Today I tackled the last of the tapes from Larry Boyd, a mix tape labeled “Alternative & Otherwise from the ’80s.” Twenty-three tracks from sixteen and a half bands/performers. (The half is Bonzo Goes to Washington, which existed only inasmuch as it’s the name the guys who made “Five Minutes” put on their recording.)

I’d never heard of several of these — the Mentors, Swans, World of Skin, Live Skull, Frightwig, Big Black, Holy Cow, the Proletariat. I’d only encountered Dinosaur under their later name, Dinosaur Jr. (They had to change it when they started selling overseas — there was a British band called Dinosaur that had dibs on the name.)

LL Cool J I’d certainly heard of, but I’m not sure I’d actually heard any of his numbers. Likewise Schoolly D.

Public Enemy I knew, of course — I was just playing them last night.

I knew Butthole Surfers and Motorhead and Killdozer and Henry Rollins, but hadn’t heard these particular songs. I think; I might’ve heard “Orgasmatron” before. Not a big Motorhead fan.

Frightwig is a lot of fun, but nothing very special musically.

I like World of Skin rather a lot. Gloomy chick singer — what a shock!

And Holy Cow takes the prize for most depressing, but is also extremely listenable: “Work work work work work work work work eat sleep work work…”

Nothing else stands out as anything all that very special, but nothing on here sucks, either. (LL Cool J’s “I Need A Beat” is probably the weakest.) It should be a good album to play when I’m feeling misanthropic.

Ohmigod, I practically laughed myself out of my chair just now…

I did the Dan Hicks CD, and also ordered some CDs from Amazon to replace some earlier bad tapes, three of which came with AutoRip, so I added those to my collection — I’m over 1,000 “albums” in iTunes now. Then I started on “Ol’ Yellow Eyes Is Back,” which I’d played part of when I first got it.

Then on Side B of that tape was something I’d never noticed before; I know I’d never played it. It’s “Cutting Their Own Groove,” by Big Daddy. Or most of it — it cut off halfway through the last song.

I’d never heard of Big Daddy before. What they do sounds stupid, but it is hysterically funny. They take well-known songs and perform them in the arrangements of completely different songs.

I started writing this while listening to Wilson Phillips’ “Hold On” performed in the arrangement of “Your Love Keeps Lifting Me (Higher and Higher).” The one that had me falling out of my chair, though, was “Money for Nothing” done as “Sixteen Tons.”

“The Living Years” done as “The Leader of the Pack” was also pretty damn funny.

Why have I never heard of these guys? Why did it take me 21.5 years
(the tape’s dated 9/6/92) to get around to playing this?

I’m just glad the tape hadn’t deteriorated; it’s just about perfect.

The last cut, “Help Me Make It Through the Night” done as “Yakkety Yak,” was cut short; I paid 99 cents to download the complete version.

“Ice Ice Baby” was done as “Johnny B. Good.” “Welcome to the Jungle” as “Wimoweh.” I’m stunned.

I may want to pick up some of their other albums.

Oh, yeah — Brent Spiner’s “Ol’ Yellow Eyes Is Back” demonstrates that Spiner can sing the hell out of classic lounge songs. Beautiful voice well used. Unfortunately, I really don’t like that style of song, so I don’t know if I’ll ever play it again.

This leaves four music tapes, all of them “various artists” collections someone sent me, and a dozen spoken-word tapes of one sort or another.

Side 1 of that Larry Boyd tape is done. A bunch more Mission of Burma, and a chunk of Husker Du. I don’t have much more to say about it.

I mentioned that I had six more tapes of music left to go — one more from Larry Boyd, and five from someone else, but I’m not sure who.

I did one of those other five today; the sender labeled it “The Very Best of Squeeze (’78-’91).” It’s got pieces of eleven different albums. No real problems with the transfer, or finding any of the relevant data.

I remember that this was sent because I’d said I wasn’t a Squeeze fan, and this was an attempt to convert me. It didn’t work, though I admit it did raise my opinion of the band somewhat. Prior to playing this I pretty much only knew the stuff that got played on MTV, and they were a better, more varied band than that sample had shown.

But I’m still not a big Squeeze fan.

(Incidentally, I sorted this out into fragments of the eleven albums, rather than leaving it as a “best of.”)

Next up — I never did finish up the Dan Hicks tape because the quality just wasn’t good enough. One of the albums on there is no longer in print and was never available on MP3, but I picked up a used copy online for a reasonable price, and it arrived Saturday. I’m going to rip that to my computer. After that, back to the remaining tapes. Five more music tapes, all either 90 or 100 minutes, and a dozen assorted tapes of spoken word stuff; not sure what order I’ll do them in. The last from Larry Boyd says it’s ’80s alternative; of the other four, three are just labeled “Various Artists” (numbered 1-3), and the last is Brent Spiner’s “Old Yellow Eyes Is Back.”

I wasn’t sure how much time I’d have to record today, so I started out doing a short tape, a C-30, from Larry Boyd.

Side 1 was five tracks from Mission of Burma — the original, not the reconstituted band. Two of them were live, three of them were demos that Larry had snagged somewhere. (They did eventually wind up on a compilation album, after Mission of Burma broke up.)

Side Two is Disarray, captioned “Last Recordings ’86.” Four tracks that I didn’t already have (though two of the four have live versions on the 15th anniversary tape).

So I have seven songs, altogether, that Disarray never put on any sort of album. I’m pretty sure this is the last of them — I only have one more of Larry’s tapes left to go, and I didn’t see any Disarray on there.

I don’t find myself terribly enthused about Mission of Burma; I actually like the Disarray tracks better.

And I did get started on another tape — a C-90 from Larry Boyd that he labeled “A Trio of Trio’s.” It’s one-third Mission of Burma, one-third Husker Du, and one-third the Minutemen. However, I didn’t get it finished. And it’s not in order; it was wound to the end of Side 1, so I recorded Side 2 first, then Side 1.

Side 2 got edited; Side 1 will get done later, probably tomorrow. I’ve got five tracks from Husker Du, four off their album Zen Arcade and one single that was never on an album. Seventeen (!) tracks by the Minutemen come from four different albums.

Both of these tapes, like most of Larry’s, are good quality. It took me two tries to do the short one, though; it is possible to crash the new version of Audacity. I had it all recorded, but it failed to save properly and I had to start over. The second time, no problem.

When the second of today’s tapes is done I’ll have six more tapes of music left to go — one more from Larry Boyd, and five from someone else, but I’m not sure who. Pretty sure they’re all from the same person.

And then there are a dozen or so tapes of stuff other than music.

More from Larry Boyd: 90 minutes (roughly) by his band Disarray. This is labeled as “Angle/Reangle 1979-1985,” an Ahooastia recording — if you google “Ahooastia,” the only real hit you’ll find is the credits to song lyrics the reconstituted Disarray wrote after Larry was gone, so I guess that was the band’s music publishing company.

The tape package also sometimes has Disarray spelled “DSR@.”

It’s 24 songs, apparently in chronological order; the band’s style changed over time. I like the early stuff a lot — I don’t know if I’d ever played it, and suspect I didn’t, because I think I’d remember it if I had, as it’s damn good. “Straight Line/Brick Wall” is probably my favorite.

The middle period, from “Radio Free” through “War is Big Dicks,” I don’t care for much, really, but then in the last part “Ghost Fuckers” and “My Intimate Friend” are nice stuff.

Most of this seems to be studio recordings, but there are a few live numbers on Side 2.

Larry always said Disarray was a punk band, which was one reason I didn’t play all the tapes he sent — I didn’t really get into punk until later. Listening to this stuff, while it’s deliberately pretty raw, I wouldn’t really call it punk. It antedates grunge, but that’s the same esthetic, really.

I mean, I can see punk influence certainly — when one song’s lyrics include a little speech something like, “Hi, we’re Disarray, and here’s a one-chord song about flies,” it’s not exactly hard to see a disdain for the niceties of traditional performance — but it’s not manic enough for real punk.

Anyway, I have the impression that Disarray sort of broke up in 1985, and then re-formed several times but not necessarily with the same personnel, so if I have it right this tape is pretty much the entire repertoire of the original line-up.

I pasted up a cover for it from the only picture of Larry Boyd I’ve ever seen, for lack of anything better; I had already used the only Disarray poster I could find for the 15th anniversary concert album.

The transfer — well, the new version of Audacity doesn’t crash. I got distracted and recorded about an hour and a half of silence between sides, and it still worked just fine. And the tape was mostly excellent quality. There were a few tracks with noise here and there, and one or two of the live numbers (e.g., “Helicopter Dreemz”) aren’t exactly perfect, but I’m pretty sure that’s in the originals, not a problem on my end.

Back in 1997 I got a taped letter from someone I’d never heard of before. He was writing in hopes of convincing me to come and speak to an organization I had once belonged to; he’d joined it three years after I left, and was worried that it wasn’t growing; he thought guest speakers might help.

Mind you, he hadn’t actually discussed any of this with the rest of the group before sending me the tape.

He sent a tape instead of a letter, he said, because he was out of writing paper, but had a big bag of blank cassettes he’d picked up dirt cheap somewhere.

Nothing ever came of the speaking idea, but I wound up exchanging letters with the guy for a few years.

Anyway, today I recorded that original taped letter, which included all three versions of the theme song from “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” as well as some random instrumental track I didn’t recognize, and of course the long, rambling letter, about fifty minutes of it.

I don’t mind having the MST3K music, and the letter itself is intermittently interesting — the long tangent about how surgical prostheses are over-engineered was perversely fascinating — so I’m keeping it, and have added it to my library.

I got that done fairly early, and decided to do more, so I’m just now finishing up with a 90-minute tape of Das Ludicroix. Das Ludicroix was an improvisational band put together by the late Larry Boyd; they played what one reviewer called “Space Rock.” Given that they pretty much never knew what they were playing, it’s surprisingly good stuff.

The tape Larry sent says it’s two albums — “Jammed and Stoning,” which is two 20-minute-plus jams entitled “Indications” I and II, and “Buzz Bomb,” which has four tracks with titles that don’t have anything to do with the music so far as I can see.

Tape quality is excellent, the new Audacity doesn’t seem to crash — everything went very smoothly.

Yesterday:

I didn’t want to post anything here on April 1, so I held this back.

Someone long ago sent me a tape labeled simply “Stan Rogers.” Turns out to be two complete albums — “Between the Breaks… Live!” and “From Fresh Water.”

I recorded them, sped them up 6%, ran a noise reduction filter over the whole thing, amplified it somewhat, and started divvying it up into tracks. Seemed to be going well.

Except then I noticed that the times didn’t match the listings online — apparently the machine that originally recorded the tape was slow, too. I should have sped it up more. By the time I realized this, though, I was about halfway through and didn’t want to re-do it all.

I did notice the noise was getting worse, though, so I filtered the last half-dozen tracks again, and got it better.

It sounds pretty good, but it’s definitely not perfect.

As for the music itself, it’s Stan Rogers — Canadian neo-folk.

Today:

Tackled another of Larry Boyd’s punk samplers; this was a C-60, only an hour, of Lou Reed, Flipper, Suicidal Tendencies, Disarray, Crass, Sonic Youth, Charged GBH, U.K. Subs, the Art of Noise, and Bonzo Goes to Washington.

I almost put “Bonzo Goes to Washington” in quotes, because that wasn’t a band, it was the one-shot name the people who created “Five Minutes” put on their record. “Five Minutes,” for anyone who doesn’t remember 1984, was a sample/remix of Reagan’s “joke” about “outlawing Russia.”

It was only about four minutes long; I think they should have made it exactly five, but they didn’t ask me.

And yes, I know the Art of Noise isn’t punk, and Lou Reed is sort of proto-punk, but Larry included them anyway. This time he seemed to focus on hardcore British punk, but there was an assortment.

Larry had some good equipment; this has no perceptible noise and the times match up exactly. An easy transfer; the hard part was figuring out what albums all these tracks came off. (And of course, I can’t find anything useful about Disarray on the web, so I’m just collecting those tracks as an album entitled “unknown.”)

Oh, and earlier today I did some testing. The tape of Fleetwood Mac backed with Dan Hicks that I got from God knows where isn’t really salvageable; it’s a crappy recording, and filtering it won’t put back the stuff that’s missing. Side 1 consists of the album “Bare Trees” and a few cuts from “Mystery to Me,” while Side 2 has “Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks” and a few songs from “Striking It Rich.” I went ahead and downloaded “Striking It Rich,” but the others I’ll need to buy on CD if I want them. Which I kinda do. So they’re on my shopping list.

Yesterday:

Sigh. Audacity crashed after a tape I was recording ended, but before I got back to shut it off, and although I could see the files, I couldn’t recover them.

Trying to figure out how, though, led me to discover that there’s a newer version of Audacity available, and according to the forum this one does not have that particular form of crash — they fixed it! So I upgraded, but by then there wasn’t time to re-record the tape, so nothing was finished yesterday.

The new version has some very visible differences; I’m assuming they didn’t mess up anything I liked. So far, the changes I’ve seen are either neutral or improvements, except for the esthetics of certain windows.

It’s taking me a little while to get used to it, but I can see that once I’ve adjusted, this version will be better.

Later:

I’ve done Side 2 of the tape Larry Boyd sent with a Misfits album on Side 1; Side 2 has stuff by the Angry Samoans, Flipper, Motorhead, Agent Orange, Suicidal Tendencies, and Disarray. I’m getting an education in early punk.

My favorite remains “They Saved Hitler’s Cock,” by the Angry Samoans.

No real problems with copying and editing — I filtered out some noise with no problem at all. I think that was easier and worked better than with the old version of Audacity. The only small glitch was that some cuts came out at lower volume than they should have, but that’s an easy fix in iTunes.

Today:

Huh. Turns out that the first side is not simply a Misfits album; Larry fooled me, as it starts off just being “Walk Among Us, then veers off halfway through. It’s about half of “Walk Among Us,” three cuts off “Earth A.D./Wolfs Blood,” all three songs from the “Die, Die My Darling” single (punk songs tend to be really short, and the B side of the single has two songs), and two of the three songs from “3 Hits from Hell.”

(Actually, the cassette version of “Earth A.D./Wolfs Blood” included the three cuts off “Die, Die My Darling,” and that’s probably where Larry got ’em, but I really like the cover of the single, so I went by the LP versions in categorizing them.)

So I now have sixteen Misfits tracks, and two more very short ones by the Angry Samoans (from “Back from Samoa,” as were all the Samoans songs on Side 2) that got squeezed in at the end. And it all fit on one side of a C-60 tape.

I’m getting to like the updated Audacity, by the way, as I learn the shortcuts. It handles metadata better, seems more stable, is maybe even a little faster in processing stuff.

Today’s first tape was a recording of a panel at Dimension Con, March 27, 1982. The panelists included William Gaines, Al Feldstein, Jack Kamen, Marie Severin, and Jack Davis, some of whom hadn’t seen each other for twenty years or more.

If you recognize the names, you know what the panel was about — E.C. Comics.

I was not at that convention, but a reader sent me the tape.

Alas, the sound quality isn’t very good, and I wasn’t able to clean it up very effectively; I suspect an actual sound engineer could have done it, but I can’t.

Still, it’s good to have it.

I also had a tape labeled “Lawrence Watt-Evans RB.” I assumed from that label that it was me on a panel, or being interviewed, or something, but I had no idea what RB meant.

It meant “Reality Break.” It’s a radio interview. From internal evidence I place it in 1994 or ’95, when RB was only on WREK Atlanta, not yet syndicated.

Reality Break was a podcast for a couple of years, I see, but it started out on radio as a half-hour show.

The tape quality is really excellent, though I cranked the volume up a little. The material — well, it’s a pretty good interview, but there were a few things.

For one, the theme song they played at the beginning and end of the show, while clever and very professionally done, is much too long — it takes up at least three or four of the thirty minutes.

For another, I noticed some annoying little mannerisms in how I talk. What’s really annoying about them is that I still have them, and my kids each picked up some of them (though not the same ones).

And finally, I told some flat-out lies in the interview, and I don’t know why. Specifically, I said that my first non-fiction sale was my column in the Comics Buyer’s Guide, that I’d never tried writing any sort of non-fiction for money at all before that.

Which isn’t true. I wrote feature articles for a local newspaper called the Bedford Patriot back in 1972, when I was a senior in high school. Didn’t pay much, but it was actual money for writing non-fiction. I don’t see how I could possibly have forgotten that during the interview.

Very odd.

Anyway, the interview pretty much filled Side 1, and Side 2 was blank, and it’s all neatly filed away on my hard drive now.

March 19, 2014:

Back in 1991, a self-help guru named Richard Sutphen decided he wanted to expand his New Age publishing empire into horror. He created an imprint, Spine-Tingling Press, and wrote a few stories and novels.

He recorded at least some of them as books on tape, and distributed one to the membership of HWA, presumably in hopes of recruiting writers and maybe garnering a Stoker.

I never got around to listening to it until today, when I copied “Bone Thrower” to MP3.

It’s an okay story — novelet length, I guess. Very violent, almost verging on splatterpunk. There are some viewpoint issues, and the opening flashback is clearly there entirely to be a grabber opening; it is not the logical place to start the story. The ending is a bit cliched. And looking at this and the only other Sutphen story I’m familiar with (“Snake Dance,” which I think I mentioned here), I think Sutphen’s got a thing about snakes.

I was surprised to discover the last nine minutes of the tape are taken up with a preview of another story, “Freaklink.”

The transfer went smoothly, the never-before-played tape was flawless.

I am not surprised that Spine-Tingling Press only lasted a couple of years.

March 20, 2014:

Next up: “A Leader of Cheeseheads,” by Jay Rath’s Old Time Radio Pirates. Not quite forty minutes of political satire from 1991, six skits about then-governor of Wisconsin, Tommy Thompson.

I’d only ever played this once. It’s still in perfect condition. It copied easily, first try.

The humor’s only so-so, I’m afraid. It’s not that it’s badly dated, it just wasn’t that great to begin with.

Jay Rath’s Old Time Radio Pirates shortened their name to the Radio Pirates after this, as seen on a couple of preceding tapes. This is another of the samples Scott Dikkers sent me when he was negotiating for the rights to “The Drifter.”

March 21, 2014:

Started one that’s going to take awhile…

March 25, 2014:

Done. “The Best Fantasy of the Year 1989,” edited by Orson Scott Card and Martin H. Greenberg, with introductions by Orson Scott Card, from Dercum Audio, is now in my MP3 collection.

Which I have because one of the ten stories therein is my own “Windwagon Smith and the Martians.”

It’s an odd assortment, really. I don’t much like the Benford (“We Could Do Worse”), for example.

There were a few crashes along the way, one of which fortunately wiped out a recording that was kind of fuzzy; it came out better on the second take.

I have two more audio anthologies, but I’m going to leave them for later; this was hugely time-consuming, though not difficult. For now it’s back to single-tape stuff, be it music or con panels or letters or whatever.

March 26, 2014:

Today I was either out or busy most of the day, so I only did a very short tape — “They Came for the Candy,” by the Radio Pirates. It’s a parody of the 1938 Mercury Theatre “War of the Worlds” — in this version the Martians aren’t invading so much as trick-or-treating.

It’s fun. Only about half an hour in all. Not fall-on-the-floor funny, but amusing.

No problems with the conversion to MP3.

March 27, 2014:

Half a tape today. At some point in the last twenty-five years, someone sent me a tape entitled “Indigo Girls Sampler.” It’s a few tracks apiece from four Indigo Girls albums.

I did the first side, with five songs from “Indigo Girls” and five songs from “Rites of Passage,” today. No problems at all; everything came out very well.

I’d heard a few Indigo Girls pieces before, but I never had any of their albums, just one or two tracks I’d picked up somewhere. It’s good to have a larger sampling.

Yes, I’ve had this for ages, but I never actually played all of it; I got halfway through the first side, then got interrupted and never went back to it.

Which brings me to an observation: On “Indigo Girls,” they weren’t very varied. It all sounded much alike to me when I first heard it, which is why I never went back to it.

“Rites of Passage,” which I didn’t get to, is better and more eclectic.

March 28, 2014:

And today I finished it up. Side 2 had selected tracks from “Strange Fire” and “Nomads Indians Saints.” It’s pretty good stuff.

There is a glitch at the start of “Left Me A Fool,” though — it sounds as if maybe a stray guitar arpeggio (maybe at the end of a track that’s not included) got attached at the start of the file. Presumably this was a glitch on the original cassette tape.

I wonder where I got it?

And that, friends, brings us up to date. There are twenty-eight cassette tapes left to copy, and then I have a stack of old reel-to-reel. I intend to continue to post here about my progress. From the lack of comments, I take it that either no one’s reading, or you don’t give a crap, but you know what? I care. I’m much more interested in this project than in most of the other stuff I’m doing these days.