This stopped me in my tracks this evening, while a flood of rock and roll memories washed over me.
This :
I wonder if the sight of that piece of molded plastic ramps up in you the same welter of blurry, beery, hormonal reminiscences that it does in me. If you’re pushing 40, and rocked out with your [insert gender-appropriate appendage here] out, and spent long nights at the stereo making offerings, making entertainment for your friends and lovers, thrilled by the fact that you could actually tear songs from those big black frisbees and rearrange them any way you wanted, if you spent weeks and months, years of your life swapping one Maxell after another into the cassette player of your patient buddy’s Datsun F10, wiping off the rye you’d spilled, dropping your Player’s Light on the carpet again, waiting for the hiss that marked the end of the leader and knowing to the 10th of a second when the first kerrang of that fuckin’ kickass tune dude was going to swoop down and tweak your heart, if you remember that one night with a thermos full of vodka and pink lemonade as the snow fell like magic out of a sky that was so close and black and solid that you felt like the air was getting squeezed out of you, wearing red and white Santa gloves in the back seat of that big black fast ’65 Barracuda with the first girl you’d ever really loved, the girl you still hadn’t gotten up the nerve to tell, being tossed laughing to and fro as the car whipped around corners slick and roaring, if you remember shit like that now, then you know how I feel tonight.
Thanks to project c-90, via Mefi.
Never put me in your box if the shit eats tapes
I loved Stavros’ paean to cassettes and youth so much that I’m ganking his topic and repurposing it as my own. (Be grateful he wasn’t writing about the genius of Nora Ephron ‘cos I’m suggestible and uninspired today.) I…
Now see, I used a few of those in my time. Towards the end of my vinyl-to-tape days, though, I was using those gods-awful 80’s-flavored yellow tapes with the clear bits and the funky Miami-Vice-inspired triangles and such. They were good enough tapes, I suppose, but I look at them now (yes, I still have some of them, what of it?) and cringe…
Ah, memories. Somewhere in my basement I have a big paper grocery bag full of cassettes, which I just can’t bring myself to toss. (Although since I was a mousy little weenie-girl, mine are mostly classical and jazz.) I’d check out LPs from the library, which had a surprisingly good music collection, bring them home, and tape them. Never once did it cross my mind that this was copyright infringement, and that I might be hunted down like a dog. Come and get me, RIAA!
Lo fidelity / Wing Music
Wing Music. G’on, download a sample. That’s right, a free sample. You’ll be singing it all week… probably at 3 a.m., rocking back and forth on your haunches in the…
Lo fidelity / Wing Music
Wing Music. G’on, download a sample. That’s right, a free sample. You’ll be singing it all week… probably at 3 a.m., rocking back and forth on your haunches in the…
Real Link Stuff
I’m not normally a link and comment person, but I’m feeling in a ‘chatty’ mood, so here we go:
American Street has created adjunct Perranoski award categories to the Wampum awards. There’s also a contest for best poem featuring the Rumsfeld inf…
In The Mix
…I suddenly want to have one of the first truly great mixes I made for someone else materialize here in front of me. There’s a half bottle of rum sitting on
Man. Now I’m going to have to go digging for the two wine-cases that are full of casette tapes and connect up the machine so I can listen to some of ’em again. Except almost none are Maxells. TDK SA-90s rocked my world.
Man, it was only a few weeks ago that I finally got up the nerve to throw out all the old tapes I have kept since my teenagehood and carted around the world. Even though none of them played worth a damn any more, it was a real wrench to get rid of them, like throwing a little piece of me away.
As the owner back then of one well used ’65 Barracuda. I feel an urge to say: “I’m amazed we survived those booze infused years… Wiser’s and Royal Reserve”. Good heavens 20+ years later and I’m still doing pretty much the same… guess I should grow up one of these days, nah! 🙂