Photo by Tramavirtual
My office Christmas party was this past Friday, and as usual, a great time was had, with lots of conversation, some drunken observations (I never drink at these gatherings for fear of becoming the talk of the office), as well as the usual shenanigans that tend to occur between co-workers after hours. Rewind back to three hours prior, and I was tearing open my closets like I was robbing the place, looking for a roll of wrapping paper to wrap my secret Santa gift.
It was in this ransacking of my own home that I found something that had been tucked away in the back of a closet for quite some time, the sheen of dust already turning it's oily black exterior into a sort of gunmetal grey. I paused over this dusty little container, curious to what I had in there and what may have possessed me to keep this thing over the years.
Most of these tapes were made back in the 1990's, a magical time when I went from a awkward, shy youth to a even more awkward, shy young adult. The Internet was still in it's infancy, and still had it's potential to become something new and exciting before becoming overrun by Facebook and porn. MTV still had music in between their reality show programming, and Kurt Loder was years away from being locked in a freezer like Sly Stallone in Demolition Man, only to be thawed out when someone big from the 80's and 90's had passed. The highlight of the video game world was probably Doom, in all of it's pixelated gore and glory. Woodstock had returned, was hailed as a success, returned again, and went down in a fiery mess of violence, commercialism and Fred Durst.
The 1990's were also, more than any decade in my humble opinion, plagued by the misfortune of having an overabundance of albums that had perhaps one or two really good songs, with the rest of the album being only a hop skip and a jump away from being categorized as a fetid sewer. Keep in mind, the average CD price was around $12 to $15. In 90's dollars, that was the difference between buying a music just so I could have access to the song Sex And Candy, or using said fundage on a tank of gas, a cheap date, some illegal beer for a kick back, or some other tomfoolery that I may have been up to back in those good old days.
Fortunately children, or those children who are young enough to have been born after 1990 or so, there were ways to get the song if you wanted it bad enough. The first was to see if you could bum a CD from a friend that happened to be stupid enough to buy the song, usually for another CD that you had been stupid enough to purchase. However, if you were desperate enough, and had enough patience, there was a way to get around having to pay for the song: taping said song off of the radio. It's a long dead art, killed by the digital age, but back then, and several generations before then, we had this down to a science. All you needed was a Memorex, a stereo with a record option, and some time.
The process began with calling the deejay on the request line, offering everything but your first born child for the chance of the song of your dreams to be played. This tended to be a crap shoot, as deejays, then as now, tend to ahve their own ideas as far as what is good music that should be played. I usually had the best of luck with Glen Garza, the only guy at our local (only) rock station to play music after 1986. I hated Magic Mike, who played a non-stop orgy of Van Halen, both from the Sammy Hagar and David Lee Roth eras.
Second, you assumed the yoga-esque pose by the radio, waiting like a lion for it's quarry. Everyone had their own positions, usually some bizarre love child of the utkatasana and malasana poses. Anything that prevented you from developing a bloodclot in your legs that would lodge itself in your lungs and kill you like Finney from the novel A Separate Peace.
And there you would wait, often waiting through aggrevating commercials (like the infamous J.J. King of Beepers jingles), and at times shifting your yoga positions to something more comfortable, even taping an occasional song that you might have liked and had not occurred to you. We all even had the songs that we knew and hated enough to use for bathroom breaks, grab a bite to eat, or go do something productive (in my case, usually something by Rush.)
And who can forget those moments waiting by the radio when your musical quarry, finally DID come on.....only to have the accursed deejay start rambling on about how this was the band's new single, how he thought it was awesome, and the name of the radio station before the song began to play. All the while, you're crouching there with the recorder going on your stereo screaming "SHUT THE FUCK UP! I"m trying to get music here!" Especially if said deejay happened to love the sound of his own voice to talk right up until the lyrics began (unfortunately, also Glen Garza.)
True, I did have enough recordings where I could remix two different sections into one complete song, and I acquired the skill (a useless one) to get it to where it was seemless. But nothing beat the feeling of recording the song perfectly from one take to another, without interruption, commercials, or egotistical deejay ranting to ruin it. Over time, I had even had a sort of loose network with my friends, where we each traded different mixtapes amongst each other for other music that we had. It was like Pokemon, but without the stigma attached to it. You would talk about new bands you had heard, shared music that you had, and just find different ways to enjoy something that you may have been passionate about. And I think it's this part of the tapes that is why I kept them for all these years. It was the memories of sharing and trading tunes with friends, and the different memories of a more innocent and simple time, of days gone by.
P.S. Fuck you, Glen Garza. I'm still bitter.
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