So it’s been awhile, right? Well, partly I was at Balticon in there, and dealing with various other stuff, but also I was somewhat daunted by the tape I’d pulled out of the stack to do next.

The box just says “Beatles.” Nothing else about what’s on it. There’s no insert or other list anywhere. And it’s double-length, 3600 feet, recorded at the usual 3.75″ IPS. Which means there could be nine or ten albums on here. And it wasn’t wound smoothly, so I had qualms about its condition. All in all, I was a bit reluctant to tackle it.

But I finally made a start today, and discovered that the first thing on it is the album “Something New,” from 1964, which I have never owned, so I must have borrowed a copy somewhere and taped it.

The recording is surprisingly clean, but it’s at low volume, and it’s from before there was Dolby, so I had to run the Noise Removal and Amplify effects in Audacity to get it into listenable shape.

After that was done, though, it came out pretty good.

Eventually.

I mentioned it wasn’t wound smoothly. Well, it had a twist in it, so midway through “Any Time At All” it flipped over, and the recorder was playing the back of the tape — mostly silent, with just a little bleed-through, some of which was from Side 2 and was therefore backward. I had to stop, pull out tape until I got to where it was the right way around again, then rewind it by hand so it was all going the same direction.

So I did that, but missed the beginning of “Any Time At All” when I started recording again, so I had to go back and re-record that track later, when I was finished with the other ten.

Anyway, it’s all done, and a new album has been added to my collection, and I still don’t know what’s on the rest of the tape — I didn’t play more than a few seconds past the end of “Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand.”

I’ll probably try to do more tomorrow.

That Audacity problem is fixed, more or less. So “Hair” is done, at least for now. (There’s stuff I may tinker with later, but I don’t need the tape for that.)

Next up, a tape labeled Reel C that says Side 1 is Walter Carlos and Side 2 is Judy Collins. That’s more or less accurate.

I already have “Switched-On Bach” and “The Well-Tempered Synthesizer,” which make up most of Side 1. Those are probably from the same LPs I taped in the first place, and either way, they’re unneeded. I filled out the side, though, with five tracks from the soundtrack of “A Clockwork Orange,” and I didn’t annotate them at all when I recorded them. I can’t seem to match them up to any of the track lists I found for the album. Sound quality is somewhere between decent and marginal, and the album is not available for download (I understand Carlos and Kubrick had a falling-out, which may have contributed), so I’ve saved these, but have not yet filled in the metadata. It’s going to be somewhat difficult.

As for Side 2, this is most of my father’s Judy Collins collection — “Golden Apples of the Sun,” “Fifth Album,” and the first few tracks from “The Judy Collins Concert.” “In My Life” isn’t included, and that’s the only one of her albums I already had, so in theory this is new material I should be saving — but the quality isn’t so great, and these are available as downloads.

I added those three albums to my Amazon wish-list and left it at that.

Twelve down, forty to go.

The astute observer will have noticed I hadn’t posted to this blog for a week or so, after an extended run of almost-daily reports. I’ve been busy with other stuff (such as a trip to Boston).

But also, I ran into complications I’m still trying to figure out, as described below.

I mentioned that the next tape was “R2 – Rolling Stones Part 2,” which is Side 2 of “Beggar’s Banquet,” then (going purely by the written list, which is incomplete this time) “Exile on Main Street,” and “Goat’s Head Soup,” and “Get Yer Ya Yas Out.” At the very end is “Brown Sugar” and “Sway,” presumably from the beginning of “Sticky Fingers.”

I have now checked, and again, the enclosed list is accurate, so that’s another tape down, leaving forty-two.

After that was a tape that for reasons I do not remember I recorded at 7.5″ per second instead of my usual 3.75. It’s got the Broadway cast of “Hair,” and Dr. John’s “Gris Gris” and… okay, the third album listed is “Easy Rider,” but I didn’t know whether it was the soundtrack, or the Byrds’ album by that name, or what. It doesn’t say. There’s no track listing, just the three album titles on the box. Doesn’t say which “Easy Rider.”

So I played it and found out.

It’s selections from the soundtrack — at the higher speed there wasn’t room for the entire thing. So there’s “The Weight,” “Wasn’t Born to Follow,” “If You Want to Be A Bird,” “Kyrie Eleison,” and “Don’t Bogart That Joint,” and that fills it out exactly to the end of the tape.

The quality is decent, but not great, so do I save this, or add those two albums (I already have “Gris Gris”) to my buy list?

I saved the tracks from “Easy Rider,” and obviously didn’t need “Gris Gris,” but “Hair”…

Actually, “Hair” was already on my wish list, but here it is… hmm.

Oh, what the hell. I clicked the button on Amazon, and downloaded “Hair.”

…and the digital album has a lot more on it than the original LP. This is interesting.

The MP3 edition of “Hair” includes about twenty minutes of music that didn’t fit on the original LP, though I pretty much knew all the songs from other places. However, there seems to be a glitch — “What A Piece of Work Is Man” suddenly jumps to a piece of “Walking in Space” at the end. Redownloading it from the cloud didn’t help.

Also, the music had all been remastered, and on a few songs I liked the old mastering better — “Walking in Space” and “Three-Five-Zero-Zero” in particular don’t feel quite right. (The right channel is weaker than it should be, for one thing.) I could probably fix it with the equalizer in iTunes, but it’d be a nuisance.

That prompted me to decide to copy the version I had on tape after all — except that (a) it doesn’t include “Good Morning Starshine” at all; I now remember that I did that on purpose because I’d heard the song too damn often and thought it was excessively dippy, and I was running short of space on that side of the tape (the tape runs out less than three seconds after the end of “The Flesh Failures”), so I left it out,
and (b) there are some bad skips in “Walking in Space,” “Three-Five-Zero-Zero,” and “What A Piece of Work Is Man” that I didn’t notice during the initial copying. I mean, about half of “What A Piece of Work Is Man” is missing. I needed to remount the tape to see whether those skips are on the tape, or something that happened in Audacity, and that meant I had to fish the tape out of the disposal bin upstairs.

So I needed to check the tape, and I’m considering buying “Good Morning Starshine” from iTunes to replace the faulty copy from Amazon. Yes, Amazon should fix/replace it for free, but I don’t know how to make that happen and it’s worth the 99 cents to not bother with it.

The tape does not skip; it was an Audacity problem. I re-recorded that part and finished fixing it this afternoon.

But the unfortunate re-mastering and the munged “What A Piece of Work Is Man” on the download are still at issue.

Forty-one tapes remain.

“Assortment #2” was correctly catalogued, and there wasn’t anything on it I didn’t already have.

Forty-five left.

“Assortment #3” also looked good, but I double-checked by playing a few bits to make sure they match the list. They did.

Forty-four.

“Assortment #4,” on the other hand, has an index card listing a few songs and a note saying it isn’t finished, so there’s no telling what’s on it. It also appears to have at least one Led Zeppelin song that came from somewhere other than my record collection.

They won’t all be this easy, folks — I’m deliberately doing the easy-looking ones first. In fact, I decided to leave “Assortment #4” until later; instead I pulled out one labeled “R1 – Rolling Stones Part 1.” According to the enclosed list, it’s a couple of Stones albums I have, plus “Between the Buttons” and “Beggar’s Banquet,” which I don’t.

And upon playing it, it’s just what it says — well, it’s got Side 1 of “Beggar’s Banquet,” anyway, with Side 2 on the next tape.

Which brings me to a question. In cases where the only stuff I don’t have on a tape is easily-obtained classic albums available as MP3 downloads, should I bother recording and converting them? I mean, this is music I haven’t played, or missed enough to replace, in at least twenty years and probably closer to forty. If I’ve gotten along without “Beggar’s Banquet” all these years, do I need it?

Or, really… well, I did record those three sides. And the quality isn’t very good — it’s an old recording, on the cheapest tape I could find. (I hadn’t yet realized there really was a difference in quality.) I’d need to do some clean-up, and the records they were recorded from were scratched a couple of places, and I can’t fix that. So I haven’t bothered to do the editing and conversion to MP3. Instead I went to Amazon and put both albums in my MP3 shopping cart — but why bother to click the “buy” button, when I haven’t felt a need to buy these albums in all the intervening years?

The next tape, by the way, is “R2 – Rolling Stones Part 2,” which is Side 2 of “Beggar’s Banquet,” then (going purely by the written list, which is incomplete this time) “Exile on Main Street,” and “Goat’s Head Soup,” and “Get Yer Ya Yas Out.” At the very end is “Brown Sugar” and “Sway,” presumably from the beginning of “Sticky Fingers.” I have “Goat’s Head Soup” and “Sticky Fingers,” but not the others. There’s no MP3 download of “Get Yer Ya Yas Out” available for sale, so I’d have to buy the CD of that one, if I bought it.

For now, I’ll just do without. I can always buy them later if I change my mind.

Meanwhile, I’m still trying to figure out what to do with tapes when I’m done with them. There’s no after-market for homemade tapes, even if selling them were legal. I don’t know anyone else with a reel-to-reel tape recorder, so I can’t give them to friends. I don’t have an obvious use for miles of brownish streamers.

Sigh.

Forty-six tapes remain.

Today’s project was a tape labeled “Assortment #1,” which was a motley collection of tracks I liked off albums that (at the time) I wasn’t that enthusiastic about, along with a few singles I had on hand, and a stretch recorded off the radio.

It included a typed list which turned out to be absolutely accurate, right down to the counter numbers. The entire first side of the tape, roughly an hour and a half, was stuff I already had on iTunes, so I didn’t need to record any of it.

Side 2 was another matter. I had the first four songs, but then came Neil Diamond’s “Holly Holy,” which I think may be his best song ever (he thought so, too, I’ve read), which was recorded off the single, which I’d bought when it first came out.

I don’t have the single anymore. It went missing somewhere in the thirty-plus years between making this tape and copying my singles to MP3. So I booted up Audacity and started recording, and didn’t turn it off until halfway through the next-to-last song. (Would’ve been sooner if I’d actually been paying attention.)

So I got “Holly Holy,” then skipped a couple, but transferred Bette Midler’s “Delta Dawn” because while I still had the single (it’s the B-side of “The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B”), it was kind of scratchy by the time I copied it to MP3. So now I have two copies of the same record, where one’s scratchy and the other’s weak in the higher frequencies (a common problem with old magnetic tape, and with this particular tape recorder).

And that’s apparently where I ran out of stuff to record when I originally made this tape, because the next five tracks were recorded off the radio. Specifically, according to the list they were recorded off WYDD 104.7 FM, which was the station I listened to when I lived in Pittsburgh, 1974-1977.

WYDD has changed call letters many times since, it seems, but from 1967 until some time in the ’80s it was WYDD. Apparently it started out as a jazz station, but when I listened to it it was album rock, and very, very good.

I was horrified to discover just now that it’s now WPGB and is a right-wing talk station. In the ’70s it was about as far from that as can be imagined. I’m trying to remember their slogan — “WYDD — [something] radio for unsold ears.” Can’t fill in that blank right now. They were locally owned, completely independent. (WPGB is Clear Channel.)

Honest radio for unsold ears? Maybe.

Anyway, they played a huge variety of cool stuff, from Dr. Demento to unreleased recordings by Buckingham Nicks (I’ll get to those later — I taped them). And I taped five tracks here — but I didn’t do a terribly good job of it, so there are missed beginnings and endings, and a couple of places where I apparently paused the tape for a fraction of a second for some reason, causing a blip. I also didn’t always catch the DJ saying what he was playing. So the first of the five tracks is “unidentified boogie #1,” and the second is “unidentified boogie #2.” They’re instrumental, so I can’t use the lyrics to track them down; no idea who recorded them, but they rock, despite my interrupting the first one twice and missing the beginnings and ends of both, so I’m keeping them.

The next track is “It’s All Over Now,” by Rod Stewart — slightly truncated, alas, missing about fifteen seconds of a six-minutes-and-change running time, but still worth keeping.

And then “I’m Going Home,” by Alvin Lee, recorded live — but not the performance at Woodstock. Not Ten Years After at all; Alvin Lee solo. No idea where it’s from. I loved WYDD.

And finally — well, I thought this was one I wouldn’t be keeping, but I was wrong. It’s “Radar Love,” by Golden Earring, and I have the album “The Continuing Story of Radar Love,” but this isn’t the same version. I had the album version; now I have both the album version and the full single version. (There’s also an edited-down single version.)

But after that I finished out the tape with half a dozen more album tracks, and those all duplicated items already in my collection.

So I kept/copied seven songs out of thirty-nine.

Six tapes down, forty-six to go. Progress!

Forty-seven tapes to go.

I had one that was unlabeled on the box, but inside was a slip of paper saying “Emmy Lou Harris Luxury Liner.” Well, I have “Luxury liner” on CD, so I figured that if that was all that was on the tape, it’d be a quick toss.

So I start playing it, and there’s “Luxury Liner,” apparently taped off WKQQ in 1978… and after that album there’s more music; it doesn’t stop. There are five individual songs, and then… another album. “Don’t Look Back,” by Boston. Which I did not have.

So now I do; I just finished editing the MP3 version. And I have “5.7.0.5,” by City Boy, and “Can’t You See,” by the Marshall Tucker Band, and “Double Vision,” by Foreigner, and why don’t I own any Foreigner albums, anyway? And “Kiss You All Over,” by Exile — that came out when we lived in Lexington KY, which is where Exile was from, so it was huge there. And “On the Border,” by Al Stewart, which has me thinking I should get a copy of “Year of the Cat.”

The copies aren’t perfect. There are weird little glitches. I fixed a couple — half a second of repeated music in one song, and an opening the DJ accidentally played at 45 RPM instead of 33 — but most weren’t worth fiddling with, or weren’t fixable. The DJ’s cross-fades weren’t bad, but they cut off beginnings and ends some places.

There’s just a little bit of hum, not bad enough to be worth trying to correct, and there’s a tiny muffling in places, but these are good enough to be worth playing.

Anyway, that filled out Side 1 of the tape; “Don’t Look Back” ended about ten seconds before the tape ran out. And Side 2 was completely blank.

Next up is one labeled “Assortment #1,” which includes a typed song list. If it’s accurate, I have everything on Side 1, but there’s stuff on Side 2 I’ll want. I have most of it, but not all.

Continuing with the Joplin/Airplane tape, and specifically the recording of “I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama!” I re-recorded it. If I tinker and fuss, I can get the sound quality to marginally acceptable. But why should I, when I can buy a copy on Amazon for seven bucks? My time’s worth more than that.

Don’t know why the quality is so very poor.

As for the stuff after that on Side 1, it’s a chunk of the first, self-titled album by Big Brother & the Holding Company, the Columbia re-issue with two added tracks — it’s nowhere near complete, only about four tracks, but one of them wasn’t on the original Mainstream pressing.

That’s another seven bucks on Amazon.

As for side 2, that’s the Airplane, specifically “After Bathing At Baxter’s,” “Crown of Creation,” “Bless Its Pointed Little Head,” and a few songs from “Jefferson Airplane Takes Off.” I have all that stuff on CD, so that’s another tape done. Four down, forty-eight to go.

Meanwhile, I’ve been replacing the glitched CD transfers. No problems worth mentioning repairing/replacing “Get Born,” by Jet; “Hello,” by Poe; “Supernature,” by Goldfrapp; “Especially for You,” by the Smithereens; or “Sirius,” by Clannad.

According to the notes I wrote for myself the last two, by Janet Jackson and Robert Palmer, only have one or two bad tracks apiece, so this should be easy.

And then there are the four VHS tapes that turned up, a year after I thought I was done with VHS. Two have been copied to DVD, edited, and finalized, though I still need to make a cover page for the Oct. 1992 episode of Fast Forward. A third turns out to be a copy of the first one — an hour and five minutes of the two hours and twenty minutes of home movies — so I don’t need to do anything with that.

The last one is my sister Jody’s memorial service, which runs an hour and forty minutes. I’ll tackle that eventually.

First the tapes. I said I was going to check out “Janis Joplin ’68/70 / Jefferson Airplane 68-69,” which I suspected was all just albums I already have.

Oh, dear. I was wrong.

The first big chunk is “Joplin in Concert,” which I already have. That’s followed, though, by “I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama!” which I don’t have, but the quality is really crappy. I recorded it, but it was bad enough I erased the recording, and will try again. (I have tricks that might help.)

I think I actually remember where I got this one; I believe a friend of mine in high school, the late Glenn Cooper, loaned me his copy of “Kozmic Blues” so I could tape it.

Anyway, that left another ten minutes or so at the end of Side 1, and there was music there, but I didn’t recognize it immediately and was busy with other stuff when it came around. I’ll check it out when I’ve re-recorded it.

If I can’t get a clean copy of “Kozmic Blues,” well, I could always buy the album. It’s available on CD or as MP3 downloads.

As for side 2, haven’t touched it yet. I’ve been distracted by CDs.

Okay, this is a side-thread, not about the tapes.

Back in 2008 I ripped all my CDs to my computer — or I thought I did; as mentioned some time back, I’d somehow missed Robin Trower’s “Bridge of Sighs.” Anyway, most of them have survived just fine since, come unscathed through multiple hard drive crashes (thanks to multiple back-ups), and made the transition from one computer to the next safely.

And of course, I added new CDs as they were acquired.

However, somewhere in there — and I don’t know when or how — some of them were corrupted; in at least one case I’m pretty sure it didn’t rip properly to begin with, while others may have suffered in transit somewhere. There’s one where I’m pretty sure the back-up was faulty, and unfortunately, that’s the one I used when I moved them to Beth, and the original is long gone (see above re: hard drive crashes).

So since I’ve been sorting through old media, including filing away hundreds of CDs, I figured this was a good time to clean those up, since I do still have the original CDs.

There were ten that I knew of. I pulled those ten CDs aside, and just a couple of days ago I started deleting them from iTunes and re-ripping them. Billy Idol’s “Greatest Hits” went fine, but today I tried to replace Sarah Brightman’s “Harem.”

Windows Media Player balked; it ripped the first thirteen tracks just fine, but repeatedly stalled out 90% of the way through the fourteenth and final song. Which is one of my favorites — “You Take My Breath Away.”

Fortunately, I realized before I started tearing my hair out that that wasn’t where the damage was in the previous version, and moving stuff to the trash doesn’t actually erase it. I was able to retrieve the old copy, and add it to the thirteen new ones to complete the replacement album. It’s just finished playing through, and appears to
be fine.

Good.

I still don’t know how it went bad in the first place, so I was concerned.

Anyway, it’s fixed, and backed up to three places on two separate external hard drives, and later I’ll be copying it to two more.

Yes, I’m paranoid, but I don’t want to lose any MP3s — I have a lot, and some of them are irreplaceable. So everything gets backed up a minimum of four places.

Next up in the CD queue: “Dirty Vegas,” which I thought was okay except for the untitled bonus track.

Actually, the first eight tracks were fine, but I found some subtle glitches in #9, and #12, the bonus track, was definitely flawed.

Fixed now. Seven to go.

Well, now I know what was on Side 2 of the unmarked tape: Another King Biscuit Flower Hour concert. This one is Boston, playing at Long Beach, March 19, 1977, on “Best of the Biscuit,” i.e., a King Biscuit Flower Hour rerun. I can pin down more details than usual because not only was this KBFH extensively bootlegged, but there was also a legal record release in the ’90s.

I’d apparently set the recorder up and left partway through, because it still has the ads for the second half (a couple of which are worth keeping in their own right, e.g., Ray Charles singing a ditty about Scotch brand Recording Tape), and goes straight into the following show, which was also worth keeping: “Rock Around the World,” show #169 (How weird is it that there are obsessive fan sites cataloguing Rock Around the World, but none that I’ve found for the King Biscuit Flower Hour?).

RATW #169 opened with twenty minutes of Pure Prairie League in concert on Long Island somewhere, followed by interviews with Bob Welch and Mick Fleetwood, interspersed with some of Welch’s music. Unfortunately, the tape ran out before the interview ended, so it cuts off rather abruptly. Still, I got twenty minutes of good Pure Prairie League (they were better on stage than in the studio), including a song that they never released anywhere, not even on a live album, but for which (thank heavens) they gave title and composer (“Choo Choo Charlie,” by Tim Goshorn) from the stage.

What’s kind of sad is that listening to the Welch interview, it’s clear that he was struggling with depression all the way back in the ’70s, so that his suicide in 2012 should not have surprised anyone.

Anyway, both these shows ran on WKQQ in Lexington, KY, on October 30, 1977; that’s where I got them.

While researching dates, I was startled to discover that apparently the current WKQQ-FM in Winchester is not the one I used to listen to; that one went bust, and when WLEX (which I remember and didn’t care for) moved from Lexington to Winchester in the ’90s they took over the defunct station’s frequency and call letters.

Anyway, I’ve got both shows converted to MP3 and added to my iTunes library.

So, that was the unlabeled tape. Three down, forty-nine to go. The remaining forty-nine are almost all labeled, but some of the labels are things like “Stuff” or “Mostly blank,” which aren’t very helpful.

The next one I’m going to check out, tonight or tomorrow, says “Janis Joplin ’68/70 / Jefferson Airplane 68-69,” which I suspect is all just albums I already have. However, it’s 2400 ft of tape, which at my usual 3.75 ips speed would be over four hours, so there may well be other stuff on there I do want.

You know, at typically a little over three hours each, these tapes are going to take awhile.

I thought I’d start with an easy one, i.e., one I thought was blank.

It wasn’t. It turns out to have the complete King Biscuit Flower Hour show of a 1977 concert by the Grateful Dead at Arizona State University.

The broadcast wasn’t the whole concert, maybe half of it, plus one song, “Terrapin Station,” from another show somewhere. Despite the “Flower Hour” name, it was a ninety-minute show; after trimming out ads and announcements it’s about eighty minutes of music.

It’s pretty good stuff. There’s some hum — my recorder’s pre-Dolby — and some bits where the treble fell off, but the quality is mostly a pleasant surprise, given that it was recorded over thirty-five years ago on a machine that’s now well over forty years old.

And I’m surprised it’s from as recently as ’77; I didn’t think I was still using the reel-to-reel that late.

Anyway, the Dead. Yeah. Eighty minutes, eight songs; they weren’t exactly in a hurry. When Buddy Holly first recorded “Not Fade Away,” it took two minutes, seventeen seconds. When the Dead performed it that night in Tempe, it took 27:58. (Admittedly, it opened with a drum solo and included their own song, “Black Peter,” stuck in the
middle.)

The rest of Side 1 of the tape was filled out with an apparently-random assortment of Jethro Tull — it sounds as if I’d had an entire side of Tull, and taped over the first eighty-plus minutes of it. I just skipped the Tull; it’s all stuff I already had.

I don’t know what’s on Side 2; I haven’t played it yet.

You know, most of these tapes are labeled; I don’t know why this one wasn’t.

But that’s one side down, leaving 49.5 tapes to go.