Having finished up Larry Boyd’s contributions, we come to the other frequent giver, who is still very much alive and will therefore remain nameless. This is the guy who sent me “Ol’ Yellow Eyes Is Back” and the “best of Squeeze.” He also sent me three “various artists” collections. All five were sent in 1992, along with some letters-on-tape, when he was laid up for months with a disabling injury (which fortunately was successfully surgically repaired later) and had lots of time on his hands.

So today I recorded and edited “Various Artists #1.” (Yes, they’re numbered. And annotated.) Quality is excellent — these were recorded on top-of-the-line cassettes that probably cost three or four times what I paid for any of my own blanks. I’d played part of each of the three, but I don’t think I played all of any of them. I had some rewinding to do.

VA 1 has twenty tracks, and as with Larry Boyd, I’d never heard of several of these bands, but that’s where the resemblance ends; this guy’s tastes were way over the other side of the pop/rock spectrum. Nothing remotely punk here, though some falls into the ill-defined and overly-broad “New Wave” category.

There’s The Lover Speaks, a duo I never heard of but one of these songs sounds very familiar; the Samples, Lions & Ghosts, the Water Walk, the Adventures. Two songs from each.

And then there are the more familiar ones, like They Might Be Giants and Talk Talk and Midge Ure, though I wasn’t familiar with these particular songs.

Lions & Ghosts is pretty cool; I may look for more by them. Though it doesn’t look as if they had a very long career.

All in all, these are twenty fairly obscure songs, none of them suck, but none really grab me, either, though “Mary Goes Round” by Lions & Ghosts comes close, and of course the two by They Might Be Giants are lotsa fun.

So — two more of these mix tapes to go. (I have one recorded but not edited.) Then a dozen spoken-word cassettes, two-thirds of them from SF audio anthologies that included “Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers” read by Wil Wheaton. That’ll finish up all my hundred and one cassettes.

With that end in sight, I hauled out the old reel-to-reel tapes. There are fifty-two of them, of varying length and speed; most are labeled, though with an unknown degree of accuracy and often skimping on detail.

And I don’t know whether my reel-to-reel tape deck still works; I haven’t tried to use it in at least five years, probably much longer. Probably much longer. Most (maybe all) of these tapes date back to the ’70s or even the ’60s.

We’ll see, once I’ve finished the cassettes. I’ll either be embarking on another major project, or if the recorder’s dead, I’ll be done digitizing music.