Would Mick accept someone arriving sooner and surveying the inventory?
OK, let's take a little inventory right here.
We have here a recluse that retired from radio 10 years early because of the plethora of ignorameae and moronic individuals working in radio these days,
who lives in the Northwoods of Western Michigan by choice
that don't even see his kids and grandkids unless its absolutely necessary, and then only for as short of a timespan as he can get away with,
letting a total stranger from a bulletin board who he's never met go trolling in his basement thru his stuff.
You figure it out.
We've known each other since I was 13 attending Broadcasting Charter Academy where his (now late) older brother taught television engineering. My engineering assistants and audio trainees I'm bringing along to help shlep don't even get to come in the house or the basement. They only get to stand outside in the Michigan snow and cold for hours on end loading up the trailer. It's going to be he and I by ourselves in the basement probably for a good three days just trying to organize stuff so we don't have a huge pile of unrelated everything once we get back to California.
What percentage of this is rare and unique?
Dunno. Like I said, it's all special-mixes-for-quad-radio-only. Although if memory serves, many of the mixes are simply a stereo M&E-L (music and effects minus lead) or MMO (music-minus-one, the one being the vocal) with some left to right panning and some ambience and reverb.
I remember in those days us taping just the rear channels off the reel-to-reels onto other reels or cassettes and using that for karaoke true stereo tracks when everybody's Thomson Vocaliminators (a 2-channel front-center and everything-but matrix which only read the vertical modulations of a record monaurally) only gave a mono backing track from whatever record was run through it. So real true stereo karaoke tracks of the real band vs. the karaoke soundalike albums were a big deal in those days.
If he'd've had the time to go doing tracklists of all these hundreds of reels, then he'd have time to tape them into the computer. As he says neither is the case, I tend to take a 60-plus year old man at his word.
And for those of you who say `DA-YAMN' well that's crotchety-ass old raggedy radio engineers for ya.
``Insulate your brainiacs and insulate your maniacs both from each other and from the rest of corporate society unless you want both of them to leave for competing companies who will, leaving you with a plethora of mediocrity.''
Dale Carnegie, 1949
And they are only NOW getting around to teaching that as part of Corporate Management or MBA degrees.