Cripes, Stars! You had me scared there!
Sorry about your loss. A first edition tape is sacred. Wrap it in tissue, coiling the tape ribbon into a ceremonial design, and put it in a shoebox.
I warped out the A-Side of my origional War tape from '83 by 1987, from overuse, but the B Side still works just fine (all hail the full-length play on both sides!) . "40" on Side B is starting to go too, so now I conserve it, listening to tapes only once a month or so. A tape has a diff sound from a Cd and once in a while I go back for nostalgias' sake.
Believe it or not, I have a cassette of ATYCLB, for this reason, and actually listenend to it along with the CD, but it conked out on me 6 months ago. Oh well...
My UF tape is fine. I lost my origional Boy (well, I bought Boy 1n 1983, soit isn't "origional"!) and JT are fine.
I can't understand why my JT still works perfectly. WHY ISN'T IT DEAD??!!??!It's an original 1987 copy, bought the very day it came out. I remember walking a mile off campus to the nearest record store for it when I missed the bus. Weird to hear U2 blasting out of every other dorm window. I can still close my eyes and hear it. Suddenly your best-kept secret is everywhere...
I kindly lent out my St Patrick's Day in Boston 1992 bootleg to someone on Prop, who never sent it back. So much for my lending out shows to copy. Needless to say, my Orpheum Theater in Boston 1983 show is not going ANYWHERE.
Studio albums can be easily replaced. Beloved bootlegs you got in the mail from small companies that no longer exist, cannot. I can prob get this stuff online but no nostalgia value!
On a side note: those with origional Star Wars Trilogy videocasettes, keep them whatefver you do. George Lucas is an absolute idiot when it coes to appreciating his work as film history, however else a great artist he is. He refuses to see the worth of the orgionals as "rough drafts." The technology sgould be made to put as many copies of the orgionals we have onto blank DVD's as possible...