Well, this took awhile.

I did get hold of the bassist for Pork Pie Hat and identified some (not all) of those tracks I didn’t have names for, but it’s still a work in progress.

So it was on to the next tape — #3, Coffeehouse – Dean & Buffy (sic). I recorded Side 1 — and then threw most of it out not because of excessive noise or poor quality as such, but because it recorded at so low a volume as to be worthless. I wasn’t sure whether it would be better
on a second pass, but I gave it a try.

It wasn’t much better, and dealing with the material I had was so discouraging I stopped working on it for a couple of months. But I did eventually get back to it.

Dean and Buffie (note correct spelling) Groves were friends of mine, brother and sister; Dean went on to become a full-time jazz drummer for awhile, but switched to computer programming when his first kid was born, as he did not want to be a father who came home at 3:00 a.m. smelling of whiskey and cigarettes. Buffie’s had a semi-pro music career; she’s half of a duo called Fishken & Groves.

I hoped I could somehow salvage this music, because it includes songs written by people I knew — C.R. Bryan, a.k.a. Erik David Koenig, for one. And Dean was a fabulous guitarist, if only a so-so singer.

It didn’t look good. There’s one stretch where so much of the iron oxide has come off that I can see through the tape. But I tried.

The sound quality is dreadful, but I did manage to transfer maybe half of it to MP3. The other half was too far gone, though I want to do one more pass through some of it to see if I can salvage any more.

There are fourteen more tapes after this one; I’m hoping I’ll do better with those.