The Music Vault

The best track in the vault has no name on it.

April 1974. A small Alabama record label is being sold, and the buyer's man has gone through the tape vault and found the best thing in it: a full reel from 1969 with no label, no card and no name. He wants it first on side one, and he wants to know who is playing bass. But no record can be pressed until someone can say who played on it, and pay them. And now a producer in Memphis says it's his.

The vault man who filed every tape in the building for thirty-one years left this one on his desk, blank, and stopped answering his phone. On Thursday, everything in the vault without a name goes in the dumpster. The accounts man upstairs has eleven days, a pencil and the company's own paperwork. He can't tell his boss. He needs somebody to check his count.

He wrote to you.

How it works

• 72 sessions on the 1969 ledger. One of them is the reel with no name.
• Every chapter hands you the paper: a cut sheet, a sign-out register, a pressing-plant manifest, a union contract.
• Strike every session the paper proves is not that tape, and check your count against his.
• When one line is left, you've reached the only conclusion.