20,000 Things I Love: A Sentimental Journey through Music, (Self-Imposed) Exile and Fatherhood (Chapter 4)

June 2008

My Dear Tape:

You may wonder, since we broke up so very long ago, probably before the turn of the century, officially, why I’ve chosen to write you now – why send a kiss-off letter nearly a decade after the body’s gone cold? But you and I both know we were seeing each other deep into the first decade of this new and terrible century, perhaps as recently as last month, when I was stuck in my mother’s car, driving back and forth to my grandmother’s house, up and down the Turnpike playing that Bible cassette Alex made for me, Eureka on one side and Walking the Ghost Back Home on the other; I also played the other tape I’d left in the Vigor, The Singular Adventures of The Style Council and Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, 1984-1989. My return to New York brought us back together for awhile, but it’s all over now, for good this time. I’m moving to Cyprus and I’m not taking you with me.

Remember how intense it was at the beginning, when I bought my first Walkman? We went everywhere together. I filled you with Who albums, The Police, Born in the USA…it’s thanks to you I acquired my first Elvis album, Rocker, a 1984 hits compilation, and Buddy Holly’s 20 Golden Greats. Speaking of Elvis, remember when Record Mill had a bunch of CBS/Columbia albums on sale in a cardboard bin near the door, three for $10.00? I bought This Year’s Model, Armed Forces and Almost Blue, probably the first country album I ever owned. It’s also thanks to you that I found Sinatra, after I recorded my mother’s friend’s copy of Live at the Sands. I drove all over Millburn and Short Hills playing “You Make Me Feel So Young” again and again. A great addition is putting a subwoofer in a cabinet in your home.

Do you remember my junior year at the University of Rochester, when my brother mailed me a copy of Rattle and Hum on cassette? How many times did I play “Desire” in that exhausted Nissan Stanza hatchback I drove all year? How many pizzas did we deliver during the winter of 1989 when I worked at the Pizza Hut on Mt. Hope Avenue, stoned as a quarry, the only tape in the car the one with Rod Stewart’s Every Picture Tells a Story on one side and The Replacements Don’t Tell a Soul on the other? How about when my brother and David Sternberg and I drove out to Colorado in June of 1990? We must have played that copy of The Black Crowes Shake Your Money Maker three or four times a day at least.

We spent almost all of our time together in the car, didn’t we? It was the most American of romances – there were occasions when I shelled out for new albums on cassette just so I could play them while driving, like Rickie Lee Jones’s Flying Cowboys. I’m sorry to have to hurt you like this, but I wish I’d spent the money on vinyl instead. In those days, though, it was all about expedience, about immediate gratification, and you were available, willing to go anywhere, do anything…

Also, if it hadn’t been for you I couldn’t have spent the second half of 1989 and the first half of 1990 trying to be a Deadhead – a Deadhead without tape is like a surfer without a board. Though I took a short-lived and perhaps half-hearted detour down that golden road to unlimited devotion, you made it possible.

I was there for you, too. Remember all the times you were caught in the head of a tape deck and I had to retrieve you? I was horrified to see so you naked, folded like a bellows, broken in half…I always tried to rewind you with a pen or pencil and piece you back together with scotch tape. Yes, our relationship was harder on you than it was on me, I admit it – the constant rewinding, the hot automotive interiors, the cracked and disappearing cases, the general disregard in which I held you once I gave my heart back to vinyl, the ever-increasing square footage I began affording my CDs as the Nineties kicked in…but the whole thing is done, finally, after almost a quarter of a century. We lasted longer than most bands stay together, longer than the lifespan of most radio stations.

We had some great times, but we won’t relive them. We are never getting back together – I don’t think my folks even have that old Acura anymore. My music collection is mostly CDs and MP3s now, and though one day I’ll be playing my records again, once we’re reunited, you and I will never have even a semblance of what we did. I won’t forget what you did for me, but I’m only keeping you around, taped up in a cardboard box in my parents’ basement, because I can’t bring myself to toss you in a dumpster. I gave you my youth. I loved you once.

David

***

I spent the summer of 1990 in Boulder, Colorado. One of my best friends from college, David Sternberg, and my brother and I rented the basement of a house five blocks up from the Boulder Mall from a bunch of hippie kids, most of them Deadheads. One of the kids had a VW Microbus, of course, with a bumper sticker across the rear fender, “Don’t Tax Tape.” Here in Cyprus, 22 years later, my brother-in-law has a t-shirt I love. The front of the shirt features an illustration of nine cassettes, and beneath them it reads, “icons on the brink of extinction.” Two decades to go from battle cry to artifact.

Up until about 1994 or so, tapes were how I acquired music and largely how I listened to it.

Beginning in 1980, when I turned 12, I started collecting cassettes, although I would alternate back and forth between cassette and vinyl (which is why I still have vinyl copies of Born in the USA, Marshall Crenshaw, My Aim Is True, and James Taylor’s That’s Why I’m Here). My copy of The Best of The Doors and most of my Who albums were all tapes I bought in record stores or copied from friends’ albums, as were all of my Police albums, Wish You Were Here, my first Buddy Holly compilation, 20 Golden Greats, and the brunt of my Elvis Costello collection. At first my collection of cassettes was small enough that it only occupied about half of one of the shelves in my room, and once, as a prank, my dad took every tape I owned and hid them in one of his drawers.

During high school I DJ’d friends’ parties with cassettes: I used a two-player deck, and I would spend most of the afternoon prior to the party rewinding tapes so I could play a single song off each one. We all loved The Clash, Elvis Costello, Dire Straits, Bob Marley, The Police, Bruce Springsteen, Squeeze, The Stray Cats, The Talking Heads, UB40 and U2 – we all had the same record collections, since we were listening to the same classic rock radio stations, watching MTV and copying each other’s albums, so it was pretty easy to put together a well-received set.

Blank tapes were the CD-Rs and flash drives of the Eighties and Nineties. Tapes, even the good stuff, like Maxell XL-IIs and TDK SA-90s (or XL-IISs or SAX-90s!) were far cheaper than new vinyl or even brand new cassettes. They came shrink-wrapped in packages of two, with blank inlay cards so you could write down all the song titles. The higher-end cassettes supposedly sounded better, perhaps degrading at a slower pace through repeated plays, and we tried to stay away from the cheaper stuff, like TDK D-90s, and the cheapest stuff, like Intermagnetics cassettes, which came in a plastic bag. I think XL-IIS and SAX-90 cassettes were Chromium Dioxide, which was the highest quality tape available (other than reel-to-reel, I suppose) – in the spring of 1983 Synchronicity was released, and it was a big deal that the cassette version was Chromium Dioxide. It was stenciled on the actual cassette.

It was the technology of the time that inspired most of my cassette purchases. Boom boxes, which we also called ghetto blasters, and the Sony Walkman were our preferred method of listening to music, which was far more portable than it had been when our parents were in their teens and carrying boxes of 45s to each other’s houses. I had a turntable and a collection of records, but I needed to carry my tapes around with me, and it was often cheaper to buy a new cassette-version of an album than to buy the vinyl version and a blank, although I did so once in awhile. Bob Marley came to me via a cassette recording I made of my friend David Labiner’s copy of Legend, as did the Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense and Little Creatures, with which I spent so much of my senior year, were copied from a friend’s records.

This was all prior to the spring 1986, when CDs first appeared and record stores would display the CD, vinyl and cassette versions of new albums – I think I was at the Record World at the Mall at Short Hills when they first put Peter Gabriel’s So, released in May of 1986, on sale in all three formats. Deep into the early Nineties, when I bought my first CDs, including Van Morrison’s Hymns to the Silence, Billy Falcon’s Pretty Blue World and the two albums Springsteen released in 1992, the overlooked and unfairly maligned Human Touch and Lucky Town, I was still taping everything so I could play it in the car.

So it was only two decades ago that tapes were still my life. Even after I moved to San Francisco, in August of 1992, I was still taping friends’ CDs, and my friends were still taping albums for me. The first Cracker and Wallflowers albums made their way to me via cassette, as did the Gin Blossoms New Miserable Experience and Sugar’s Copper Blue, all of them released in 1992: a friend of mine visited me during my first winter in San Francisco, and he sent me a stack of cassettes to thank me for my hospitality when he returned home. I was still buying tapes, too, and that year I purchased brand new cassettes of Luka Bloom’s The Acoustic Motorbike and Shawn Colvin’s Fat City. This was also the period when record labels stopped issuing albums on vinyl. I didn’t yet own a CD player, nor had I brought a turntable to California with me – perhaps I just didn’t think I would have the space in my apartment for a collection of vinyl which amounted, at the time, to three boxes.[1] So I was still in the thrall of tape. But in 1994 my parents bought me a five-load CD player, and in October of that year I had a bicycle accident that required a night of hospitalization at San Francisco General – my mom flew out to California to take care of me, and when she walked into my hospital room she had my turntable in her arms. My era of tape came to an end soon thereafter.

Technology outpaces us. It’s designed to leave behind its predecessors and their baggage. Even CDs, bright and shiny little flying saucers, no longer seem modern in the presence of spiffy external hard drives stuffed with music – like tapes, they only had a two-decade run. A few years ago I saw them start to recede into the distance beside the cash register at Starbucks, one of the few places left where you could actually buy them, and I knew it was finished.

The best thing about tapes was mix tapes. Was there any better feeling than sitting up late at night making a mix-tape for someone you’d fallen for? Those were some of the best nights I ever had. I was still making mix-tapes for friends and girlfriends into the late Nineties – I think I made my last one in the winter of 2002, a hastily-compiled Eighties mix for Antigone recorded mostly from vinyl for her to play in the used Saab we had just purchased. I finished it in haste the night we picked up the car, and I think there was still plenty of blank tape on the second side, the ultimate mix tape crime (there’s no excuse – even if you only have a minute or two, you can add “Your Majesty” or “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want”), and I didn’t make her any sort of cover. Thus my empire of tape ended with a hurried whimper. The shame still burns.

The covers of my mix tapes were my first foray into visual art (in 1999 I started a comic strip, Pretty Sure, and I took up photography as a pretty serious hobby in 2003, when I started shooting photos with my father’s 1981 Canon AE-1, which I still have). At first I just cut photos and taped them to the inlay cards (family photos from a trip to Seattle for my parents’ birthdays one year, a Marvin Gaye mix titled “You’re Marvelous” for my dad, a Stevie Wonder mix, “You’re Wonderful”, for my mom). They drive a Prius and a Mini now, neither equipped for cassettes, so I’m sure my mix tapes are moldering in a box or basket somewhere in their messy home office. After that I made a tape for my dear friend, John Ferguson, “A Black Tape”, which featured Back in Black on one side and the underrated Black Love by the Afghan Whigs on the other. The cover itself was black paper, perhaps a reference to legendary albums by Metallica and Spinal Tap. A late period mix-tape, one of my last, featured a guy from an airline safety card opening an emergency door in the middle of the sky above some indeterminate East Coast forest – as the song says, I’d fallen on black days…My mix-tape covers were my Faberge eggs, artistic statements on the heads of pins, and the work I did helped me later on when I began adding clip art to my comics. My tapes, and those bestowed upon me, many of them crafted with as much or even more love and care than my own, are now boxed up, taped up, tucked away on a shelf in my parents’ basement, where they keep my vinyl company. At some point I hope to contribute some of my friends’ and my own mix-tape covers to some sort of gallery show, which will no doubt be thronged by nostalgia-drenched members of the 40+ set. I’ll serve Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers.

After we moved back to New York, in 2005, I spent a lot of time in my mom’s 1990 Acura Vigor, which only has a tape deck (it’s probably one of the few cars on the road that still does), and our drives, usually to my grandmother’s (over the river, through the woods, down nearly the entire length of the New Jersey Turnpike…), were given over to whatever cassettes had been abandoned to the compartment between the two front seats. I remember, during a rather difficult period with my wife, driving south on the Turnpike playing Jackson Browne’s “Doctor My Eyes” and sobbing. It was a sad but appropriate end to our 20 years together. I loved you once.