When I first started to make these tapes, I kept track of the songs on each tape on sheets of notebook paper, 1 sheet per tape. I came to call this catalog the "papers" (for lack of a more imaginative name *g*). Each tape was sequentially numbered as I used it within a brand.
Over time I ended up using several brands of tape: BASF, Maxell (MAXL), Memorex (MEMX, GMEM), JC (JASO), Scotch (SCOT), Sony, TDK (TDKA). GMEM stands for "Gold" Memorex tapes. When I got these, I already had the regular Memorex tapes, so I wanted to give the new ones a different "tapecode". They had goldeny-yellow insert cards, hence the "G". (Note 2024: I have now decided to give the tape brands slightly off names that sound like the real thing, to maintain 4-letter codes. Silly, but it works!)
And there are no TDK 1, 2, or 3. I don't remember if I ever had them. Somehow the ones I have got numbered 4, 5, 6 and it never changed. Or maybe... There were!
My memory escaped me for far too long. In Jan 2014, I recalled that I lent some tapes to a friend, and they subsequently were stolen from his locker. (This occurred when I was in high school.) I was justifiably upset at the loss of irreplaceable material, but there was nothing I could do about it. Just had to suck it up and deal with the aftermath. Then I guess over the years I completely forgot about the entire incident. But now during the research to reconstruct my early taping days, it's come back to me. At least now I feel a little less bad about wiping so much stuff. About five tapes were gone, and it wasn't my fault. Unless the fault was being too trusting... What was I thinking, letting originals out of my house?
But I did eventually lose 6 tape other sides in 1987 due to adding a track in a newer location and then subsequently wiping the side it had originally been. I had a stupid rule against duplicates, and the result was lots of loss. This idiotic pattern continued throughout my taping time and I lost many more sides. And there are still quite a few areas where I just can't figure out the order of tape usage and side replacement. I likely never will. 2024: I will now amend this to say that I've gotten very much closer to a true order. There are some things that could have been from multiple times, so it's tough to choose. Other problems are the copying either en masse or in twos and threes to "save" the material. Yet on certain tapes I only copied SOME of the contents. I have no idea why and I can't remember.
So that statement a couple paragraphs above is wrong. There are portions of the list of missing material that can easily fill the space between MEMX 03 and TDKA 04. I can estimate some of what goes where, so I am adding "the tapes that should have been" to this listing, as close as I can figure out what they were. (And BOY this is difficult with the patchy sections!)
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