1115.org

Despite one of the biggest political stories of the past few years reaching its crescendo, I’ve been less than driven to write this week. Something about everybody.blogspot.com acting like they are on nickname basis with a certain federal prosecutor and getting Kenneth Starr-type leaks which they use to speculate about leg irons and orange jumpsuits has lowered my posting libido. Luckily there’s always music, and seeing this page sent me on a time warp. I have to give it up to Noz who was similarly inspired.

Now on the surface (and below it for some people), looking at a page filled with scans of blank cassettes might sound boring, but in the age of iPods and invisible mp3s zipping across the internet, it is easy to get nostalgic for the physical realm of tapes.

When I was a kid, our house and cars (even the Corvette) were strictly 8-track. At some point I managed to pick up a cassette recorder that I used to set next to my clock radio to tape music from college stations WRCT and WPTS. I finally convinced my father to buy me a Walkman when I was 12 or 13, but for some reason when he discovered that it only played through headphones, it went straight back to the store. Later I won a mini boombox at a raffle and was off to the races, recording every hip hop and alternative show in range. I’ll never forget buying my first real tape, Duran Duran’s Seven And The Ragged Tiger in 1984. At the time, the music industry was running ads with the tagline “Home taping is killing music.” They weren’t talking about me because I spent every cent I had buying music.

I didn’t own a CD player until well into high school, so there was plenty of time to get used to the analog charms of cassettes. Even after I entered the CD age, everything was duped to tape for the car, but my blank tape habit really took off with the arrival of the rave scene. Major DJs today wouldn’t think of recording and distributing free demos, but in the early 90s even the headliners passed out mixed tapes in the battle for more gigs. Coupled with the vendors who sold tapes at parties and through the mail, cassettes soon took up more space than clothing. But driving up to six hours each way to party required a lot of music. Fast music.

As with any addiction, too much was never enough. While raves and electronic music were still residing underground in the States, in Europe mixes came out every week, and every radio station had a mix show featuring the best DJs in town. Unlike the present day where it’s possible to hear (or download) BBC Radio One’s Essential Mix and any number of other top tier mix shows online, back then there was no streaming audio, no high-speed connections, and no servers packed full of mp3s. Trading tapes with kids overseas was the only way to hear the sound of the cutting edge, and luckily they were fiending to check out Baltimore breakbeat, Chicago house, New York hip hop, San Francisco tribal, and LA trance. Certainly international airmail wasn’t the most efficient method of barter, but it would be years before anything better presented itself.

This obsession led to boxes and racks holding more than 1500 cassettes which followed me around through several apartments and a cross country move. Eventually electronic music started making its way onto CD as more record companies figured out how to market it. But commercially available mixes are subject to licensing that saps the spontaneity so often found on underground tapes. A few years ago, around the time that my last Walkman died, I bought an iPod. Cassettes may as well be doorstops to an iPod, but I’d have given up 12 years of irreplaceable tapes over my own dead body. The solution? The real-time transfer of each and every tape to hard drive. Yeah, it took a long time. Yeah, I was sad to switch from cassettes that had their own style and character to ones-and-zeros on a computer, but the ability to listen to whatever I want without having to dig through multiple boxes makes up for that.

I kept the tapes with the most sentimental value and tossed the rest. There’s a time for history, and there’s a time for taking advantage of advancements in technology. With any luck, I won’t ever have to worry about a tape melting on a dashboard or being eaten by a hungry cassette deck. But that doesn’t mean I won’t miss the Memorex.

Previously: From 8-Tracks to iPods