Audio.Nautical

17th August 2011

Post with 4 notes

One about cassettes: an introduction

(photo by Erica Marshall of muddyboots.org)

Growing up in the ’80s, cassettes were THE chosen media for music. Multiple-paneled inlays; Transparent shells; 60, 90-minutes (hardly ever above that); TDK, Maxell, Memorex, BASF, Sony, Fuji, tons of brands.

The ability to first play tapes on my own came after my sister got her first radio as a birthday gift: it was a little single-speaker Panasonic radio, too small to be called a boom-box, but to our young ears it was the pinnacle of high definition. I constantly borrowed it to sneak into a corner and listen to Music, sometimes without her knowledge, which resulted in many a fight. Coupled with the fact that I’m not the most careful person (read: clumsy as hell) and practically destroyed my sister’s radio, this prompted my mom to buy a new one for me, identical to my sister’s. I couldn’t be happier with the gift. 

Way before we ever had a dual tape deck and could discover the wonders of high-speed dubbing, we would record tapes by putting one radio’s speaker in front of the other’s tiny mic. It sounded like crap and we LOVED IT.

We quickly graduated from cheap-ass tape dubbing to cheap-ass original productions: my sister and I, along with the kids that lived in our street, would gather in a neighbor’s house and do our own audio versions of latin “novelas”, which we barely scripted and practiced, resulting in hilarious mistakes and “actors” who constantly fumbled their lines while trying to hold back laughter.

(Clockwise from top left: R.E.M.’s Everybody Hurts Maxi-Cassette Single; Trouble’s Psalm 9; World Class Punk compilation from ROIR; White Trash’s The Crawl/Apple Pie Cassingle; Tori Amos’ Little Earthquakes; Pearl Jam’s Not For You Cassingle; Smashing Pumpkins’ Zero Cassingle; and a 90-minute TDK)

Later on in life, as I got older and got into owning Music, cassettes remained the preferred way: a Walkman would go anywhere with me, keeping me connected to songs I could listen to over and over again. These would get played until the labeling on the shells were completely erased. Songs would get rewound over and over, until serious dropouts in sound would emerge in places where the tape got stuck on the player’s head, folded or “chewed” by a badly kept portable player. Cases would get replaced constantly, inserts would get their panels taped together when constant reading of lyrics and liner notes made them fall apart.

(Top row, from left to right: T-Ride’s self-titled debut; Aversion’s Fit To Be Tied; Death Angel’s The Ultra-Violence; No Mercy’s Widespread Bloodshed/Love Runs Red. Bottom row from left to right: Life, Sex and Death’s The Silent Majority; Queen’s A Kind Of Magic; Metallica’s Ride The Lightning; and Frehley’s Comet’s Live + 1)

These artifacts made me feel happy, and complete. A new cassette was like a personal concert from a new favorite artist every couple of months (whenever I could save up enough money to buy a new cassette). Sometimes, a friend would lend something that soon became a new favorite. In those cases, a frantic road trip to the nearest store was in place. A brick of blank tapes in hand, that afternoon was guaranteed to be spent dubbing tapes and listening to tunes as loud as I could to make sure the dubs came out fine.

This daily ritual of obsessing over Music was all that I needed in the world. In that moment, it shielded me from the all the crap that was my adolescence. Teenage years made bearable by Maxell. It was life, and it was Memorex. 

Tagged: MemoriesCassettesmusicanecdote

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