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RoIO collecting in the pre-digital age

by Gerhard den Hollander

"I do have some bootlegs of our stuff to remind me how much I hate them." -- Nick Mason.

Upon re-reading these opening paragraphs I feel that I may need to explain some of the above terminology for the younger generation. (Don't worry if the above doesn't make sense to you; your kids will have no clue what mp3s were or what an iPod is.)

Tapes -also known as 'cassette tapes'. A way of storing sound onto easily portable media. Cassette tapes consist of about 130 meters of plastic ribbon on two spools in a small plastic holder. Onto the plastic ribbon they have glued rust, the rust gets magnetised by the recording equipment, and upon playback the magnetic signals in the rust get re-translated into sound. Tapes came in 2 flavors: Type I (or Ferro) tapes, the lowest quality (and therefore cheapest), and Type II (Chromium Dioxide), the taper's type of choice. Discerning collectors would occasionally use Type IV (metal) tapes for really special and high class recordings. There also were Type III tapes (FeCr or Ferro Chromium), but those were never used.

Dolby Noise reduction - Tapes were inherently noisy (simply because of the mechanics involved in it), so many schemes were devised to reduce the noise. The most popular and widely-accepted schemee was Dolby Noise Reduction. And long (and almost religious) debates raged in trader's circles whether or not a trader should use Dolby when copying tapes.

LPs - large (12" ), usually black, circular music media, which was meant to be played on a record player. Music was recreated by dragging a bit of metal (or diamond) across the surface, and translating the resulting scratches back into sound. High quality (high definition) LPs are still considered to be sonically superior to CDs. Unfortunately, most LPs were of (much) lower quality.

Tape Trees - A novel (to me, back then) concept, where basically one person has a very special tape (or set of tapes or) and offers that tape to the community. Everyone who wants that tape signs up for the tree. The organizer of the tree then spends an evening with a stack of paper drawing up a tree (with himself as the root) and the other people as branches (willing to share the groove) or leaves (people who can not/will not duplicate tapes). Usually the 'branch' makes an agreement with his 'leaves' to either trade (always my preference) or dub in exchange for blanks (basically, the 'leaf' sends enough blanks for the tape/show and something extra--either an extra tape, or an IRC).

IRC - This used to stand for International Reply Coupon. Basically, it was a piece of paper that you could exchange at your post office for stamps so that you could pay postage on the return package.

When I encountered my first RoIO, I was about 18 years old. In those days (around 1988) the CD was still new and showing promise (lower prices, better sound quality). I had heard about live recordings before. The back pages of the better class music magazines had small ads where people advertised audience-tapes. 4 stamps (2 to cover postage, 2 for the owner) would give you the trader's list, and he (mostly always 'he' rather than 'she') was willing to sell you shows for 5 to 10 guilders per tape (about $2.50 to $5, or about twice the price of a 90-minute chromium tape.). I never replied to those ads.

Then in University I encountered a friend who was also a Pink Floyd fanatic, and who actually possessed some of those live recordings and was willing to tell me more about them. In fact, he was more then happy to tape his entire live-LP collection (all two of them) for me. I then found out that near the university was a shop that specialised in selling rare and collectible recordings, including RoIOs.

A new world slowly opened for me. The aforementioned friend occasionally bought new vinyl recordings, and even on occasion (gasp, shock, and horror) was able to find a RoIO that had been remastered to CD.

Time went by, and my live collection had grown to about 10 different tapes (comprising between them about 10 shows) when I encountered the internet Pink Floyd fanbase through the Echoes mailing list. Members of this list were actively discussing the arcane minutiae of Pink Floyd songs, the relative merit of the various solo efforts, and even occasionally would make mention of being in the possession of live recordings.

Through e-mail contacts with those few who admitted to owning the sacred live recordings I was able to set up the occasional tape trade, whereby I would copy my tape (through the old-fashioned mechanism of a dual cassette deck) and send off the copy. I would then receive another show in return. Sometimes people would go all out and adorn their tapes with beautiful handmade inserts and/or tape labels.

As more and more people were trading live shows, some of them came together and undertook the mammoth task of detailing all known live recordings and (much more importantly) give a quality rating with each of them. This mammoth task, which eventually became the online http://www.pf-roio.de/[Pink Floyd ROIO database], proved on one hand to be an invaluable help in judging whether entries on someone's tapelist were worthy of obtaining, and on the other hand it was a tantalising glimpse into what was out there to be had. Mystical shows with something entitled The Man and The Journey were mentioned. LPs were listed that contained songs called "Return of the Son of Nothing" and "The Amazing Pudding", not to mention the mysterious "Labyrinths of Auximines".

This discovery marked my descent into more furious madness: serious RoIO collecting. It started innocently enough, with an attempt to get at least one recording of every tour (or every year, whichever was less). Things got really exciting when a trading partner mentioned having a recording of a Roger Waters solo show, which contained an as-yet unreleased song called "Monkey Television", and who was more then willing to send me a tape of that in exchange for one of my tapes. Every day I would rush home and search through the incoming mail, in eager anticipation of the tape. It took a couple of weeks (Dutch mail being very good at delaying international mail), but eventually there it was: a new, unheard masterpiece. And all I had to do was exchange a few dozen emails, dub a tape with a nice Floyd show, and send it off.

More furious madness continued... I learned to tell the difference between tours based on the setlists (if you've ever seen the Floyd VocalList file, you know that eventually led). I even learned to recognise the fact that some RoIOs were exactly the same, even though they claimed to be different (and usually a rehash of the BBC sessions) and eventually came to the following conclusion:

NEVER TRUST A RoIO FARTHER THAN YOU CAN THROW IT.

(And to that I usually add that I'm not very good at throwing.)

With time, things improved. Other people realised I was a serious collector, people brought me in touch with people who were really serious collectors, and who no longer bothered to list their collection by RoIO title, but who simply listed the dates of their shows. These people often had (by my standards) very, very rare shows. Eventually I had a large enough collection (the idea of obtaining one tape from every tour or year had long ago been discarded as not good enough) that the very serious collectors found stuff in my collection that they didn't have (or maybe they just took pity on me) and were willing to trade their rarer tapes with me.

By that time I had come into contact with other people who were trading non-Floyd stuff, who introduced me to the concept of tape trees, which eventually led to the creation of the second Echoes tape tree (as well as many others), which in turn brought me into contact with even more traders, and led to another explosion of tapes .

Things got better and better and I had gained so much from trading tapes that I felt it was time to do something really cool, and to create a tape tree that would be the ultimate collectible tape tree: the Echoes Rarity Tree. (Ask around amongst other ancient Pink Floyd fans. They may--if their memory is still accessible--vaguely remember that one.) With the (very) gracious help of fellow Floyd fans I set out on a quest to obtain all B-sides, rare releases (mono mixes, single edits) ever released by the Pink Floyd (excluding the mono LP releases). This eventually brought me into contact with even more serious collectors, and after months of work I had managed to collect 6 tapes worth of rare Pink Floyd material. Organizing the tape tree took another 6 weeks, and the final completion of the tree (having the tapes delivered to the last leaf on the last branch) took all in all some 6 months--and even after that I got the occasional e-mail from someone who had missed out on the original but wanted in anyway, which in turn led to more trades and more tapes and more contacts.

Every day I would rush home and search through the incoming mail, in eager anticipation of the new tape.

When I moved, and I found that I had three moving boxes full of live Floyd (and solo) music, I realised that maybe things were getting a bit out of hand, so I started to reduce the amount of trading I did. CD burners started to become popular about that time, which rendered the entire tape trading affair a bit obsolete. Fortunately, at the same time Roger Water started his 1999 tour (pop quiz--which year was this?) and pretty soon I found myself attempting to collect every show of that tour on CD (and succeeded, but that's a story for another day), but apart from that, sort of stopped trading Pink Floyd (or solo) music.

These days, of course, finding high-quality live Floyd shows is easy. I had a look at EasyTree, and within a week's time managed to download over a dozen Floyd shows (one of which I had never heard before, and all 11 of the others in equal or better quality than any recording (of the same dates) I already had.

Ten years from now we'll probably be able to just go on the internet, click a few links and be able to get any Floyd show we like, lovingly and caringly remastered by dedicated fans in 2048bit, 512Khz, Dolby 7.3 Surround quad woofer quality in streaming sound mode, all through our cellphones.

Somehow I miss the old days.

Gerhard den Hollander is a staff writer for Spare Bricks. He still has six boxes full of Floyd tapes in his attic, and will one of these days get around to hooking up his tape deck so that he can actually listen to them again.

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