Tape and Vinyl Project

This is at the low end of the high-art industry that is modern music, but it’s based on an original idea and more importantly a holistic social idea, so I hope you’ll follow me.

I spent a few months converting all my old tapes and records into MP4. The easiest way to do this was to convert entire sides of LPs into single files, so now when my random shuffle turns up one of these backups, it plays that whole side of the album, as it did in the vinyl era, like a needle-on-the-track, complete with the crackle of dust.

This was fun to show to friends, who generally smiled and agreed it was nice to hear the record played in the original, not broken up by shuffle. Sharing it online, this became an experiment in playing and listening, with a theme: whole musical art forms, stand-alone music technology and the more complete musical parts of life. This wholeness is something we all know and understand, where feelings and opinions are not only welcome but necessary, and not dangerous but edgy.

More to the point, this is about recordings on vinyl and tape; Albums in other words, complete works of art and physical objects of interest in themselves; to remind you where modern music came from, or teach you of it, or challenge you to find your own old stuff before it all went streaming; and if you want, to chat about it, or share your music too.

*Tape & Vinyl page header on Soundcloud*

It’s also a fight back against the fragmentation of modern life. This blog is about albums, not playlists or shuffle – complete creative endeavours by at least semi-whole artists, not broken into songs or samples but extended play. To prove it, the entire blog is now complete. I don’t even have to think about it anymore, I can just bop along with the music. You can sit back while I post it to you, one album (complete, mostly) at a time.

How this works is, every few days I send you a text with a short post about the music or the technology or the life of it, and a link – you click the link, it opens a web player, you press play. Should be easy? Hope so.

I produced this complete playlist by hand: first playing my media through a conventional stereo system with output via headphones to an instrument jack and iRig adaptor for iPad with GarageBand as mic input to a “song” maxed out to 120 bars and 40 BPM, usually for both sides A and B as single tracks, then saved down to itunes and uploaded to pc by lightning cable and synch’d variously to iphone, mp3 player, soundcloud, cd burner, or just played out through the pc’s back headphone to the music port on the same stereo as in step one. Then upload to Soundcloud and text the comment part to you! It took months to do the whole tape collection, music I’ve had for years, not all in good condition (wobbles, hiss, dust…) but all great music.

Coming up now is my first pick for an archive of great old music from vinyl to tape to cd to mp3. Just my own 30+year-old music collection, uploaded for safekeeping.

Why? Because I love this music!

The Essential Beatles (1970)

This is the first record I ever truly loved, not mine but my Mum’s. I was too little to understand that the silhouetted individuals in the sleeve art were just four guys or even that they were people of the ordinary two-arms-and-legs kind. I couldn’t read, so the weird squiggles were at once ominous and awe-inspiring, before I could even get my head around the music. I would sit in a corner and turn it over and over as the record played, trying to solve all the mysteries. Then suddenly the Rorshack of the imagery made sense as separate faces in time, and then I could read their names, and then many years later I could play some of the songs on guitar, but damn, I still can’t sing like that, and I don’t believe anyone ever will.

The Essential Beatles (1970)

Side A

Side B

The Church SEANCE heat damaged

This is one of my favourite albums, a bit heat-damaged but that’s the charm of converting tape to mp3.

Shit happens, in a hot car usually. It was normal in the seventies and eighties. It still is normal to warp a CD. Tapes are more easily damaged but less badly so, and it’s a different sort of damage. A warped cd is totally wrecked. A warped tape you can still play.

You can go out and buy another tape or cd! But I kept this one because it still plays and the damage actually works OK with the swirling guitar parts, especially at the start of Side 2, yeah!

Side 1

Side 2

Woody Guthrie & Sonny Terry (& Friends)

Old records, the 78s and 45s and earlier, would actually play on a newer record player, and even a basic old player had those speeds as standard settings. If you got the switch wrong, Vera Lynn sounded like Val Doonican or vice versa. No chance of that now, and it’s meant to be a compliment! (big shout out to Vera and Val if you’re up there anywhere…)

Woody Guthrie falls somewhere off to the side, doesn’t belong, or belongs to the railroad tracks rather than the record tracks. Still he had a huge influence, changed the language, paved the way for Bob Dylan. This here album is jus’ zackly that kinda good old-time hoe-down music with washboards n’ kazoos, Sonny Terry a genius on the blues harp, Woody sounding like a hound-dog on a chain, but real, like the best rock and roll is real, and slick like as if they knew what they was doin’, an’ wow, man, NEW! You never heard these sounds before. Mighty pretty!

A Side

Don McLean AMERICAN PIE original tape cassette

Everyone a generation older than me had this LP, or long-playing record, on what we now call vinyl. I had the tape, which was never as complete an experience, but the same experience in the most essential respect: Vinyl or Tape, albums in those days had two sides, spiral grooves or wound magnetic strip on both sides. You had to flip it over at the end to play the other side. Either winding fit all that sound into an extra dimension of time. Physical objects of beauty and function, impossible today on the linear-quantized and one-sided younger technology, the compact disc.

The job of a poet in designing an album was to decide how to start and finish both sides in the most coherent way. The two sides of this particular album, American Pie, are the album of all albums, better even than Sergeant Pepper and far more poetic, two sides of the finest, smartest stadium-folk music ever written or sung by golden-voiced rebel crooners since Orpheus himself. Standing above them all is Don McLean, Heavens’ child, second son of Mary mild, etc. in well-deserved self-congratulation.

It would have been the first tape I bought, and even in the 80s it still had the two sides: One Side, and Another Side. Clever labeling, unique to this album. I’ve seen a few other jokey labels but I can’t remember them. Queen? The Beatles?

er, Who? They don’t come up to the belt buckle of the giant, the Paul Bunyan of music, Don McLean.

UB40 Labour of LOVE

Does anyone care about tape and vinyl in this day and age, lost art that it is? It must seem a peculiar fetish of mine (sorry UB40 for busting your intro here! bear with me) I mean, who the fuck cares what media it’s on if it’s such great music??

Well call me old-fashioned and seriously weird, it’s all true, but there’s something comforting to me about the sound of the needle coming down on the track, the pristine smooth low susurration before the song, the gradual appearance of dust as sharp ticking noises, like hard rain on the vinyl. The past is my lost homeland, the drowned Atlantis of soft cloth dust cleaners and anti-static sleeves and big cupboards to keep your record collection in.

Is it pathetic (yeah it is) to mourn and celebrate the larger album art that the LP format made possible? They were true works of art. Picture your fave album cover, Sgt Pepper or Saucerful of Secrets or Yes Live, but as big as a placemat and with studio quality reproduction matts and glosses, not postcard sized but folio. Man, we lost that somehow.

It’s comin’ back, of course, but is it affordable and authentic, or is it a fad? If Banksy (for example) was an honest artist or even just one person, would he be making album covers?

OK UB40, that’s you, you’re on!

Tears for Fears THE SEEDS OF LOVE

The cool thing about records and tapes is there’s no random play, no shuffle, it always plays as the complete, original album. You can tape a track onto another tape or fast forward anytime but whenever you come back to that album and let it play, it’s complete, intact, whole.

A good friend sent me a massive collection of cd’s one year, one a week, 52 albums all up. So this was his idea, to celebrate those particular albums and to share some more. I sure did celebrate them then but now they mostly play as individual songs on shuffle, about 4 days worth of music, holy shit, far out.

So here’s another complete album, a continuum indivisible, with the cover-art universe of the artists’ invention as colourful as the funky sound. Some of these songs are on the compilations you’ve heard, so yeah I really love these guys and their whole, complete, entire band.

Be Happy tape compilation

Tape compilations are the old shared playlist, a custom mixdown from record or radio or mic to tape cassette. This was interesting technology. To record you’d press the play and record buttons, two chunky-patterned mechanical levers, at the same time; that was just the way it worked for about two decades. The magnetic heads would clinch down and grip the waxy brown tape, winding it through like spaghetti on a spoon but you had no step forward control and often didn’t know where you were. If anything went wrong the spaghetti was your music all through the spools. Hit the fast forward button (physically engages the gears) and the whole thing whirs in accelerating overdrive like a mad hamster in a wheel. The heads would get dirty, but you could clean them with spirits (perfume even) and a cotton bud. Under the bonnet fun with your own music. We’d make tapes for friends, or to hear ourselves for a laugh. You could record anything onto tape as easily as today, with just those two chunky buttons.

Sounds From Chicago

This is a compilation from a great friend of the stuff he was listening to in Chicago at the time. He started his family around the same time so he will remember it. Oh yeah.

Party Tape 2008

Another compilation tape, this time for the 2008-2009 New Year’s party at our place. Dance music! Is there any other kind?! (Well, yes…)

I lost this tape behind the cushions on the actual night, and had to scrounge up all the originals instead, which was a lot of fun and got some laughs for the whack dancing we did. This tape has the one huge lead break that will get the Edge into Heaven (“so this is what the volume knob’s for”), plus “sweet Sixties here we come Baby Yeah” from some movie I never saw but had a great sound track.

Why three sides? Because I, uh-I, Believe in Love, and I live like everyone is watching me dance!

Disney Movie Story Book Cassettes

Little kids had little record players, or knew how their dad’s worked, and film books would come out with the story and songs on a little flexible plastic disc, a square pull-out page with the spiraling grooves, really fascinating to kids, and the stories were great. When the tape cassette versions came out, the B side was redundant as the recordings were recorded short to fit on a single disc, so they recorded the same on both sides.

Spiral grooves…My pet theory of the universe involves tightly wound spirals as relativistic space axes. There’s a close connection between modern physics and children growing up with rock music – both John Lennon and Syd Barrett were fascinated by it, and Barrett was raised in Cambridge in the years when they were rediscovering General Relativity after Einstein’s death on the other side of the fifties-era 10-hour Atlantic.

Kids understand time-warps better than most adults, so these stories are for them. Hi Sonny and Pepper, Rama and Jasmia and Kalila !!

The Blues Brothers soundtrack

Soundtracks on tape or vinyl mirror the original film experience, the first and second reel with a two-climax story arc. In those days audiences would actually applaud a good movie or boo a bad one, and smoke all the way through.

The Blues Brothers might be among the last of the audience interactive movies, like the Rocky Horror Picture Show (comin’ up) that invite you to live the thing for real. The Blues Brothers were as real as it gets in movie-music world, actual gangster-musos (or comedian-musos, close enough), Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, who leapt onto the stage for a gag and discovered that it worked. The warping on this old tape of mine is there to remind you, get right in your face and **** you if you don’t like it, how real it could be.

Modern movies have interlaced plot lines like the straps of Mira Sorvino’s corset in Mighty Aphrodite, but no intermission and no sense of the crowd around you. I liked the old actual-film-on-a-reel experience for the small chance you always had that the celluloid would melt in the bright light and plunge the theatre into darkness and passionate heat. It seldom actually happened but I would be on the edge of my seat for it the whole time, or that Jake and Elwood would turn up pursued by cops, or a stripper would start passing round lit joints…

Still hoping!

Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack

“You know these earthlings (uhmp) persons?”

Greatest gag in science fiction or horror!

Side B comes first btw, wtf?

Bob Dylan DESIRE

HUge amounts of Dylan in my collection. Just this one…

Bob Dylan BLOOD ON THE TRACKS

…and this one.

Phil Collins BUT SERIOUSLY

You’re No Son of Mine hurts like being hit in the head as a child. Mothers cryin’ in the street. Children dyin’ at their feet. Tell me why.

Genesis WE CAN’T DANCE

These guys had a huge heart for the eighties! And the funniest, self-knowiest film clip ever – Phil Collins in his home-office, working out the message of the clip by dropping a string of names with his dude, both of them rapping on the whole zeitgeist of the era. I at least, er…didn’t get who. But that was the whole problem with it, no one did. Fuckin’ wanker we all thought. But it was so funny.

Joni Mitchell THE HISSING OF SUMMER LAWNS (with tape disintegration)

Tape damage is weird, you never know when its going to happen or if it’s the humidity in a cupboard, or something other than the usual hot car glovebox. As with that Church tape, Seance, this album actually likes the warping. SO is it cool for copyright because it’s an original effect on a sample? Does anyone know?

You could say this is a little old retired tape, hobbling along with a stick. What, you’re going to arrest her? Voice of a blonde and freckled generation, all her art and beautiful soul clearly audible through her silver voice for anyone with an ear.

Joni Mitchell HEJIRA

There’s so much great music from the 70’s, so much of it on the original records if you can find them. There seems to be a serious vinyl resurgence in the 21C but that’s not what I’m on about. An $8,000 turntable+ in a home entertainment system is in the shadow of the original home stereo, lovingly kept alive by anyone with basic electrical know-how. That ain’t me, my old Panasonic (portable!) has sand in it from a beach party sometime in the 90s, but I salute you old farts who did manage to keep it alive, and to every good person who committed one of those original records to tape, dust crackle and all, that have come down to me.

Dire Straits DIRE STRAITS with overdrive distortion

Dire Straits were the the last big supergroup before U2 got so huge that the idea of a “supergroup” imploded on itself and became the independent black hole of Nirvana. After that I don’ know what happened. But this album was so new to listen to you just knew how huge they were going to be.

I must have tried too hard when I recorded this, it maxes out in places. You can still do that by accident when mixing things creatively but not by burning or ripping a cd. No surprise they made home copyright violation technology foolproof before they started to slap lawsuits around. They, as in they want my, they want my MP3…

Bob Marley & The Wailers NATTY DREAD

Opening beat bass-boogey whoop almighty Jah!

Bob Marley & The Wailers CONFRONTATION with tapehead scratch

Re-recordable tapes came in a range of sizes measured in minutes, up to 90 minutes max, but the first few seconds were a strip of tape blank that wouldn’t record, woe to you if you didn’t allow for it (wind it through with a pencil) or if you forgot to record-lock your best tape (break off the lock tabs along the bottom edge) and your sister taped over it (spit ball in the lock tabs and she can tape over it anyway).

Creedence Clearwater Revival CHRONICLE (greatest hits)

This is what most people my age probably think of when they think of vinyl: 70s stadium-rock, the kind of music that first came to audiences huge enough to still skew the charts today but while the music was still real, when they had youth and street cred, before John Fogerty for example woke up one morning to find all his copyrights had been sold out from under him. I feel part of the revolution that raises a middle finger to the sweaty lawyers who ripped him off, playing this music to a big audience (I hope) and no royalties for those that should not sleep at night, but with the fishes.

David Bowie SPACE ODDITY remastered tape with out-takes and missing channels

I had a lot of Bowie’s records as a kid, but I followed the same lost orbit as most of his fan base and threw it all away in the 80s, only coming back to Space Oddity. Since he died, I’ve changed my mind again and I’ll listen to anything by the Starman. This copy is interesting for a number of sonic reasons: first up, it has a missing channel in the title track so you can hear exactly how he did the harmonies in that most iconic gimmick song ever. Freak out, far out. And secondly, some very peculiar out-takes.

Space Oddity has dozens of different re-release artwork covers, but this one has clearly been gone over with a glitter pen, partly identifying the owner by probable age-range at the time. Hello miss 8-to-14-or-so! Do you still dig Bowie like you did when your friends stayed over that night? Did you ever tune into one of his live request shows and get to talk to him? Where are you now, ie which star, which planet?

On second look that’s fairly sophisticated artwork, so don’t let me patronise you. Did you see the time Bowie took a phone call on stage in a huge televised US-Europe phone-in gig, and thought the lady was much, much younger, like a little girl? She was using her little-girl voice when he picked up the phone, I think because she was so fan-struck she was back in her day, but no, and it quickly spiralled into heat; he had to recover and realise he was talking to someone who wanted him badly, and she had a very grown-up chat with the old cat. This might be her! Hello again and Hi David if you’re up there!

Fine Young Cannibals THE RAW AND THE COOKED old and muffled

This tape is like, really messed up. I tried to keep it better, but could no more than keep my own youth. I don’t give a shit anyway, I LIKE it.

Lou Reed TRANSFORMER

Frankenfurter with a stratocaster, Lou Reed is a rock and roll god, the feedback meistro of the heavenly choir. Ola Dr Reed! You and Bowie must be hitting the wildest sounds ever recorded on any plane of existence as we speak.

Lou Reed NEW YORK

This guy was so cool. There’s a live studio recording of Last Great American Whale, just Reed and two other guys on bass and drums, and Lou speaks this song with a toothpick in his mouth; he chews around it as he sings, switches it from side to side, and doesn’t miss a beat.

Nelly Furtado WHOA NELLY! with sharp cut-in

Lovely debut album, I haven’t followed her much since but I got and get this on tape right down to the millisecond. Hi Nelly! from a big fan.

Paul Simon NEGOTIATIONS AND LOVE SONGS (greatest hits) missing bits

Paul Simon’s greatest hits, not even counting his great work with Art Garfunkle or anything after Rhythm of the Saints (up next). This guy invented his genre and made the niche big enough for his bands to thrive in after he moved on. Sting followed this great idea deeper into the jungles of South America and never really came back, artistically he more or less stayed there. So it’s a deep groove.

Uh oh looks like it’s missing side one…darn, darn, another one bites the dust, heyeyeyeyyeah.

Paul Simon RHYTHM OF THE SAINTS missing tracks

Just when you thought Paul Simon couldn’t get more World…

kd lang EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES

Brilliant piece of self-knowing country-pop revival and the most remarkable pure and powerful voice in the whole of country music, where there is no shortage of very direct plain-yodelling whip-crackers.

The only other country in my collection is LJ Hill Inside The Universe and Paul Kennerley’s concept album White Mansions. Not even counting Ingenue, up next.

kd lang INGENUE

Girlfriends and friends of girlfriends, girlfriends of girlfriends, all said I should check out kd lang. They were so right

The Kinks ULTIMATE COLLECTION

Great band! Lyrical masterpieces, cutting edge sixties sound.

Led Zeppelin I

No collection is complete without at least one Led Zepp album…usually this one. The first chord these guys laid on us, is one big jump explosion of power chord+bass+drum, a hammer blow on a nail, like your record player has shorted out. It still makes me jump for joy.

Kansas POINT OF KNOW RETURN

This album is another unheralded masterpiece of the 1970s, along with White Mansions, which I only have on CD. I’m not sure what else Kansas did – I’ll bet they had a great career but I didn’t follow it after this – because they so nailed this album, that I regard it as a unique genre within prog-rock, a niche never occupied by any other band. Plus one of the most mystically beautiful long-view lyrical understandings of the human condition and indeed all possible life conditions, set to one of the sweetest acoustic guitar-cello pieces you have ever heard.

I bought this album in Camden Town market, which is a nice memory to have. Like it!

Pink Floyd Meddle/Echoes

Enigmatic, brave, driven, but helpless in the storm of fame and stardom, they wondered “what do we do best?” and got no further than “er, long things” (epic musical excursions to distant stars, usually). Many people thought, Stoned or what? In fact I can’t find a single gratuitous drug reference in Pink Floyd’s lyrics, unless it’s Syd’s Gnomic adventure “amidst the grass”. But they went on to do it for decades and made a fortune most of us can’t even imagine.

Pink Floyd ATOM HEART MOTHER

The smile of a Mona Lisa from the rear end of a cow, one of those images that you have to wonder how they made it work and yet it does, which says as much about the actual music as you need to know. It’s a great album.

A MOMENTARY LAPSE OF REASON as good as that sounds

Pink Floyd’s first outing without Roger Waters proved that the strength of the songwriting talent was with the group, not any individual. Frankly it was a relief for us fans to hear them let Roger go; any more of those wailing death-in-madness screams and I would have turned to Barry Manilow. Sorry Baz! You should scream more, only not so much.

Pink Floyd Relics

Best of Pink Floyd? Pink Floyd’s Greatest Hits? Oh come on. For a band that rejected the single, these guys had enough hits to fill a few different versions of the aptly named “Relics” that I’ve seen. This is only one of their “greatest hits” albums, and it’s really great!

Various Artists REGGAE RHYTHM in good shape

This album is the most fun I have had since the 1970s.

R.E.M. AUTOMATIC FOR THE PEOPLE with crinkled tape

Tapes could jam in all kinds of ways (sorry REM, I’d forgotten this is a blog about tape and vinyl, not the music as such) the worst of which led to the tape having to be broken to get it out of the machine. A mid-range bummer was getting the tape into a little windout pileup that resulted in the tape coming out crinkly – literally a zig-zag multiple folding of the grey plastic magnetised tape. Somehow the effect didn’t sound like it looks, it’s like just another smear job on the tape itself. I dunno. Maybe this tape isn’t actually damaged that way. Maybe I’m not damaged that way (much) either.

The Traveling Wilburys Volumes I & III

Two supergroups “The Highwaymen” and “The Traveling Wilburys” appeared at around the same time, as though by agreement to stride opposite halves of the American music tradition at the same point in history and not step on each other’s toes in that or any other moment.

On my side of the mountain that’s Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison, Geoff Lynn and George Harrison as an honorary American for the gig. Sadly Roy Orbison, the great warm voice of the Wilburys, died before they could get back in the studio for Volume II, so they went on to Volume III without him. George too has since passed, with all things at last.

I seem to have lost the last song of Side A Volume I so I’ll have to re-do it; of the last great fave albums of this blog, that side alone would be among my best, if not.

Crowded House CROWDED HOUSE with tape distortion

I can still remember the first time I heard this album opening up. I can even remember the second time I heard it. In fact all the later times seem significant in my life!

These guys were so ready for fame. They were a triad of hot young blue supergiants escaping from a cluster of stars. Paul Hester was the greatest drummer-clown since Ringo Starr, Neil Finn sang like the throaty angel of John Lennon, and Nick Seymour was the artistic scion of a family of famous musicians, he laid down bass and ‘boards that would have sprained Paul McCartney. And they did it all without the equivalent of George Harrison yet still made it somehow ring like sitars.

Once again, warping has been kind to this album. I think the angels must watch over hot cars.

Dexys Midnight Runners SEARCHING FOR THE YOUNG SOUL REBELS cassette tape original

Brilliant search by radio tune-intro to the young soul rebels burning it down.

Enya WATERMARK

Eithne Pádraigín Ní Bhraonáin (anglicised as Enya Patricia Brennan /ˈɛnjə/; born 17 May 1961), known professionally as Enya, is an Irish singer, songwriter and musician. Born into a musical family and raised in the Irish speaking area of Gweedore in County Donegal, Enya began her music career when she joined her family’s Celtic band Clannad in 1980 on keyboards and backing vocals. She left in 1982 with their manager and producer Nicky Ryan to pursue a solo career, with Ryan’s wife Roma Ryan as her lyricist. Enya developed her distinct sound over the following four years with multi-tracked vocals and keyboards with elements of new age, Celtic, classical, church, and folk music. She has sung in ten languages. (Wikipedia)

RESPECT, thank you Sister Enya. This is one of your old tapes, almost broken, please let me share it back with you.

Jean Michel Jarre EQUINOXE

Laser lightshows, fireworks and prodigious solo performances, Jean Michel Jarre holds the world record for largest ever audience at an outdoor event, well over a million people, having broken his original record of that target many times since.

Man I wish I was that good!

The Beatles 10000001 (WHITE ALBUM) cassette 1 only minus Back in the USSR

Tape players could completely jam on your tape, eviscerating it (and you) as you pulled its guts out to free it. Sometimes you could get it all out and rewind it back into the cassette, other times it’d die in the attempt and you’d have to go on living somehow.

This is only one record of a double album, the first among double albums. Tape 2 got stuck inside a tape door that just would not open. We never could get it open and were mature enough by then to not wreck it in desperation, though I briefly hated the guy whose player it was. So that was it for tape and tape player alike, the tape trapped in there like Major Tom in his tin-can, the tape player like HAL drifting off into space with an enormously significant human cargo.

Why did I not include Back in the USSR on this backup? Man, I hate that song. Still do now, even now that I know and love The Beach Boys PET SOUNDS, which is #2 on the 200 Rolling Stones’ Greatest Albums of All Time (after Sergent Pepper) which walks all over Back in the USSR.

The Beatles RUBBER SOUL

Apart from that one song these guys just didn’t know how to hit a bum note, musically or sartorially, but politically they were pretty naff. You DON’T keep Imelda Marcos waiting. Large Filipino crowds supported by regime security and police chased them to the airport, like a scene from Help! on a large tropical set. Then you DEFINITELY don’t tell bible belt USA that you’re bigger than Jesus Christ. They were hounded from city to city that whole tour, hounded off the stage for good, and the hounding followed John Lennon to the end.

Nothin’ wrong with this old tape though. It didn’t come from those times and sticks to seduction rather than provocation, good move.

The Rolling Stones HOT ROCKS 1964 – 1971

Records could be scratched, or warped by heat, or left exposed to dust. They cracked or shattered if you dropped them on a hard floor, sometimes. The damage was usually end-of-story; unlike tape damage a damaged record usually just couldn’t be played, unless you lifted the needle over the scratch. Literally pick up that little arm and drop it a bit further on. Pain in the ass, yeah so it’s broken.

I only have one example of a scratched record though I had plenty once. sigh I lost them. Actually I don’t have any records at all. Had you noticed? Just that first Beatles album taped from the record then tape-to-MP3, a frankenfurter of a hand-me-down via my brother and my Mum. It was Mum’s favourite record when she was twenty-five, I remember it well.

My shame to admit the Tape & Vinyl show has no actual vinyl. I had hoped someone by now would twig to the production and send me some vinyl. Man, I need vinyl, like oxygene, like nicotine, like hard boiled eggs. Aw gimme some vinyl, I’m beggin’ you.

Steely Dan CAN’T BUY A THRILL no problemo

I HAD a great record collection sob with a boxed set of Pink Floyd, Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, Empire Burlesque… (sorry, if you’re just tuning in, I’m a little fragile about this)… and I lost it to an old mate whose car I borrowed for a long drive.

He offered to lend me his car! It wasn’t my fault!

I was moving from Leura to Adelaide, and I drove though the night to Lightning Ridge to meet up with another friend. I stole some oil from a farmer to keep it running, drove back via Mount Panorama to really try this baby out, even stopped to repair a loose clutch cable that my he’d showed me. I dropped the car back at my mate’s place in the mountains and continued on with my friend and her kids to a Dylan concert in Sydney, where we met up again with my old mate looking very grave.

I said What? He said Fark, man. Long story short, the car was pretty fucked and I didn’t want to argue so I said OK, sorry, look, keep my records. Have my records. I’d left all my stuff with him anyway, so it was cool and easy and something he could probably sell.

I don’t know, the car was running fine when I dropped it off, but I trusted him to tell me the truth. I never saw him again (called him once to say hello, which became damn, man, gimme back my records, I told you the car was fine, and it went nowhere), so that’s that, but shit, I miss those records.

Sting THE DREAM OF THE BLUE TURTLES

So now you know the secret of my loss, you also must know that I haven’t thrown out my old tapes, I’d kept them forever on bookshelves and then latterly in shoe boxes and I’m going through them now one by one wondering why don’t I MP3 this one? What’s wrong with that one? Buddy Holly’s Greatest Hits (erk)? Ambient Seashore Sunrise (eew)? This old scratchhead from when I was 17 and old friends Michael C and David G busted in on me “wanking” (ie trying to record a song) (uuh)? Do I really want to broadcast every damn inch of tape I ever owned or made or borrowed? Is that what this is about?

You tell me. Only 7 left, counting this one, and some of the best I have.

THE COMMITMENTS with overdriven highs

Like “The Young Person’s Guide to Becoming A Rock Star”, this is how it feels, the divine madness of a passionate affair with the half-dozen people moving in your group; the incestuous love and bromance or straight-up for the backing vocal girls or sweaty lust for the tall and funny bass player, with no day-job rules, no boss who is not also a contested part of the sexual equation, no OH&S to save you from the crabs.

And you still have to put it down in a studio, so you need to get good, and soon. That’s where we come in, the screaming fans, the heightened madness of following these stars as though they will last forever when they streak and burn in one summer. The grief, the white light, the madness…

Glenn Evans BROTHER BLUES home-made covers album

This is my brother, true, playing and singing and makin’ a tape that he gave me to keep. Respect, thanks man.

Jeff Buckley GRACE tragedy

…the tragedy not of the medium, but of the artist and the audience. This guy lost his father, but gained his father’s fans, then lost his life leaving his wider family of fans twice-bereft. A poetry of ironic tragedy pursuing a bloodline of talent and promise. O how we grieve for Grace, we sing Hallelujiah and Wish You Were Here, and remember.

Clearly there is no God or Saviour for Rock and Roll. From Buddy Holly, Syd Barrett, Janis Joplin, Jim Buckley, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, and all the rest, we learn the stark truth, that the music universe has an empty maw at its heart. Why must it be so cruel, so bright?

Toni Childs GREATEST HITS eclipsed…

Why? Why do you do it? Why …?

Why Toni Childs? I hope Toni understands, that she alone could tell it. I would not post Dark Side of the Moon here, or Madness, but …

…great hollow-voiced ballads of loss, family, living and dying; seeking and finding, the dead, the ocean…

…even when you are not mad, madness is terrible anxiety, it is fear, voices, delusions. It is brain damage and striving to live and hold your mind together while dealing with hell and other people…

…crazy diamonds streaming through the starlit sky, travelling by telephone…

(It is very hard to explain why you are mad, even if you are not mad)

Jimmy Cliff THE POWER AND THE GLORY uplifting YES

Though when the darkness falls over their eyes, the living light still shines with you in Yah; while ever music plays in any lonely room there tread the angels of Rock and Roll.

The Black Sorrows HOLD ONTO ME

Why? Because Music carries us through life, one of the driving enigmas of existence, as real as the mirage of a ship cutting through ocean waves. Music is all the art forms rolled into one and made better by it, uplifted by the tight-rope of performance, strung across landscapes of aural colour, peopled with poetry and the yearning to share it with someone.

I used to wonder, how do they do that? Now I know, and it’s no less incredible. A musician is a magician who is as amazed as the audience.

Tracy Chapman TRACY CHAPMAN low hiss

Mad for this girl, love her heart and soul…

U2 ACHTUNG BABY final tape!!

And that, my friends and family, is it! As Syd Vicious sang with Frank Sinatra, floating high over the Gran’ Ole Opree, Dream, dream / don’t dream it’s over / don’t dream it, be it.

Merry Christmas!

[this blog was originally hosted on Soundcloud, at $11/month until I got it finished, then I abandoned it as too expensive. The site’s at https://soundcloud.com/user-130201086 with no music attached. With a bit more time, I’ll upload it all to YouTube, for fuck’s sake.

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