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.

Next up: 2400 ft. “Professional quality” Realistic tape, i.e., Radio Shack, with no reel number or date, but under “subject” it says “ROLLING STONES FM/LIVE.”

You’ve probably already guessed — yes, it’s the King Biscuit Flower Hour again. A 90-minute one, actually — the regular show and a follow-on interview with Mick Jagger.

I’ve identified it as an October 1973 concert that KBFH used at least four times, in ’74, ’75, and the ’80s. The interview wasn’t included on the bootlegs that are my best reference source, so I can’t place it. The interviewers are Peter Cooke and Dudley Moore, though.

I recorded this in either ’74 or ’75, but I don’t know which.

I screwed up the beginning when I was recording it, so after a few minutes of lousy, impossibly-low-volume music there’s my voice saying, “Oh, shit,” and then a click as it switches from microphone to line feed. And despite what Bill Minken of KBFH says, it’s not really ninety minutes; after about 88 minutes there’s a little dead air, then the WYDD DJ comes on and says, “They told me it was ninety minutes!”

As an interview, the interview is worthless; it’s Jagger and some others screwing around, with questions like, “So this second track — it came after the first, did it?”

Still, there’s a moderate amount of good music in there, and some of the interview is actually funny.

I didn’t try salvaging the opening. I missed “Gimme Shelter,” and have catalogued the rest as starting with Track 2, rather than 1.

And a 2400-ft. tape at normal speed is over two hours long per side, so what’s on the rest?

Well, a few minutes of WYDD, with “Mr. Bojangles” by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and another song or three I don’t remember right now.

After that I turned off WYDD, and from that point on there’s nothing I want to keep. First comes “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” and “Within You Without You” played at 7.5 IPS, and then it’s back to 3.75 IPS for the very end of the tape and all of Side 2, where we find the rest of Side 2 of Sgt. Pepper, followed by the Vanilla Fudge album “The Beat Goes On,” then “The Mason Williams Listening Matter,” and finally “Early Steppenwolf.”

All of which are already in my collection, and in much better quality.

So I just needed to clean up and edit to MP3 the Stones stuff and maybe a couple of those songs off WYDD, and I’m done.

There were four songs from WYDD. “Mr. Bojangles” was first, and it’s not the hit single, it’s a live version. Definitely worth saving.

After that, though, we have an Eric Clapton song, Seals & Crofts, and Loggins & Messina, none of them very good. I don’t know why the DJ thought that would be a good set to play after the Stones, but I’ve saved them all anyway, as a “various artists” album entitled WYDD, because the crossfades made it hard to split them up cleanly.

All done now.

Thirty-four left. Next up: The Blank Box.

Next in the stack: An 1800-foot 3M/Scotch tape in an unlabeled box. There’s an enclosed song list, though, calling it “Album Assortment,” which says that Side 1 is Pink Floyd’s “Animals,” “New World Record” by the Electric Light Orchestra, and the first four songs from Foreigner’s self-titled album.

Side 2, it says, is “Leftoverture” by Kansas, “Hotel California” by the Eagles, and two singles: “Outlaw Man” (more Eagles) and “We Ain’t Got Nothin’ Yet” by the Blues Magoos.

The list (which has most but not all of the individual track titles) is accurate. For most of the tape there’s no perceptible tape noise at all — that’s what happens when you use high-quality tape and a decent stereo to record an album. However, there’s some slight “muffling” due to high-frequency loss, especially on “New World Record.”

I already had “Animals” and “Leftoverture,” and the other stuff is all available fairly cheap, so I thought I might just toss this and buy the rest, instead of spending my time editing.

But naah. I didn’t edit and save “New World Record” or “Foreigner,” but I went ahead with “Hotel California” — it was such a clean recording it seemed stupid to waste it.

I knew I had “Outlaw Man” on “Desperado,” so that went straight into the bit bucket. Turns out I also already had the Blues Magoos song — that was from one of my own singles. Didn’t catch that initially. I MP3ed it, then realized the duplication and tossed the new copy.

Still haven’t decided whether I want to bother going back to “New World Record” or the fragment of “Foreigner.” I saved the Audacity file, just in case I decide I do.

The tape, though, is finished and discarded.

That leaves thirty-five.

I’ve decided to do next all the tapes that aren’t Concertape 44-1018 — that was my standard type, and most of what I had, but there were a few others mixed in. 44-1018 was cheap 1,800-foot stuff.

Today I played my last Concertape that’s not that specific type — it’s 44-1060A. It’s 2,400 feet instead of 1,800, which means it’s a bit over two hours a side. The box says “Woodstock I & II/Atlanta Pop Festival, Part One.”

The majority of it is indeed from the albums Woodstock I and Woodstock II, which I already have in my collection — I probably taped it off my own LPs. The interesting (at least to me) thing is that I re-edited them. I cut John Sebastian’s “I Had A Dream,” for example, and moved it to go with “Rainbows All Over Your Blues.” I may have trimmed out some (not anywhere near all) of the stage announcements and crowd noise, and I inserted stuff from the second album in where I thought it belonged on the first, so that for example Canned Heat’s “Woodstock Boogie” comes immediately after “Going Up the Country.” Which is, according to the 40th anniversary set, exactly where it actually came.

I also inserted Mountain between Sha Na Na and Country Joe Macdonald, but I don’t know why — I didn’t know what order the acts appeared in, and in fact, Mountain actually performed after that. Maybe I just liked the transition better that way.

And you know, this is the first time I’ve noticed that Woodstock II includes Hendrix stuff that apparently isn’t on the supposedly-as-complete-as-possible 40th anniversary set. I’ll want to check on that — it may all be in that medley that the 40th treats as a single track.

Anyway, this is interesting, but I won’t be keeping any of the Woodstock music. The Atlanta Pop Festival, on the other hand — I never had that on an album. I’m guessing either I somehow got hold of Columbia’s “The First Great Rock Festivals of the Seventies” set long enough to tape it, or I recorded it off the radio; I have another tape here in the stack that says it has the Isle of Wight festival, which was also on that album.

The sound quality is okay, but there’s a definite background hum.

Over an hour into Side 2, still on Woodstock, where I did indeed put “I Had A Dream” together with “Rainbows All Over Your Blues.”

iTunes says the two Woodstock albums add up to 3 hours and 46 minutes. Close. I think I wound up with 3:43 of Woodstock on this tape.

And the tape finished off with 27 minutes from the second Atlanta International Pop Festival, from 1970, featuring Johnny Winter, Poco, the Chambers Brothers, and the Allman Brothers. Which I needed to clean up and edit a bit. I ran noise removal on it.

It all came out pretty well, and is now in my collection. I wonder whether Part Two of the Atlanta festival is somewhere in the stack of remaining tapes? I haven’t noticed it.

Thirty-six more to go. Thirty-two of them are Concertape 44-1018.

On to the next tape: “Assortment #4,” mentioned here before.

The enclosed index card lists eight tracks — three studio cuts by Led Zeppelin, all of which I had; three tracks by the Eagles, two of which I had; and two live tracks by Zeppelin, which I did not have. I played those, and the list was accurate — but that wasn’t the end. There was a lot more that wasn’t listed anywhere.

Specifically, Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” — the single version, a minute shorter than the album cut, and I decided I don’t need that since I do have the album. Then Bad Company’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy,” which I did not have. Then two concerts from the King Biscuit Flower Hour, featuring Blondie and George Thorogood and the Destroyers.

So that’s interesting.

I tossed out the three studio tracks by Zeppelin, transferred “Take It to the Limit” to MP3, and tossed the other two Eagles tracks (which I had listed with the wrong titles).

The two live Zeppelin tracks turn out to be Side Three of “The Song Remains the Same.” I’m cool with that. They’ve been added to the collection.

I dumped “Heart of Glass.”

Those KBFH concerts — they’re less than half an hour each. Maybe they were a two-artist show? Or parts of two differents shows?

Anyway, they’re all squared away now — sorta. The thing is, when I went looking for dates, I only found KBFH shows for these bands from later than internal evidence indicates these to be. The playlists didn’t match, either. From the stage chatter on the Blondie set it’s from mid-1978, where the Blondie KBFH that turns up as a bootleg is from December 1980. I couldn’t find any record of a 1978 show.

So I swiped the cover of one of the 1980 bootlegs and used that, even though it isn’t right.

As for Thorogood, he did several KBFH, but this appears to be from earlier than any that I’ve found listed. It’s from a concert in Cleveland, but that doesn’t seem to help — they play Cleveland a lot. In fact, they’ll be there again later this year.

So I pasted up a cover using the KBFH logo with the name of the band lettered in.

The sound quality on the Blondie one isn’t all that great — I think I recorded it off a radio with less-than-perfect reception. The George Thorogood one is just fine, though, and the band was having a good night.

As for Side 2, which I didn’t play until a couple of days later: Twelve minutes (three songs and some stage chatter) of Devo in concert followed by eighty-five minutes of blank tape.

Nice to have the Devo — which is not King Biscuit Flower Hour; I don’t know where it’s from, but it’s off the radio, and the partial station break on the tape doesn’t fit the KBFH pattern. The playlist and other details lead me to think it’s a July 1980 appearance in Cincinnati, but how these few minutes of it wound up on the radio, I don’t know.

So that leaves what, thirty-seven?