You know, at typically a little over three hours each, these tapes are going to take awhile.<\/p>\n
I thought I’d start with an easy one, i.e., one I thought was blank.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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
\nmiddle.)<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I don’t know what’s on Side 2; I haven’t played it yet.<\/p>\n
You know, most of these tapes are labeled; I don’t know why this one wasn’t.<\/p>\n
But that’s one side down, leaving 49.5 tapes to go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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… 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-246","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\/246","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=246"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":854,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246\/revisions\/854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}