In May of 2024, I was invited to start writing a monthly column for the daily newspaper serving our beloved twin cities of Lewiston and Auburn. Read the latest installment here. Be warned: Content at SunJournal.com resides behind a paywall. I would encourage readers, especially those here in Maine, to suck it up and subscribe. For one affordable price, folks get all the news from Greater L/A, the state’s second largest metro area; everything from sister paper, the Portland Press-Herald; plus access to content at the Morning Sentinel and Kennebec Journal. All of these local journalism operations are now owned and operated by the Maine Trust for Local News. While I strongly encourage you to support them with your money and eyeballs, the paywall does make it difficult to promote the product to non-subscribers. So I’ll be sharing the odd column here.
By Hal Phillips
It’s weird to learn via media report that specific, intimate aspects of one’s own cultural history are making “comebacks”. Maybe 15-20 years ago, a certain American demographic started collecting and playing vinyl records again, for example. Out of nowhere this became trendy. Today, folks of all ages are still giddily sourcing records from Discogs and investing in turntables, after a 20-year respite.
My Millennial son and daughter-in-law maintain a modest record collection today. Yet they have gathered these vinyl relics more or less at random, in small batches, from second-hand shops. They don’t even bother to seek out records from artists they like. Their enjoyment of this seemingly kitchy, analog activity is almost entirely ironic, like dressing as a steam punk, or churning butter.
I get it. Millennials do love their irony. But they are divorced entirely from the activities and emotions that once made vinyl-collection and record-playing irresistable.
Just last month, and in the same vein, I learned that cassette tapes are back in vogue after three decades away. I am not technically a part of this revival. I maintain two means of playing cassettes, and have for some time, because my mixed-tape collection — dating back to my own golden age of mixed tapes (1986-92) — has remained sweetly nostalgic to me. The idea of buying new tapes, or making them, feels rather anachronist, because the technical and interpersonal conditions that prevailed during this golden age no longer exist.
In short, one must have achieved a certain age — “old as dirt” is the technical term, I believe — in order to remember cassette tapes and what made them so special. But that doesn’t mean we should consign their fascinating 20th century narrative to the dustbin of history.
Until the late 1970s, there was no practical way for everyday folks to record music from vinyl — or off the only other practical music source then available, the radio. Cassette tapes changed all of that. The advance proved both technological and cultural: A friend who owned Jackson Browne’s album “Late for the Sky,” for instance, could just tape the whole thing for you. This saved money. Cassettes also stored more efficiently, in something as small as a shoe box. Critically, one could also play them in your car, if said vehicle featured a tape deck. This was huge.
Yet cassettes also transformed any schmuck into a legit DJ. Throughout the 1970s, radio was the only place where music consumers could experience a stream of individual cuts off multiple albums, from multiple artists. We take this phenomenon for granted today, thanks to Spotify, iTunes, Pandora and YouTube. Commercial radio originated this experience, however — with interruptions from advertisers. Our record players gave us commercial-free choice, but only one immutable album at a time.
Cassette tapes cannily merged these multiple forms of music consumption. They allowed us to create those playlists for ourselves, from our own record collections. They enabled playlists using other folks’ collections, from songs highjacked off the radio, even from other tapes (if a stereo had two tape decks). This multi-valent ability, acquired during the first Reagan Administration, proved thoroughly mind-blowing and futuristic. Then Sony introduced the Walkman and we all felt like cinematic characters from Blade Runner.
If you were there in 1983, that wonder remains tangible and meaningful to this day — in the form of these mixed tapes. If you weren’t, the phenomenon is likely reduced to mere anachronism.
Our experience in the moment doesn’t create mere memory. It attaches meaning to memories. For example, it took a very long time to put together a mixed tape. We’re talking days and days. Emotionally, this added still more layers of satisfaction, by producing mixed tapes for parties, for one’s own enjoyment, for one’s vehicular commute. I worked mainly with TDK 90s, meaning each side of the tape could accommodate 45 minutes of music. Naturally, finished products required clever titles, cover art and carefully documented song rosters.
These were works of art, time-stamped to reflect specific periods in one’s life.
If you were dating someone, well, there were few more meaningful gestures than making a mixed tape for them. One had to be careful with such powerful sentiment, however, lest the gesture prove too much, too soon. What’s more, it takes a month or two of dating to truly understand someone’s musical tastes — or this is my recollection (!). To pre-emptively hit some poor woman with a mixed tape invariably loaded with a guy’s favorite music smacked of a dangerous, primordial form of mansplaining.
And yet, it was the nature of this time-consuming, deeply felt, highly technical effort that made the exercise meaningful — for someone else, eventually, but for one’s own self immediately.
Allow me to provide some insight into the technical side of mixed-tape engineering, via a short primer on The 540 Method. So, you’re making a mixed tape and you’ve stopped recording at the end of a single vinyl track. Step 1: Press the RECORD and PAUSE buttons on the tape deck, simultaneously. Now one is poised to quickly and precisely restart the recording. Step 2: Queue the next vinyl track to be taped using a wetted finger on the disc’s interior, paper label. In this way, one may carefully stop the turntable at the exact spot the next track begins. Then comes the fun bit: Manually reverse the disc one full revolution (360 degrees) on the turntable — plus another half revolution (180), or 540 degrees in total. Step 3: Hold that finger there in place, on the disc label, before lifting said finger at the same moment the PAUSE button is depressed. Magically, the music will start and the tape deck will begin to record, in unison.
Behold, the perfect segue. Guaranteed.
The ‘80s-era cassette tape itself was a pretty flimsy article. It got dirty and gummed up quickly and easily, especially when wedged underneath passenger seats or behind stereo consoles. Even if carefully stored in sterile, hyperbaric environments, the tape itself might stretch or crease in substandard tape decks, resulting in distorted musical output before eventually snapping. If the mixed tape was valued highly enough, this rupture meant the delicate deconstruction of the cassette’s plastic casing, the micro-splicing of tape using very thin, surgically applied strips of Scotch tape, and the winding of reels back to taught position — using pencils, whose angularities and diameters were just right for the job.
However, the tape stretched between the two reels was itself made of polyester-plastic film with a magnetic coating. Contrary to what you may have seen Tom Hanks finagle on Cast Away, you can’t bind anything together with such diaphanous material. Once repaired, it’s even more fragile. Depending on the tape deck, the mere stopping and starting of reconditioned cassettes involved great risk.
A portion of this technological challenge survives into 2024, according to The New York Times, which reported in October that the real difficulty these days is finding working tape decks. The last vehicle to roll off the assembly line with a tape deck was a 2010 Lexus apparently. Stereo makers gave up on them way before then. Thrifting for such things is a huge ask today, a bit like sourcing leaded gasoline.
I maintain and preserve my own tape-deck options because I’m aware of these obstacles and, as you may have noticed, I have problems throwing things away.
I made my last mixed tape for a girlfriend in 1993. It wasn’t received in quite the way I’d hoped, by her, because the cultural moment had already passed. Compact discs had taken over the market and the vinyl/retro movement had not yet developed an iota of traction. I remember being a bit taken aback by her indifference, but I let it go. She married me anyway.
