have a larger sampling.

Yes, I’ve had this for ages, but I never actually played all of it; I got halfway through the first side, then got interrupted and never went back to it.

Which brings me to an observation: On “Indigo Girls,” they weren’t very varied. It all sounded much alike to me when I first heard it, which is why I never went back to it.

“Rites of Passage,” which I didn’t get to, is better and more eclectic.

March 28, 2014:

And today I finished it up. Side 2 had selected tracks from “Strange Fire” and “Nomads Indians Saints.” It’s pretty good stuff.

There is a glitch at the start of “Left Me A Fool,” though — it sounds as if maybe a stray guitar arpeggio (maybe at the end of a track that’s not included) got attached at the start of the file. Presumably this was a glitch on the original cassette tape.

I wonder where I got it?

And that, friends, brings us up to date. There are twenty-eight cassette tapes left to copy, and then I have a stack of old reel-to-reel. I intend to continue to post here about my progress. From the lack of comments, I take it that either no one’s reading, or you don’t give a crap, but you know what? I care. I’m much more interested in this project than in most of the other stuff I’m doing these days.

March 18, 2014:

I used to correspond with a guy named Larry Boyd. I think he originally wrote to me about something I’d said in my column in Comics Buyer’s Guide, but however it started, we corresponded for several years. We had overlapping interests — he was a comics fan, and a freelance writer (mostly about music).

He was also the drummer and lead singer for a punk band called Disarray that was pretty well known in his corner of Massachusetts, but nowhere else.

He sent me tapes every so often — performances by his own bands (Disarray was merely the longest-lasting of several), performances by other local acts he liked, or just stuff he thought I’d like.

I’ve just recorded one of those tapes. It’s in two parts — one song (from 1991) by a short-lived band called Pennies from Heaven, where he sang and wrote lyrics but did not play anything, and then the full set Disarray played October 1, 1994, at the Mitchell Memorial Club in Middleboro, MA, as part of Disarray’s 15th Anniversary Tour.

The Pennies from Heaven number is called “Empty,” it’s more than eight minutes long, and it was intended for a “soundtrack album” to accompany James O’Barr’s graphic novel “The Crow” — the one that became a movie (or two). Larry credits the song to himself, John Bergin (bass player for Pennies from Heaven), and James O’Barr. I can’t say it’s a masterpiece, but it doesn’t suck, either.

As for the Disarray set — seventeen songs, fifteen of them written by Larry, either alone or in collaboration, with titles like “Granny Wears A Diaper,” “Geeks’ Night Out,” and “Cool Diseases.” They range from two and a half minutes to almost ten. Well over an hour of music.

The two he didn’t write are “Ejection,” by R. Calvert, whoever that is, and “Crossroads,” which he credits to Robert Johnson, but it’s actually the arrangement/rewrite Eric Clapton did for Cream. (Johnson’s title was “Crossroad Blues,” and the distinctive opening riff is Clapton’s, not Johnson’s.)

The sound quality is pretty good, given the circumstances under which it was recorded, though the first half of the first Disarray song (“Dissatisfaction”) is much softer than the rest of the tape. Since you can hear someone giving instructions to fix the volume on the recorder, I’m assuming that wasn’t a problem on MY end.

I don’t think I ever played this all the way through; I just never found the time, and I wasn’t a big punk fan. I should have, though; I can see why Disarray was a local favorite.

I’d like to tell Larry that I finally listened to it, but alas, I can’t; according to a website for one of his bandmates (from Das Ludicroix, not Disarray), Larry’s dead. I had no idea. I don’t know what happened, or when.

Oh, regarding that bass player, John Bergin — my family doctor, from 1958 until I moved to Kentucky in 1977, was Dr. John Bergin. I’m pretty sure he’s no relation.

March 19, 2014:

Well, this turned out to be more complicated than I expected. But I’ve got three more tapes done. They aren’t going to the discard box, though; they’re going back on my brag shelves.

Back in 1993, Scott Dikkers and the Radio Pirates (which was an ancestor of the Onion) bought the radio rights to my short story, “The Drifter,” which they adapted as the pilot for a new SF anthology radio show, “Radio Free Tomorrow.”

Scott sent me a preliminary tape of the adaptation. Then he sent me an official author copy. Then he sent me another one. Today I recorded all three of them, which turned out to be four copies; the preliminary tape had it on both sides, while the copies with the nice labels had the show on Side 1 and were completely blank on Side 2.

And the two with the nice labels don’t match. It’s mostlyMOSTLY the same, but one of them has reworked background voices in at least one scene, and I think some of the sound effects are different.

Three of the four copies may be the same; I haven’t found any differences in the two from the advance copy and the first author copy. I’m not sure, though, so for now I’m keeping all three. (Comparing 27-minute stories to find minor variations is not something I care to tackle right now.)

The revised version is better — the changes are minor, but they’re improvements.

Anyway, the show never sold. So far as I know, this adaptation was never broadcast.

I’m thinking of trying to get hold of Scott — he still works for the Onion — to see who owns the rights to these; it’d be fun to put one on my website.

Oh, yes — the transfer was just about perfect, and the tapes were in pristine condition. I think I had only ever played Side 1 of the first one.

March 15, 2014:

The missing jewel case for the “Gladiator” soundtrack CD turned up; it was incorrectly put in a stack of “various artist” CDs, instead of with soundtracks.

The two CDs are still missing, though.

Meanwhile, things have gotten… interesting, with the tapes. I played one labeled “Joe + Faith” that turned out to be a kindergarten teacher’s recording of herself teaching her class the alphabet. Joe was the noisy kid in the class; I’m not sure about Faith.

I have no use for that, so I tossed it unsaved.

While it was playing, I decided to fiddle with the non-functioning tape deck a little — I thought maybe if I could get the tapes to press down on the heads better, it would still function.

Turns out wiping the little blob of black gunk off the play head made a difference, too. No idea what it was, but it came off on my finger readily enough.

And yes, I know rubbing one’s finger across the heads is Not Recommended. Tough. It worked.

Anyway, the tape deck is working again — more on that in a moment.

Meanwhile, Julie got to work and noticed that she had an old boom box, with cassette player, at her desk, which she uses for music when her iPod is not practical, for whatever reason. She offered to bring it home for my use, but since I got the deck working I told her not to bother — yet. So I have another option, should I need it.

And I pulled the next tape out of the stack. A homemade one, labeled in handwriting I don’t recognize. As is so often the case, I don’t know where it came from, but the sides are (accurately) labeled “Kingston Trio – From the Hungry I” and “The Irish Rovers – The Unicorn.”

This copy of “The Unicorn” (apparently copied from LP) is better than the one I already copied from the commercial tape, or at least better than it recorded before I cleaned the heads, so I may replace that, but I haven’t yet.

I did, however, record “…from the Hungry i,” which was one of my favorite albums when I was a kid (before I hit puberty and discovered acid rock). I discovered I could still sing along with most of it. However, this tape had been recorded on a crappy machine, and there was a very heavy hum (probably 60 Hz) throughout. Filtering that out without seriously damaging the music was a challenge. Hell, it took me three tries just to get the thing recorded without Audacity crashing, and then it had to be sped up 6%, and then tinkering with the noise reduction… well, I eventually got the hum out without wrecking the music, but I won’t pretend the result is perfect.

(My first shot at noise reduction, using more or less the default settings, resulted in what sounded like Martian chipmunks trying to sing calypso.)

So, I have an old favorite back, including “The Merry Minuet,” a song that is often — very often — misattributed to Tom Lehrer. And “Zombie Jamboree.” And other good stuff.

(By the way, I’m not sure which of my parents bought the album back in ’59.)

March 16, 2014:

I started on that extra copy of “The Unicorn,” but it’s not a high priority.

Meanwhile, I tackled the first side of the next tape: “Medieval Roots,” by New York Pro Musica. It’s a complete album taped off LP — an assortment of medieval music, using authentic instruments. It’s not unlike some of the Nonesuch LPs I did earlier.

There are a few places where either the turntable playing the original LP, or the recorder used to tape it, was having issues — the speed isn’t completely consistent. I have no idea how to fix that without hours of nitpicking, repetitive work, so I’ll live with it. It’s maybe three spots for a few seconds each, not a big deal.

One amusing (at least to me) detail is that there’s a saltarello on here that I have in an updated version by Dead Can Dance. Good music is good music, even seven hundred years later.

Hell, this album may be where Dead Can Dance first heard it.

The album’s cover art, which I pulled off the web, is a great concept, but the colors (if the JPG I got is accurate) are not good. Oh, well.

I don’t know where I got this tape. I don’t recognize the handwriting. The other side, which I’ll probably get through tomorrow or Monday, says it’s “Stormy Weekend,” by Mystic Blues Orchestra, which I never heard of before.

March 16, 2014:

Now I have finished the second copy of “The Unicorn.” It’s not perfect, but the average sound quality is better than the previous copy, so I have both copies converted, side by side in iTunes.

March 17, 2014:

I probably never heard of it because it doesn’t exist. This is “Stormy Weekend” by the Mystic Moods Orchestra, which I certainly have heard of and heretofore did my best to ignore. One of several “easy listening” outfits of the day, before “New Age” came along.

It’s copied. There are some more of those wows where something was slowing it down, but it’s mostly a good copy.

Whether it’s one I actually want… well, as easy listening goes, it’s not bad. It’s a theme album, where the concept is exactly what the title says — a stormy weekend, holed up somewhere romantic. In the background and between songs there’s a perpetual thunderstorm going on; there are windchimes somewhere, and every so often a train rumbles past. The brief next-to-last cut, “4:22 A.M.,” is mostly dogs barking at distant sirens as the thunderstorm starts to wind down, and the final song is “Monday, Monday,” as in, the weekend’s over.

The opening number is “Love is Blue,” which I’m sure many of you remember, and “Monday, Monday” starts with a quick recap of “Love is Blue” before segueing into the Mamas & the Papas tune.

Anyway. It’s all instrumentals and sound effects, heavy on strings and piano, and I admit these were good musicians at work.

Not good enough that I’ll spend actual money to replace the tracks with speed issues, though.

(Yes, it’s available for download.)

March 12, 2014:

I’ve finished “Emerson Lake & Palmer In Concert,” recorded in 1977 and released in 1979. The group broke up in 1978. The record company was reportedly pretty pissed about that, and cut the planned two-record set down to one.

It’s still pretty good, though.

And I’ve concluded that all the commercial tapes with problems were (a) acquired from Columbia House during my one-year membership circa 1980, and (b) stored in the box I sometimes kept in the car. Now, we kept the car in the garage, and did not leave it sitting out in the sun for days on end, but these may have gotten a little warm on occasion.

I suspect Columbia House’s questionable quality control was at least as big a factor as the in-car storage.

I’ve started (but not completed) Blondie’s “Autoamerican,” and the sound quality leaves something to be desired. It, too, was from Columbia House. It’s not quite bad enough to pay the eight bucks for the MP3 download, though.

ELP in concert was from Columbia House, but it’s okay. Not as crystal-clear as the Vivaldi, but still entirely acceptable, much better than the Blondie or Cheap Trick.

March 12, 2014:

I may reconsider about “Autoamerican,” actually. It’s pretty bad. I’m going to leave it overnight and see how I feel tomorrow when I get back from running errands.

March 13, 2014:

Yeah, I finished transferring the music from tape to MP3, played it back, and said, “Yecch.”

Bought the album from Amazon, complete with three bonus tracks, one of which I had actually been unsuccessfully looking for several years back.

It sounds much, much better.

March 13, 2014:

Sigh. Just finished up Cheap Trick’s “At Budokan.” It starts just fine, but the last cut on Side 1 starts to sound a bit muddy, and the sound quality deteriorates all through Side 2, starting from decent and working down to crappy.

I’m not sure whether it’s worth a second attempt, or whether I should buy a new copy, or replace the worst tracks, or just live with it.

As for the album itself, “I Want You to Want Me” and “Surrender” were major hits and they’re still good. The rest of the album isn’t up to that level, but it doesn’t suck. Especially “Need Your Love.”

That’s pretty much the last plain old album of music on cassette, though there’s still a “hits of the ’60s” compilation that’s still in the original shrink-wrap.

And of course, there are still fifteen or twenty music tapes from various unofficial sources, and lots of spoken-word stuff.

March 13, 2014:

Well, that quality problem has gotten more complicated.

I had a K-Tel tape still in the shrink-wrap. It sounded lousy, more than its circumstances could explain when I tried playing it, so I got out my old hand-held, battery-powered pocket tape recorder.

It sounded fine on that.

So there is something seriously wrong with the tape deck, and I’ve hooked the pocket one up to the computer instead, with fresh batteries.

Now I need to filter out noise — this was never meant for music — but instead of too slow, it (like my turntable) runs very slightly fast. And I expect to go through a lot of batteries.

March 14, 2014:

And in case it wasn’t obvious, I can hook that hand-held recorder up to the computer, and I did. I had to filter out all the noise — this one does not have any Dolby or anything like that, as it’s designed for reporters or the like taping spoken word — and I’m not sure just how reliable the speed is, but it seems to match up pretty well with the official times.

Anyway. “Back to the 60’s Rock ‘n Roll,” from Dominion Entertainment, is now in MP3 form. Most of this is not the originals, but re-recordings by the original artists or an approximation thereof (e.g., Paul Revere and Mark Lindsay fill in for Paul Revere & the Raiders, since the rest of the original band wasn’t available).

Going by what I’ve found on the web this was sold in LP and CD form by K-Tel, but that name does not appear anywhere on the cassette tape version.

Anyway. It’s mostly not the originals, but it’s not bad. It’s nice to have “Psychotic Reaction” in my collection, and none are total stinkers. And once I switched to the small recorder and filtered the tape hiss, it sounded pretty good — the bass is maybe a bit weak.

March 14, 2014:

Not a tape, but I’ve just added another album.

Y’see, I’ve been putting away my CDs — I emptied both my 200-disc carousels, and hauled out all the empty jewelcases I had stashed away, and put the CDs into their appropriate receptacles. It was a fairly large job, actually, as neither discs nor boxes were in order, but I finished today.

Except that I can’t find the case for the soundtrack of “Gladiator,” and I can’t find the discs of “Patty Smyth” and X’s “Ain’t Love Grand.”

So I spent part of the afternoon rummaging around my office, hoping they’d turn up. Went through stacks of CD-ROMs hoping the CDs might have wound up there by mistake.

I didn’t find the missing items, but I did find a CD I’d never played, let alone ripped — “Colour Moving and Still,” by Chantal Kreviazuk. No idea where I got it, or when, but what the hell, I ripped it to my collection. It’s playing right now. It’s not bad. I don’t think she’ll ever be a real favorite, but I’m enjoying it.

March 8, 2014:

Wow, “Disney’s Sing-Along Song Tape” is short! Like about twenty minutes for both sides together, ten songs.

It’s a collection of random songs from various Disney albums, many of them not really suitable for singing along at all. I think we played it maybe twice when we first got it; the kids didn’t like it much. Anyway, it’s in pretty much perfect condition, so it was a quick and easy job adding it to the MP3 collection.

I think I’m down to fifty-three remaining.

March 9, 2014:

Looking back over my previous posts, I notice I’ve remarked that several albums were short. Which leads me to wonder whether it’s my standards that are off.

I am of the opinion that an LP should be at least twenty minutes a side. If the total time for both sides is under half an hour, that seems too short to me. Is this unreasonable?

Anyway. Linda Ronstadt’s “Heart Like A Wheel” has joined the MP3 parade. Went very smoothly. Some nice music, but nothing I couldn’t live without.

Funny thing, though — as I’ve mentioned several times, my tape deck runs slow. Most of the time, playing stuff back, I don’t really notice the difference. When I accelerate it to the correct speed it sounds better, but it sounded okay before.

Linda Ronstadt is an exception to this. This album sounded dreadful coming straight off the tape, but when it was sped up by 6% it was fine. No idea why this is true of her and not others.

So — easy transfer.

Blondie’s “Eat to the Beat,” on the other hand… well, the first three cuts were fine. The fourth, “Shayla,” had weird noise. The fifth was okay. The sixth, and the entire second side, were muffled and distorted.

I tried re-recording it, and it got worse — the entire album now sounded lousy. So I bought the Amazon download; not worth the hassle of continuing to mess with it.

It was similar to the problems I had with “Dream Police.” Don’t know what the story is here. I know these two tapes spent years in a particular carrying case, but so did “The Little Mermaid” and “Heart Like A Wheel,” so that’s not it.

It’s a mystery.

March 10, 2014:

“The Turn of A Friendly Card,” by the Alan Parsons Project, has now made the transition.

The sound quality isn’t perfect — there are bits that sound a little muted. But I think the tape always sounded like that.

Audacity crashed midway through recording Side 2, so I had to start over. No big deal, really; I was letting it run unattended while I made dinner.

I honestly don’t remember why I bought this. It’s not bad, but I was never really an Alan Parsons fan. I suspect it was part of a Columbia House sign-up bonus.

I’ve also started doing a little research on Disarray (the ’80s punk band out of Boston, not the later band out of Tennessee) and Das Ludicroix, as I have several tapes of their music; Larry Boyd, the drummer for both bands, was a fan of my novels and sent me a lot of tapes. I haven’t actually started on those tapes yet, and probably won’t for some time yet, but I wanted to see what I could find about them.

The sad surprise I found was that Larry Boyd is reportedly dead; no word yet on how or when it happened. I thought he stopped writing because he was busy, or just got tired of it, but apparently not.

March 11, 2014:

“The Best of the Doobies” has joined the gang.

The sound quality is good, not perfect, as seems to be the case with several of my commercial tapes; don’t know whether it’s a storage issue, poor quality control in production (most seem to have come from Columbia House), or my tape deck going bad on me.

That last possibility… well, these two tiny little pad-like objects, no more than a quarter-inch in any dimension, have fallen out of the tape compartment; I think the glue holding them dried out and let go after long neglect. They obviously weren’t essential, but maybe they helped with aligning the tape properly, and their absence lets it waver a little, so that some data is lost.

Or not. I really don’t know.

Anyway, “The Best of the Doobies” is a really kick-ass album that I played a lot back when our car could play tapes, and that may also have caused some data loss.

There’s one strange thing I discovered when I went to look up some credits — this tape has the sides reversed from the LP and CD editions. The tracks aren’t rearranged, but Side 1 is Side 2, and vice versa.

I debated whether to switch them back, and decided to do so because frankly, it makes more sense the LP/CD way, opening the album with “China Grove” and closing with “Without You.”

March 12, 2014:

I said I didn’t know whether the quality issues I was having came from the tapes or the player.

Now I do know. Because I recorded Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” as performed by the Stuttgard Chamber Orchestra conducted by Karl Munchinger, and it was as crisp and clear and sharp and beautiful as anyone could ask. There is obviously nothing wrong with the tape deck.

And “The Four Seasons” is a very fine piece of music. Glad to have it available again.

March 6, 2014:

“Cutting Through,” a 1992 promotional tape from Columbia Hard Music, has made its debut in my collection.

I mean that literally; it was still in the shrink-wrap. I’d never opened or played it; it’s just been sitting there, waiting for me to have time.

It’s seven songs by various metal bands — the regular packaging says six, but the shrink-wrap had a label announcing a bonus track by Circus of Power. Also included: Collision, Cathedral, Alice in Chains, Warrant, Cry of Love, and Rob Halford. The Halford song says it’s from the soundtrack to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and it took me a moment to realize it meant the movie, not the TV series — 1992 was well before there was a TV series.

There’s a certain sameness to all of these, really, but they aren’t bad.

And no, I don’t know where I got the tape. It was probably a convention freebie, maybe at an ABA.

Also on today’s agenda: “The Unicorn,” by the Irish Rovers. A surprisingly short album. The cassette also has the songs in a completely different order than the LP or CD — I mean, completely different, not just a couple swapped to make the sides come out even. They also repeated the title track in the middle of Side 2 for no obvious reason. I rearranged everything back to the order from the LP.

It’s Irish folk songs and some pseudo-folk songs, including a few serious revolutionary songs and a few comic songs, making for some odd contrasts. Eleven songs in all, which might seem reasonable for an album, but the longest on here is well under four minutes, and a couple are less than half that.

But it’s good to have.

March 6, 2014:

And today I have restored Nicolette Larson’s “Radioland” to its rightful place in my music collection.

It’s only nine tracks, each about three minutes, so it’s a surprisingly short album, and honestly, I only really like about half of it, but I like that half a lot. I used to keep this in the car, back when I had a car with a cassette player, and I played it a lot. Mostly for the title track.

I always sort of wondered what happened to Larson, so today I looked her up and learned that she shifted over to country, then died young of liver failure that may have been the result of drug-induced damage. What a shame!

Since “Radioland” was so short, I went ahead and did a second tape — one labeled “10 Sketches – Radio Pirates.”

You probably never heard of the Radio Pirates — at least, not this group; I’m aware others (including a band) have used the name. The Radio Pirates were a comedy group out of Wisconsin that was more or less headed by Scott Dikkers and Jay Rath. In 1992 they bought the rights to do a radio adaptation of my short story “The Drifter” — I’ll be getting to that tape later. This one was sent to me by Scott Dikkers as a sample of their work, to help convince me to let them have the rights cheap. He sent at least two others, as well, which I’ll get to later; I played the others and liked them, am not sure whether I ever listened to this one.

If the name Scott Dikkers sounds familiar, it’s probably because in 1993 the Radio Pirates broke up, and he devoted his time to another comedy project he owned: The Onion. Where he’s twice been the editor, and where he’s been very involved in their multi-media online empire.

Anyway, these sketches are all short — the longest is a little over four minutes. In fact, all ten together did not fill the first side of a C-60 tape, and the second side was blank. (I played it, just to be sure. Blank.) They’re inventive, all amusing, but not often really funny. They’re very well produced, though, and even when spoofing current events (e.g., the elder George Bush, or the Robert Mapplethorpe brouhaha) they haven’t dated badly.

March 7, 2014:

Well, crap.

The next tape I picked from the pile was “Dream Police,” by Cheap Trick. It didn’t sound very good, so I tried rewinding it back and forth, to loosen up sticky spots and realign the tape with the heads, Sometimes this helps when a tape has been sitting unplayed for years.

This time it made it significantly worse, intolerably muddy, whereupon I said, “How much would it cost to just download it?”

Six bucks. It’s worth six bucks to me to not spend possibly hours messing with a bad tape, so I bought it off Amazon and tossed the tape.

And I then discovered that it’s not really a great album. Not as good as I remembered.

Oh, well. It’s in the collection now.

March 2, 2014:

Tonight I squared away the soundtrack album to “The Little Mermaid.”

This one got played a lot when the kids were little; it was a favorite for long car trips, for one thing. It holds up just fine — it may well be the best soundtrack Disney ever produced.

And someone long ago sent me a tape of Kate Bush music that I’m pretty sure all duplicates albums I already had. I’ll play it to make sure the listings are correct, but it looks like another one I won’t copy.

March 2, 2014:

Yeah, the Kate Bush tape is just what it says, and I do have all the music. Off it goes.

March 3, 2014:

Today’s album: “1989 Windham Hill In-Store Play Sampler.” Which was a freebie I picked up at a gift shop in Shepherdstown, WV back in (unsurprisingly) 1989.

I have a theory that the sales rep distributing these to shops had extras, so he just left them on the counter at the store I got it at, because it doesn’t seem to be intended for consumer use, but for in-store play.

Windham Hill, for those who don’t know, was a label founded by a pianist as an outlet for himself and his friends. Initially they only did instrumental music; later they added a jazz line that allowed vocals but was still mostly instrumental. Windham Hill was one of the top “New Age” labels of the ’80s and ’90s.

They eventually got bought up by BMG, which then had no idea what to do with the label, so it gradually withered away. The name and backlist belong to Sony now, but they haven’t released a new title in several years.

Anyway, this tape had seven pieces on the first side by Windham Hill artists I never heard of, and four from Windham Hill Jazz on Side 2. It’s actually quite pleasant, but not exactly catchy or involving.

One track is a medley of two Hendrix songs, “Castles Made of Sand” and “Little Wing,” done in an easy listening/light jazz style, which amazingly does not suck. It works better than you’d think.

The rest is all original instrumentals by people like Philip Aaberg or Nightnoise.

It’s nice enough to listen to, but I doubt I’ll play it very often.

March 4, 2014:

When I was a kid, I had a 78 RPM record of stories about the Lone Ranger; maybe more than one, I’m not entirely sure anymore. Decca Records had issued a four-record set in 1951, and my family had at least part of a set, though I’m pretty sure we didn’t have the fourth one.

The originals were lost long ago, but somewhere along the way I later acquired copies of #2 through #4, probably from a yard sale or antique shop, and I copied those to MP3 months, or maybe years, ago.

But I didn’t have the first one, “He is Saved by Tonto,” and there was a second edition which replaced the really lame fourth story, “He Helps the Colonel’s Son,” with a much better one, “He Meets the War Horse,” and I didn’t have that.

But in November of 1986 a guy in Virginia, probably inspired by something I said in my column in The Comics Buyer’s Guide, sent me a cassette tape with all four second-edition stories on it, along with the 20th-anniversary “Lone Ranger” radio show from 1953. I have his name and the date because it’s still in the mailing box, with postmark and return address.

So tonight I copied that.

Alas, the quality wasn’t that great; they’d been recorded at very low volume, from I don’t know what source. Didn’t sound like the records. So, scratchy as my three records were, I kept those versions and did not replace them with the taped ones.

I did, however, add the first story, and “He Meets the War Horse,” and the 20th anniversary radio show.

To do so I had to fiddle with stuff on Audacity I’d never used before, filtering out the tape hiss, boosting the volume, and so on, as well as speeding everything up to compensate for my slow tape deck. Took a lot of work, but they came out pretty decent.

And they aren’t bad. Ending my collection with these instead of “He Helps the Colonel’s Son” is a major improvement.

March 5, 2014:

Almost ninety minutes of Pat Benatar in concert, from two stops on her “Precious Time” tour in 1981, recorded in Austin and Dallas and broadcast on the King Biscuit Flower Hour. I taped it off the radio.

Surprisingly solid quality throughout, despite the several steps from performance to MP3; seventeen tracks of music (and an eighteenth introducing the band), but she did “Heartbreaker,” “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” and “Hell is for Children” at both venues, and they’re all on here, so only fourteen different songs. The versions of those three songs are different enough to be worth keeping them all.

For the iTunes cover art I pulled a publicity still off the web, from about the right time period — she’s in a purple zebra-striped leotard, very ’80s.

I was a pretty big Benatar fan back then, but I began to lose interest when she drifted from rock toward pop; when “Love Is A Battlefield” became a huge hit, that was pretty much it for me. Listening to this tape I remembered how much I liked her music before that.

February 25, 2014:

Okay, another one squared away.

I have no idea where it came from; it’s a C-90 cassette labeled “Oldies Side 1” on one side, and “Oldies Side 2” on the other, in my handwriting, with no other explanation whatsoever.

I do not remember a thing about it, but it does in fact hold thirty-six oldies, 88:14 of music — I trimmed out a little wasted space, so it’s not the full 90 minutes. They range from 1954 to 1962, and are pretty good quality, but not perfect; the sound’s ever so slightly muddy in spots, and there are two apparent skips.

The play-list does not match any compilation I found in a quick online exploration, though a lot are on the soundtrack of “American Graffiti.”

It took awhile to identify some of these, and pin down which versions they were, but I got ’em all eventually.

Right now “Party Doll,” by Buddy Knox, is playing.

February 27, 2014:

And the next cassette in the queue was labeled “Beatles at the Beeb,” and was just that — specifically, the two-part 20th-anniversary radio show from 1982. Couple of dozen Beatles songs from their BBC appearances, interspersed with history and commentary (some from the ’60s, some new for ’82).

A lot of these songs were never released on record when the Beatles were all alive; the BBC finally put out all their Beatles material as a ten-disc series in 1994, but there’s stuff here I hadn’t heard anywhere except this show.

One thing I find amusing is that one of the announcers from 1982 sounds very much like John Cleese parodying BBC announcers; if this is the specific guy Cleese was imitating, he pretty much nailed it.

Sound quality is good, not perfect (quite aside from flaws in the originals). When I made the original tape I edited out most of the ad breaks; when I converted it to MP3 I cleaned out a couple of blips where I hadn’t hit “Pause” fast enough.

Alas, I also had to delete “Clarabella” — that was at the very end of Side 1 of the cassette and not only did it get cut off when the tape ran out, but there were fairly severe problems with the take-up reel sticking during playback. Not sure what caused that.

The interstitial material ranges from fascinating to pompous to sophomoric. The Alan Freeman stuff from “Pop Go the Beatles” is especially obnoxious.

It’s fairly clear that British Beatles fans of the ’60s had a very different experience than American ones.

February 28, 2014:

Two episodes of the radio show “The Shadow,” from the late 1930s, have been added to my collection, allowing me to relegate another cassette to the disposal box.

I had listened to these before, and remembered them — not the case with many of these cassettes. “A Friend of Darkness” was pretty good, and reasonably progressive in outlook for the time, as it makes a point that the blind can hold jobs and earn their keep; “The Isle of Fear,” on the other hand, is racist to the core, explicitly stating that the black people of Haiti are savages at heart, no matter what trappings of civilization they may acquire. It’s got a voodoo priest sacrificing white children to snake-gods at the Feast of the Blood Moon — very lurid.

The copying process went smoothly, and the digital versions don’t seem to be any less in quality than the tape was when I first received it.

I have a total of eight episodes of “The Shadow” in MP3 form now, and the next two cassettes in the stack, if they’re correctly labeled, duplicate six of those eight (including “A Friend of Darkness” and “The Isle of Fear”). I’ll probably double-check before ditching them, just to be sure.

Incidentally, I also recorded another tape, “Spine-Tingling Press Sampler,” but I haven’t decided whether I’m going to bother converting any of it to MP3. It’s samples from a few novels, and one complete short story, and the samples are kind of pointless since they’re so incomplete, while the short story just isn’t very good. Richard Sutphen’s Spine-Tingling Press appears to have only existed for two or three years in the eary 1990s.

To give you an idea how unexciting that sampler is, remember that I took the time to convert “Complete Electric Bass Course,” but I’m not planning to do these stories.

February 28, 2014:

I double-checked those Shadow episodes. The labels were correct.

As for the Spine-Tingling Press Sampler, I decided, what the hell, and converted them.

And doing so reminded me that there should be another cassette somewhere, from someone campaigning for a Stoker, and sure enough, I found it on the paperback shelves, filed under the author’s name.

So I’ve found a total of 101, trashed a damaged one that was apparently blank, and have sixty-three left to go. Several of the other thirty-seven were duplicate material, and some were blank, so I don’t know how many I’ve actually recorded.

But I think I’ll at least attempt to record all the remaining sixty-three. Thirty-nine are music; twenty-four are spoken word of one sort or another.

February 23, 2014:

I found the tape that’s a major reason I wouldn’t give up having a cassette player in the house.

Actually, it turns out there are two of them, but the first is done.

When my mother was dying in 1990 she said she wanted to record some of her memories, so I bought a little hand-held cassette recorder and spent a good part of a week sitting on her bed while Mother talked about her family and her life.

I filled two C-60 cassettes. The sound quality isn’t always that great because the recorder started picking up the sound of its own motor, more and more as I went on, but still, it’s two hours of my mother talking, and easy enough to make out every word.

I’ve done the first tape. I split it up into nineteen pieces; it was actually recorded in about a dozen sessions, but I broke the long ones up to more manageable sizes.

Haven’t done the second tape yet.

Anyway, there are four segments about her grandparents, two about her father as a young man, one about her mother, three about their wedding and where they lived at various times, and nine about Mother’s own life from early childhood through college.

Listening to these after so long is fascinating. Just hearing her voice again brings back a lot of memories. I’ve discovered I misremembered a bunch of family history, and attributed two of her stories to my father’s side, for some reason, attaching a story about an unnamed great-uncle on her mother’s side to my father’s Uncle Sam.

And I realize that one reason she wanted to make these recordings was to distract herself from what was happening to her; there are a few spots where you can hear the pain, a few places where she had to stop until the morphine kicked in again.

I’m sending copies of the MP3s to my sisters, one at a time.

I’ve also gone through some of the other cassettes. One turned out to be completely blank, and three others were junk I have no use for, so… well, the stack I still need to deal with is down to fifty-five cassettes, out of the seventy-eight I started with.

From here on, they’re all labeled; six are audio letters, but the other forty-nine all look like stuff I want to keep — mostly music, a few radio shows, etc.

March 6, 2014 (out of sequence):

I said I hadn’t done my mother’s second tape yet. Now I have.

The first tape covered from her grandparents through her graduation from high school. The second tape covers from there to the birth of my oldest sister.

She was deteriorating by then, and frankly, so was my tape recorder, so there’s no third tape.

I’m glad I gave her a chance to revisit some good memories. I feel a little bad that I told her about some of the changes to a place she’d remembered fondly (Ogunquit, Maine — I’d visited there in the ’80s, and she’d been there in the ’40s). I just automatically went into my habitual “being informative” mode without thinking that she might prefer not to know; the changes weren’t for the better, and it wasn’t as if she would ever go back there. I should have just let her remember it as it was when she was there with her boyfriend. (The last one before my father.)

The second tape wound up as a dozen pieces. One of them has speed problems — maybe I should have tried to adjust that. The batteries were dying when we recorded that bit, so the wheels were turning slowly, which meant when it gets played back at normal speed it sounds as if we’d both been hitting the helium.

I also could have filtered out the tape hiss and other noise, but I didn’t. It’s not that bad, and I didn’t think of it until I was 75% done.

I’m sending the files to my sisters, one by one, so the whole family will have copies.

February 24, 2014:

Huh. Turns out I didn’t have seventy-eight cassette tapes. I had eighty-one. There was a stack of three sitting on a bookshelf for no obvious reason.

And typing that reminded of somewhere else I should have checked. Make it an even hundred in all.

Sigh.

I’m pretty sure some of them are duplicates, though. Because what I was reminded to do was check my bookcase of my own work for audiobooks. I found a total of nineteen cassettes — four four-cassette sets, and three singles.

So that’s something of a setback, and I’ll be keeping the author-copy cassettes even if I never play them again.

Of course, I’ve still dealt with twenty-three of them, so there are seventy-seven left. And I’m fairly certain at least six are duplicates.

I have two more completely unidentified ones, though — only one of the three I found out of place was labeled.

February 26, 2014:

Well, one of those two appears to have been blank, but I’ll never know for sure, because after successfully playing one (blank) side, about two or three minutes into the second side the tape broke.

So it went in the trash, and if there was anything on the remaining 43 minutes of Side 2, it’s lost forever.

The other one had “Rootabaga Stories” on it, copied from the same scratchy LP I recorded back in late January. That filled all of Side 1, and in fact didn’t all fit — the end of the next-to-last story and all of the final story were missing. Side 2 appears to be blank; I’m about 25 minutes into it, and not a sound.

February 26, 2014:

In case it’s not obvious, no, I didn’t save anything off that; the rest was indeed blank, and I don’t need duplicates.

Today I recorded a letter on tape a friend sent in 1992. I hadn’t planned to keep it, or any letters, but this one had so much content I decided I should.

Also: Played a tape labeled “The Very Best of the Everly Brothers” on one side, and “Peter Paul & Mary: Moving” on the other. The descriptions were accurate, but the tape’s defective — it keeps jamming and slowing down. I already had “The Very Best of the Everly Brothers” on CD and MP3 anyway, but I decided to go ahead and buy the MP3 download of “Moving” rather than try to salvage this.

Looked through some more, and if the labels are accurate I have two more duplicates. I’ll want to double-check before tossing them, though.