Next in the stack was a tape with a label with lots of writing on it, almost none of it legible. I think it said “Album Assortment” in there somewhere.

Anyway, it had “Infinity,” by Journey, on it. And “Dog and Butterfly,” by Heart, and “Point of Know Return” by Kansas, and “But Seriously, Folks” by Joe Walsh.

The quality on the first two was really bad, and I already had “Dog and Butterfly,” so I just went ahead and ordered “Infinity” on CD (it was really cheap).

The second side wasn’t as clear-cut — I didn’t have either album, and the sound quality was significantly better.

But it still wasn’t actually good, and I didn’t really want to put in the time and effort to edit them, so I downloaded “Point of Know Return” and ordered a CD of “But Seriously, Folks.”

And that’s another tape out of the way.

Yeah, that second Moody Blues tape was not good. But it was just what it said on the insert, plus a duplicate of part of one track, so since I have all three albums, it’s done.

So that tape is gone, and I’m done with the Moody Blues.

Not sure what’s next. Guess I’ll see tomorrow. Or Tuesday. Or sometime.

The “King Crimson” tape held no surprises. The quality was very bad for most of it, so I just put the replacement albums on my Amazon wishlist and didn’t try using anything off the tape. They’re not available for download, only on CD.

“Moody Blues Part 1” held four Moody Blues albums. I already had three of them — “On the Threshold of A Dream,” “In Search of the Lost Chord, and “To Our Children’s Children’s Children.” Didn’t have “Days of Future Passed,” but the quality was poor (though not as bad as the “King Crimson” tape), so I just bought and downloaded it from Amazon.

And that was that. The tape’s done.

Next up, of course, is “Moody Blues Part 2,” which, according to the enclosed list, has just three albums on it: “Every Good Boy Deserves Favour,” “A Question of Balance,” and “Seventh Sojourn.” Most of Side 2 is allegedly blank, though I’ll want to make sure.

I already had “Seventh Sojourn,” and what the hell, as long as I was downloading “Days of Future Passed,” I got the other two, too, because I’m pretty sure that tape’s quality will be low, too.

Started on the next tape. This one should be quick.

The box says “King Crimson,” and sure enough, if the track listing is to be believed (and it’s accurate for most of Side 1, anyway), this tape has their albums “Islands,” “In the Court of the Crimson King,” “In the Wake of Poseidon,” and “Lizard,” and also at least part of the album “McDonald & Giles,” by Ian McDonald and Michael Giles.

Some of the tracks seem to have been rearranged. I have no idea why. One or two may be missing entirely.

I also don’t know why they’re out of order of release.

The quality is pretty poor, so unless there are surprises in the part I haven’t played yet I’m not going to keep any of this; I’ll just buy the four albums I don’t already have. (Of course I have “In the Court of the Crimson King” on CD. Had it on vinyl, too. Everyone should own a copy.)

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.

Well, this was interesting, and made my life a bit easier. The tape labeled “P.P.H. 2” is mostly blank. There are two songs at the beginning, totaling thirteen minutes of music — a jam, and yet another rendition of “Parchman Farm” — and then nothing.

I still had to do two takes. The first time through the music was barely audible, as the 40-year layer of crud interfered. The second time, after vigorously cleaning the heads and rollers, it sounded just fine. Knowing the rest was blank, though, on the second play-through I stopped after fifteen minutes and turned it around to rewind. (Have I mentioned that “rewind” and “fast forward” no longer work on my recorder?)

But hey, it’s done and sounds surprisingly good. I’m pleased.

Then it was on to #5, “Coffeehouse – Pork Pie Hat (Two),” dated Aug. 27, 1973.

Played through Side 1. Stopped it twice to de-gunk the heads, but most of it was still faint, muffled, and generally crappy-sounding. It should improve the next time through.

So I have this play-list that was enclosed with the first Pork Pie Hat tape. It lists four sides. Two of them were on that tape, and I assumed the other two would be on either this tape, or “P.P.H. 2.”

They aren’t.

Side 1 here had not quite an hour and twenty minutes recorded, which is about right, but it doesn’t match the songs on the list. It should have “Jive, Jive, Jive” and “Maggie’s Farm,” along with a mishmosh of stuff I don’t have actual titles for, and that’s not what’s there. Instead there are half a dozen abortive attempts at “Badge,” a decent rendition of “Soul Kitchen,” etc.

Notice I didn’t say it has an hour and twenty minutes of music; it doesn’t. There’s a lot of tuning up, diddling around, talking, false starts, etc. I doubt there’s more than forty-five minutes of actual music.

Very disappointing, so far.

(And where the heck is the tape on the list?)

Then I played through it again. Mostly better. There are a couple of tracks that could stand another try, though. I had to de-gunk the heads partway through, and there are two tracks where neither recording is really acceptable.

Played Side 2 for the first time, too. About an hour and a quarter, of which about an hour is music. Most of it came out well.

What’s interesting (to me, anyway) is that the playlist for Side 2 (if there were one) starts with the same five songs that ended Side 2 of the first PPH tape. It has three songs beyond that, though.

I don’t think these are different copies of the same performance, but I’ll want to check them against each other to be absolutely sure. And given how disorganized the band was, I’m a bit boggled if they actually had a set list — but on the other hand, they apparently didn’t bother to change it up between shows, even though it was the same venue, so that’s their sort of sloppy.

This had their best version of “Summertime,” and a kick-ass fifteen-minute jam of “Spoonful.”

But wow, I’m sick of “Parchman Farm.” And they used “Badge” for their soundcheck, so there are three partial takes (not counting abortive ones I didn’t bother to convert to MP3) as well as the final performance. Fact is, the band only seems to have known about a dozen songs, and I wound up with about five hours of them either playing those songs over and over, or jamming, or just messing around. (Actually, I didn’t keep most of the “just messing around” stuff, so that would be more than five hours, counting that.)

Anyway, I now had everything that was on the tape, but played through Side 2 a second time, and Side 1 a third, to get better transcriptions.

(I needed to play Side 2 a third time just to rewind the tape — “rewind” and “fast forward” aren’t really working anymore — but I didn’t bother recording it.

The third play-through didn’t help much. It was generally worse than its predecessors — the treble is noticeably degraded, and there’s added noise, maybe from crud on the heads or the tape.

So the whole thing was pretty much complete at that point, except that (a) I needed to choose my preferred takes on a couple of songs, and (b) there are eight songs I haven’t really identified yet; I have them listed as “Don’t Know 1,” “Don’t Know 2,” “Don’t Know 3,” “Don’t Know 4,” “The Great Escape (in theory),” “Don’t Know 6,” “Highway 15 (?),” and “Don’t Know 9.”

I used to have Don’t Know 5, 7, and 8, but then realized they duplicated others on the list of unknowns. “The Great Escape” and “Highway 15” were titles on the song list in the box, but don’t appear to be correct. “Highway 15” may have been an original.

Most of the unknowns are instrumentals, “Highway 15” being the major exception.

I’ll track those down eventually. In fact, I just discovered that Julie is still more or less in touch with the Hat’s bass player, who ought to be able to identify everything for me.

I’ve chosen my preferred takes on everything, so that’s officially done — ID’ing things doesn’t count.

Anyway, there are fifty tracks, but I only count twenty-five different songs, since there are several repeats and one (listed simply as “Boogie”) had been split between two sides of the tape. There are also two jams, which I listed as “Jam” and “Jam Too.” It’s about five hours of music in all, as I said above.

Quality varies, but none of it totally sucks. (Mostly because I didn’t keep a few bits that did suck.)

Onward!

More about “Coffeehouse – Pork Pie Hat.”

So I played Side 1 again. Seemed much clearer this time, so I decided I’d be replacing some tracks before I move on to the next tape.

This proved quite interesting. A reminder for those less obsessed than I am: I’d played this tape three times. The first time was basically just to clean the gunk off, and I didn’t even keep the Audacity recording. It sounded like utter crap.

The second time mostly sounded okay. I transferred it all to MP3.

I played back the Audacity recording of the third, and compared it, song by song, with the MP3s I made from the second play-through.

The first three tracks were clearly superior on #2 — crisper, clearer highs, generally sharper. But the fourth track (“Maggie’s Farm”) was much less obvious. I wound up keeping #2, but it required playing bits of each version against each other to judge them, and it was close.

And with tracks #5 and 6 — which I haven’t identified; I think 6 is just the band jamming — Recording #3 is clearly superior. I’m replacing the earlier versions. By the end of track 6, Recording #2 was muddy sludge, where #3 is still pretty crisp.

But I cleaned the tape heads twice during Recording #2 (and not at all during #3), so I needed to see what happened when I got to those points.

And I made an unpleasant discovery.

The sound quality was significantly better on #3, but I couldn’t use a lot of it — Audacity skipped stuff. A 13-minute jam is 11 minutes — that’s the worst, but at least four tracks have skips.

You know why? Because Facebook’s Javascript is badly written. I knew my computer was having memory issues that generally cleared up when I got a “A script on this page has stopped working” message and told it to stop the script, but I hadn’t realized it was interfering with the recording.

I needed to do it again.

So I did Recording #3 of Side 2, then checked it to see if it was better than what I had.

It wasn’t. It started well, but by fifteen minutes in it was noticeably inferior to the previous take. I think the tape’s fading and probably won’t survive many more playings.

I only saved a couple of tracks from this pass. The last iteration of “Summertime” got swapped out, and I’m saving the last “Spoonful” until I figure out why it’s 20 seconds longer. But that’s all.

I needed one more pass, to get those cuts from Side 1 that got munged, and then the tape goes away.

But wow — I got some much nicer takes this last time around, and replaced tracks #8 through 15. Serious improvement — but I don’t know why. (Tracks #1-5 or so weren’t as good as before; on #6 and 7 the differences were inaudible to me.)

And here’s a weird thing — the timing was different. The tape apparently ran faster the fourth time through, where previous recordings (at least, all that I checked) matched. WTF. It’s never more than a few seconds, and some of it may come from trimming in slightly different places, but several of these are 2 – 6 seconds shorter than previous versions.

Anyway, it’s done. I have thirty decent tracks, from three different play-throughs. I still need to identify some tracks — but that should be easier now, because I can actually hear the lyrics on some of them now.

On to the next tape!

There was another pair of tapes. The first is labeled “Coffeehouse – Pork Pie Hat, Aug. 13, 1973” and “#2.” It also lists the seven members of Pork Pie Hat on the back.

The second only has a very faint scribble, “P.P.H. 2.”

Haven’t taken the second one out of the box yet. I’m working on the first one.

I played it all the way through. It sounded like utter crap. When it was done, I cleaned black gunk off the heads, rollers, guideposts, etc. and started it over. I’m three songs into that second run-through, and it sounds pretty good — not studio quality, but I’ve heard worse on commercially-released live albums. Seems like I have a formula — run through it to get the gunk off, then record it.

Anyway. Pork Pie Hat was a local band in Bedford, MA back in ’73 — five regular members, and a couple of drop-ins, according to what I wrote on the box. No connection with any band by that name you’ll find on the web. I knew four of the five members from high school, and one of the drop-ins; the other was the older brother of one of my friends.

The drummer, Chip Edgar, I didn’t know at all. No idea where they found him.

I’m pretty sure the band broke up by ’75. They were an adequate bar band, not much more than that, though they sometimes got ambitious. That anonymous jam I recorded from the previous tape was better.

Right now, as I type this, I’m listening to the Hat’s version of “Maggie’s Farm,” and it’s a bit odd — the rhythm section sounds like they’re playing “All Is Loneliness,” rather than “Maggie’s Farm.”

The tape box included a song list — but it’s for four sides, so I’m assuming it includes the tape labeled “P.P.H. 2.” It also isn’t very complete. That would be five or six hours, and believe me, they didn’t play that long at the Coffeehouse on August 13th. So far, in this first set, I don’t hear any crowd noise; maybe it was a rehearsal?

I really wish I’d kept better records back then.

Oh, hey! I just took a closer look at the box, and in the very faded ink that we see on a couple of other boxes it has a second date written in below “Aug. 13, 1973” — it says “Aug. 27, 1973.” So I guess I taped two different gigs.

And I was looking at the other tape boxes, and there’s a third one: #5, “Coffeehouse – Pork Pie Hat (Two), Aug. 27, 1973.”

This is confusing. There are play-lists for two tapes, not three. I checked all the boxes; no other lists.

So I recorded the first side of the first tape, edited, and converted it to MP3, and… it’s a mixed bag. The first couple of tracks sound good, but it gets muddier and muddier. I actually stopped the tape twice between songs to clean the heads; the first time the heads weren’t bad and it didn’t make much difference, but the second time, at the end of a thirteen-minute jam, I got a big wodge of gunk off and the difference was huge. So I’ll probably go back and re-record some of this stuff and see if I can get better versions. Some of the damage is clearly in the original tape and unfixable, but some probably isn’t.

The first two songs — an instrumental I haven’t identified and “Jive, Jive, Jive” — sound great. The third, “Parchman Farm,” is good. By the fourth, “Maggie’s Farm,” not so much…

Sigh.

Pork Pie Hat did not have a really extensive repertoire. On the first tape I heard “Jive, Jive, Jive” three times, “Parchman Farm” twice, “Maggie’s Farm” twice, “The Great Escape” twice, an instrumental I haven’t identified three times, “Badge” twice, and “Summertime” twice.

(Classically-trained first sopranos should not sing “Summertime” with blues-rock bands. Especially not an octave or so above the key the band is playing in. The word “screechy” is one of the politer terms to come to mind.)

And besides those favorites they played a few other songs, including “Soul Kitchen” and “Spoonful.” They didn’t do either of those as well as that anonymous band on the previous tape, but they weren’t bad.

They closed out the set with “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.” That was interesting, and better than I might have expected.

I ran into trouble recording the second side. I tried to save the file to an invalid location and lost the whole thing. I was able to salvage it, but I spent two and a half hours recovering a recording that’s only an hour and forty minutes. Now I know how to do it, though; next time (I’ve made this mistake before and may well do it again) I’ll be able to do it much more quickly.

It was all still there when recovered, and I successfully translated it all to MP3.

It’s all squared away. I have thirty tracks off this tape, albeit with a lot of repeated songs. Quality is mostly good; the entire second side was clean enough that I didn’t need to filter or rebalance anything, though I did amplify a few numbers.

The first side, well, I plan to re-record that and maybe replace some of the iffy pieces, if I can get better versions.

I don’t actually know where this stuff was recorded. The song list doesn’t say. The box says it was recorded at the Coffeehouse, on two different dates in the summer of 1973, but I’m not sure I believe that. It’s probably accurate, but even if it is, I have no idea where the break between shows is. Since some songs are played three times, I can’t just go by the assumption that the second set begins when they start repeating.

Also, there is no crowd noise on the first few tracks, so that might have been a rehearsal, or maybe they just started playing when the place was still half-empty.

Whatever. It’s done, barring possible replacements. And most of it is decent music. The vocals on “Summertime” are pretty dreadful, both times — and I say this even though the singer was a good friend of mine — but the band could jam. I think their arrangement of “Maggie’s Farm” is bizarre, but they did fine with “Parchman Farm” and “Spoonful” (all thirteen minutes of it) and some of the others.

There are seven songs I haven’t identified. Some are instrumentals and I don’t recognize them; a couple have words, but I can’t make out enough of the lyrics to google them. Or at least, I haven’t yet — I’ll probably give them a more careful listen eventually.

So, on to the replay, and then the other Pork Pie Hat tapes.