Well, that was interesting.

The first side of the tape has eighteen tracks, more or less, taking up a mere thirty-eight minutes.

The first five are Martha and her guitar — two originals, a Beatles tune, an old folk song, and a Joni Mitchell number that probably called for a little more range than Martha really had. The song I’ve had running through my head intermittently since 1974 turns out to be called “Photosynthesis” — there’s no enclosure, but inside the box the bottom has a track listing, and the lid has personnel.

The personnel were Martha, me, three of my four roommates, and Nadia Benabid, who was another roommate’s Moroccan girlfriend.

That only covers fifteen of the eighteen tracks, though. The last few were added later. For that matter, #15 is dated February 12.

I’m listed as playing jew’s harp and providing vocals on “Mountain Dew” (track #7), but I’m pretty sure I also played jew’s harp on “San Francisco Bay Blues,” and the unlisted tracks all feature me playing dulcimer.

Anyway. The first five tracks are Martha, then there are two silly group numbers, then Martha and Ray (I think) do a duet of “Mobile Line,” then Fred and Nadia have two and a half duets (there are two takes of “Proud Mary”), then Nadia has three solos — two in Spanish and an instrumental.

And finally there are three instrumental tracks — “Go Tell Aunt Rhodey” and two rather tuneless jams — with me playing dulcimer and Josh playing jew’s harp and Martha (I think) playing kazoo.

Martha and Nadia were both pretty good. Ray was okay. The less said about Fred and me, and especially Josh, the better. The only place I tried to sing was on “Mountain Dew,” and that was because I was the only one who remembered any of the verses, though everyone joined in on the chorus.

I’m glad to have this stuff. This is from about a week before I flunked out of Princeton, a time I get nostalgic about.

The recording quality is mostly quite good. Nadia wasn’t close enough to the mike for her three solos, so I had to amplify them to the point there’s audible tape hiss, but otherwise it’s fine. I did punch up a few tracks a little, just ’cause, but it wasn’t necessary.

As for Side 2, most of it is blank. The box says it’s got the Mothers’ “Over-Nite Sensation” on it, but it doesn’t. The first fifteen minutes or so, unfortunately, are taken up by a failed attempt at comedy by me and my high school friend Glenn Cooper, with a lot of the jokes lifted from the humor ‘zine I published my senior year of high school.

It’s really, really bad. Not funny at all. I’m embarrassed. I’m not going to preserve any of it. It can all go, as far as I’m concerned, and since it’s mostly me (Glenn’s only in about two minutes of it) and Glenn’s dead, I think it’s my call.

So I’m saving the music, and not the “comedy.” I’m debating whether I should erase the “comedy,” just to be sure.

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.

Next up: A tape where the “Reel No.” box is filled in with a big Z, and the title is “Zappa & Mothers.” It’s also recorded at 7.5 IPS, instead of 3.75 — says so on the box — which is why I decided to tackle it next.

It starts off with “Over-Nite Sensation,” which I already had, and the quality isn’t noticeably better than the LP, even though the LP wasn’t exactly pristine, so I’ll ignore that.

But then there are two jazz fusion albums. I think the first one is “Hot Rats,” though I’ll want to double-check that, and the other is definitely “The Grand Wazoo.”…

Oh, wait! There’s a note scribbled upside-down on the back of the box. It is “Hot Rats,” and, it says here, Side 1 of “The Grand Wazoo.”

It’s not exactly Side 1, as it cuts off in the middle when the tape ran out, but I’m not sure whether that was near the end of Side 1 or somewhere on Side 2. I think I also missed a bit of “Hot Rats” at the end of Side 1 of the tape.

Yeah, I missed 10-15 seconds of “Son of Mr. Green Genes,” and the last three minutes of “The Grand Wazoo.” Oh, well.

Y’know, there’s another tape further down the stack that says it’s got “Over-Nite Sensation” on it, as well (along with stuff I recorded live). I’m not sure why I recorded it multiple times. It’s a good album, but not that good.

As for “Hot Rats” and “The Grand Wazoo,” I recognize the virtuosity that went into them, but I still don’t much care for them. I simply don’t like (most) jazz from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. Not even the fusion stuff.

But they’re here, so I edited ’em in.

All done. Twenty-five left.

So I was down to twenty-seven tapes…

Or not.

The next tape’s box said “The Giant Rat of Sumatra” on the spine, and it contained a neatly-typed list saying it had Firesign Theatre’s “The Tale of the Giant Rat of Sumatra” and “Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers,” followed by “Monty Python’s Previous Record” and “Another Monty Python Record.” This list was accurate, and I already had all of those but “Giant Rat” in my MP3 collection.

So I recorded that in Audacity, but the quality was pretty bad.

On a whim, I tried the head demagnetizer again, and this time it worked a whole hell of a lot better. I must have not done it right before. The sound quality went from lousy to very decent. I re-recorded “Giant Rat,” and got a pretty clean copy.

But that means I may want to (eventually) give the last half-dozen tapes I did another go, and see if I can do better by them. I’ve fished them out of the discard heap and set them aside for later.

For now, though, I have twenty-six more tapes — half the original fifty-two — left that I haven’t done anything with yet.

Well, two of the tapes in unmarked boxes were blank — or at least, one I played was blank. Another tape still had the factory seal, so it’s a pretty safe bet it’s blank. I didn’t bother breaking the seal to play it to check; I put it aside to be disposed of.

The third, though, has stuff recorded from WKQQ Lexington KY on it. Quality’s pretty bad. What’s kind of weird is that from the DJ’s remarks this appears to have been recorded the same day as one of my cassettes, in the summer of 1980. Earlier, though.

I didn’t recognize any of the music, which is a bit odd, but then I realized I wasn’t after the music when I recorded it. There’s an episode of “The Lone Ranger” on here.

And an episode of “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.”

And one of “Superman.”

That finished out Side 1; I left Side 2 for later.

I transferred the Lone Ranger episode (“The Short Route,” from 1953) to MP3, but the quality on the others left a great deal to be desired, and when I googled for dates and titles I discovered they were both available as free downloads from archive.org. So I downloaded them, and won’t bother with the tape versions.

(The episode of the Lone Ranger is still under copyright, it appears, while the others are listed as public domain — apparently the copyrights on the first few Superman radio episodes weren’t renewed, same as with the Fleisher cartoons. Later episodes, not so much.)

And after that was done I played Side 2, which is blank except for a few seconds of music so badly distorted I don’t recognize it at all. (It may even have been recorded at a different speed.)

So that’s another tape done. Twenty-seven left.

(I’ve done a little sorting on the twenty-seven; something like half are stuff by local acts I recorded live back when I was a teenager. I have no idea what the sound quality is like on those.)

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.

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.

The last of the non-standard tapes: a Maxell LNE35-7, 1,800 feet, with a label on the spine reading “Buckingham Nicks/Fleetwood Mac.” There’s a song list inside that I didn’t notice until after I’d recorded the whole thing, and there’s also a list in the label on the tape itself, so there wasn’t much question about what was on it, at least for most of it.

It’s three albums — “Buckingham Nicks,” “Fleetwood Mac” (the 1975 one), and “Rumours” — followed by Fleetwood Mac live.

“Buckingham Nicks” flopped and has been out of print (excluding bootlegs) since 1973; I was very pleased to discover that I have it here, complete and clean. Two songs had later Fleetwood Mac versions, but here are the originals. I recorded this off WYDD — they played the album straight through, no interruptions, late one night in 1975. I remember the event.

“Fleetwood Mac” and “Rumours” I already had, so I just deleted those once I’d verified there wasn’t anything weird going on. That finished out Side 1 and started Side 2.

And Fleetwood Mac’s live set didn’t have a source listed, but the minute I hit a station break I recognized the announcer’s voice — it’s the good old King Biscuit Flower Hour. For some reason he never says that, on this tape, but it’s unmistakable, and googling “Fleetwood Mac King Biscuit” promptly brought up all the verification I needed — this show was bootlegged, and the set list is plastered on the bootleg’s album cover, so I can be quite sure that’s the right one (even though the bootleggers have one song title slightly wrong). It was recorded in October 1975, broadcast in ’75 and ’76 and ’90.

I used the bootleg cover as my cover in iTunes — why not?

And finally, at the end of the tape is Renaissance, performing “Ashes Are Burning” live. I didn’t recognize it at first, to be honest, and even then wasn’t sure until I played the two in alternation, but it’s the performance from their “Live At Carnegie Hall” album (which I have). So I didn’t need to preserve that.

No idea why I chose that to finish out the tape.

Anyway, I got “Buckingham Nicks” and the Fleetwood Mac KBFH out of it, so I’m pleased.

That just leaves thirty-two Concertape 44-1018 1800-foot tapes to go. Nothing else.

The blank box is exactly that — the box containing the tape is completely, totally blank, just bare white cardboard. I had no record anywhere of what was on the tape.

I had some vague memories, though, which turned out to be partially correct.

I think this may have been a tape that came with the recorder, actually, so the buyer could start using it immediately without needing to buy anything else.

Anyway, it’s a mess. There’s some stuff at the beginning just messing around, experimenting with different speeds — talking very slowly, for example, at low speed, with the idea it would be played back twice as fast, so it sounded like normal-speed speech (or close to it) but at higher pitch.

Then there’s a long stretch of recording card games. I don’t know why I thought that was a good idea. I was playing games like Spit and Pounce with my friend Jack, who died in 1991, and in the latter part with my sister Ruth, as well. Another sister kept butting in and being told to shut up or go away.

And after that, there’s a long interview I did as research for an article I wrote for the Bedford Patriot — my first paid writing was doing features for the Patriot. That dates this to early 1972. I think the card games were earlier, ’70 or ’71.

After that, we’re well onto Side 2, and the rest appeared to be blank. I played through it, just to be sure; there was some other stuff right at the end, but it’s junk.

What’s mildly dismaying is that of all the people on the tape, I come off as the biggest jerk. I hope I outgrew it.

None of this is going to get transferred to MP3, but on the other hand, I’m not sure I want to discard it, either. There isn’t much left of Jack anywhere.

Jack Wells wasn’t anywhere near as smart or funny as he thought he was, but since he thought he was a fuckin’ genius and master comedian, he was still pretty bright and amusing. We met when we were four, when my family moved in across the street from his, and we were best friends from then until high school. All through elementary school he spent more of his waking hours at my house than his own, for a variety of reasons. We started to drift apart a little when puberty hit, because he turned out to be gay while I was straight, and then we largely lost touch when I went off to college and he didn’t. He turned up again every so often until his death from AIDS.

He’d had all these grandiose plans that never came to fruition; he wound up a flight attendant, not the entrepreneur or Broadway star he’d hoped to be.

Anyway, here’s this tape of him doing comedy shtick that doesn’t quite work, and talking about his business as a supplier of occult paraphernalia that failed within a few months, and so on, and I don’t know that I’ll ever want to play it again, but I can’t just throw it away, either.

Ah, well. Thirty-three to go.