February 12, 2014:<\/p>\n
I said some of the tapes might be blank. Some are. Or effectively blank, anyway. One is the “Hi, you’ve reached the Evanses” message from our long-dead and vanished tape answering machine, and another is a C-90 with nothing on it except someone saying, “I guess it’s recording, the red light is on.”<\/p>\n
But I also did up “Forever Your Girl,” by Paula Abdul, which Julie gave me back in 1990 because she knew I liked “Straight Up” and “Opposites Attract” on MTV. Except I mostly liked the videos, not the music. Not that those are bad songs, I do<\/i> like them, but I probably wouldn’t have bought the album myself. And the rest of it isn’t as good as those two.<\/p>\n
Still, it doesn’t suck, so it’s been added to the collection.<\/p>\n
That leaves sixty-nine to go.<\/p>\n
February 15, 2014:<\/p>\n
Another blank turned up — almost; it’s a 90-minute cassette with Red Rider’s “Lunatic Fringe” missing the opening riff and followed by 86 minutes of blank tape. I already had two copies of “Lunatic Fringe.” I tossed it uncopied.<\/p>\n
Then there’s “Poems, Prayers, and Promises,” by John Denver, which I already had — but I have no idea where I got it; I don’t see it on CD. Maybe I had the LP? I don’t remember, and it’s not logged as “from LP.”<\/p>\n
But I didn’t start logging that immediately. Checking the runtimes, my version’s slightly faster than the official one, so yeah, it must have been from LP.<\/p>\n
Anyway, I don’t need to copy the cassette. At least, I don’t think I do. Maybe I should play it back and check the quality. Hang on, I’ll be back later…<\/p>\n
Huh. Yes, it’s from the LP. There’s some surface noise. This is a dilemma. I’m not crazy about the album, so is it worth the effort to replace it? And that assumes the tape’s better.<\/p>\n
Well.<\/p>\n
I’ve copied, but not yet edited, two other tapes, both recorded off the radio, specifically WKQQ, a Lexington, KY “album rock” station I listened to in the period 1978-1983. One’s some old-time radio shows they played to provide an alternative to radio coverage of the 1980 Democratic convention; the other is just a bunch of music. I started editing the music one, but it’s frustrating, because the DJ talks over some bits and cross-fades between tracks so that I can’t get clean separate copies. Oh, and I already have a lot of the songs, e.g., Pat Benatar’s “Evil Genius.”<\/p>\n
I’m two cuts into the John Denver album now; the quality’s pretty good. I don’t think I’ll bother replacing it.<\/p>\n
February 15, 2014:<\/p>\n
Okay, I managed to get nine songs off the WKQQ tape — there were half a dozen more that I already had. There are some rough transitions and chopped endings, unfortunately, but they’re worth having. I can date this to the first half of 1982.<\/p>\n
So I’ve got songs by the Stones, the Who, Journey, REO Speedwagon, Bruce Springsteen, Jimmy Buffett, Jackson Browne, the Moody Blues… and Silver Condor.<\/p>\n
Who the heck was Silver Condor? I do not remember ever hearing of them before. Wikipedia says they released two albums in a brief but moderately successful career; news to me.<\/p>\n
Anyway, I’m filing these as a “various artists” album under the title WKQQ, with the station’s logo as the cover art.<\/p>\n
February 16, 2014:<\/p>\n
Actually, there were at least three tapes from WKQQ. I’ve just finished up with the King Biscuit Flower Hour presentation of a 1981 Jefferson Starship concert in Saratoga, New York.<\/p>\n
There’s at least one bootleg of this same show in circulation, which meant I could find data on the web and get the title of a song I didn’t recognize (which was apparently never on an album and they only performed it from 1981 through 1983).<\/p>\n
(The 1984 Starship concert from KBFH is apparently much easier to find than the 1981 one — there are multiple bootlegs of it. Confusingly, it’s about two-thirds the same songs, not in the same order.)<\/p>\n
But anyway. I got nine of the ten songs — I had to turn the tape over during one of them, so it’s missing. I edited out the ads and DJ chatter and a little applause.<\/p>\n
I lifted the cover art from the bootleg, and labeled it “King Biscuit Flower Hour.” It’s not a bad show. The Starship was a bit loose that night, and the tape is slightly muddy in spots, and there’s a scratch on the record at one point, but it’s mostly very decent. (King Biscuit distributed their shows to radio stations on LPs, not tape.)<\/p>\n
A decent find.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
February 12, 2014: I said some of the tapes might be blank. Some are. Or effectively blank, anyway. One is the “Hi, you’ve reached the Evanses” message from our long-dead and vanished tape answering machine, and another is a C-90 with nothing on it except someone saying, “I guess it’s recording, the red light is… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-generalities-rants","category-strange-days"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":881,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions\/881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}