You beat me to it. I had just checked that Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars lp was released that June and side 2 is 18.25 long - almost exactly the right length! Obviously Nixon had already played side 1 in private and after he played side 2 in the Oval Office, he feared being outed as a Bowie fan (quite alienating to his voter base back then) and deleted the relevant section of tape!
Ironically, it was Richard Nixon, discussing the Alger Hiss case, who said that more often than not, you get them for the cover-up not the original crime. The cover-up becomes easier to prove.
Alice’s restaurant is 18:34 long. Arlo Guthrie is on record saying that it’s probably just a coincidence.
I thought it was established that Alice’s Restaurant is 18 1/2 minutes.
i used to work extensively with reel-to-reel tape machines in the late 70’s and thru the 80’s and its very possible to accidentally erase or record over a section of tape. those machines were the harley-davidson of recording equipment. meaning they were very finicky and you had to keep a close eye on them and maintain them regularly; they would sometimes change record levels from use to use and sometimes just not record for no apparent reason. the tape itself was also subject to failure, most often if it was used repeatedly it would get “worn out” spots that would no longer record or record poorly.
i obviously have no idea what is in the 18.5 min gap; but the context of that particular tape, the conversations immediately prior and after the gap, however indicate that something important and possibly incriminating was indeed erased.
mc
Technology has advanced a lot since the Watergate days, one would think the audio would be recoverable even on an “erased” tape, provided that portion it wasn’t recorded over again.
“If I had a friend like Rose Mary Woods,
How pleasant my life would be…”
What was actually on the tape was clearly spelled out in the movie Dick
It’s been investigated and the National Archives are known to regularly review the possibility.
Yeah, but he had had 5 years to listen to that. Ziggy Stardust would have been hot off the presses and just in at his local record shop!
Nixon was famously inept with technology. (He was known to have chewed off the cap of a child-proof bottle of aspirin.) He was probably at his limit of knowledge and ability in erasing that segment. That it was done five to nine times indicates the level of his paranoia about it; anyone experienced with the gear would have stopped at two.
More like sung out.