Head gasket recommendation

If the deck is flat and the head is flat, you've beat 90% of the sealing issue.

I wish rough surface finishes went away decades ago . The old wives tale that the rough surface "bit" into the gasket and it stayed in place better. It is nonsense. It was nonsense then too. The dowel pins hold the gasket in place.

Every surface should be milled to as flat and smooth a surface as the tooling and the rigidity of the machine can do. Think about it. As the engine builds temperature, the block and heads expand at different rates. Even if both are cast iron. It's worse with bimetal engines. As the block and head expand and contract with heat, those ridges you feel with your fingernail wear down. When they do, the fasteners lose tension and you have a gasket failure.

Again, there are thousands of engines out there with a fairly rough surface finish. The best finish is as smooth and flat as you can get it. Most of the time, either the shop is stuck on a rough finish because it's the way they've always done it, or they don't have a machine capable of machining a surface as smooth as it should be.

With your CR, if you don't detonate the hell out of it, a Fel-Pro blue gasket will be fine. Detonate it and you can kiss any head gasket goodbye.
I read this commentary with interest, 'speically the comment of flatness being most of the battle. The one thing that I question is on the dowel pins; I can't see where they do anything to to help the gasket stay in place in the narrow webs between cylinders. It is just clamping pressure and surface friction that keeps them in place in those areas.

With grinding type surfacers still around, the rough surfaces in rebuilds aren't going away IMHO.