I try to walk every day. It’s a healthy habit I’ve attempted to stick to my whole adult life. (I think it started when I worked in New York back in 1988-89. I walked before work, at lunch, or in the evening. Sometimes multiple times a day.)
Music is a big part of my walking routine, too — almost every step of the way. I can’t tell you how many Walkmans and MP3 players I have burned out (not to mention walking shoes) along the way.
Lately, I’ve been letting Apple Music dictate my playlist. My Apple home page has something called “Bill’s Radio Station,” which is an algorithm-fed playlist composed of songs I have listened to, added to a playlist, actively liked, or are some other way related to my listening habits. My algo isn’t perfect, but it is amazing how often the randomness of the playlist matches my mood or walking tempo.
One day last week, my station fed me an old “Peter, Paul & Mary” classic (I think it was “500 Miles”). Hearing that old folk trio always reminds me of my long-departed older brothers. Jack and Gary were big fans, which made me a fan, too. The song got me thinking about a cassette tape I had to have somewhere in the house of my brother Gary’s One Man Show called “September Songs” — he recorded it for my mom over thirty years ago. I thought, “I need to dig out that cassette and see if I can digitize it to perhaps share it somewhere.”
I made it a mini-mission to try and turn the songs into MP3s that can be played on phones and computers.
Well, I discovered that, while it’s remarkably easy to digitize an old cassette tape, it’s a whole ‘nother matter trying to correct the fidelity to something anyone might ever want to listen to!
Anyway, I decided to isolate some songs from that old cassette and share them here… This first song is one that we played in church during our wedding ceremony in 1999. Gary had been gone five years, but we thought it would be touching to have him sing at our wedding (he always told me he wanted to when he was alive).
It’s kind of funny, though, looking back now. We had the song title wrong the whole time (even the way my mom wrote it on the cassette cover). We called it: “When Morning Bells Chime.” In actuality, the song was written by John Denver, and he called it “For Bobbi.” Later, Peter, Paul & Mary recorded the song, and Mary Travers changed the title to “For Baby.” We think the folk harmonies inspired the version Gary and his guitarist/accompanist Virginia Wagner were trying to match. Give it a listen here:
As I said, trying to get a recording from a 30-something-year-old cassette tape of a tape of an open-air live recording that has now been digitized is a daunting task for even the best audio technician. I tried to remove some of the hiss, and I’m still not happy with the muddiness of the track, but I think it’s in decent enough shape to share. I hope you enjoy the experience.
If you’re interested, here are a few more tracks I’ve isolated…
Gary singing “Oh Danny Boy”:
Gary singing David Bowie’s “My Death” (sorry for the truncated ending, it’s where my old cassette had to be flipped, so the recording just drops off!):
If you’ve read this far, thanks. Gary was (as the headstone in the image that graces the top of this page shows) one of my amazing older brothers who died way too soon. In truth, all of my older siblings were amazing to me in their own way (Bobby, Tom, Gary, Jack, Ginger, and Boots! – I was the baby of seven kids.) I wrote this “letter to my daughters” about 15 years ago to tell them more about three uncles they never got to meet. I share it here out of my love and admiration for all of them.