Yes Michael, things were different. They are still. Thanks for pointing up the continuum or creativity on which the roles of participant and recipient play out. The Woodstock Generation and the Swifties occupy different positions on that continuum. Sarah was AT Woodstock. I consumed and felt consumed by the film. CSN&Y, Country Joe and the Fish, Richie Havens all participated to the max. I consumed over and over and over again, the blood seeping out of the revolving album grooves. I was there with The Who because it was My Generation. As they revolved, we have evolved. But we certainly haven't got older.
That's the spirit :-) And you're right... it's a continuum, and the point at which you sit on it feels like the norm, from which all else differs... though if you were at a different point, your current position would seem odd too. Also odd is that you mention Woodstock, which is where I'm sitting right at this moment! Been here for a writing week... lovely place.
At the Sidmouth blues and jazz festival I just participated in my first blues harmonica class given by the 81 year old Johnny Mars who brought down the house at - yes - the Sidmouth Conservative Club last night. Wonderful. Though I promise to submit to a security search to ensure I don’t have a harp about my person the next time we meet
Music. But also books! Books were expensive and hard to get for me. You passed them around (and got them back) and reread them, and were knocked out when you found a really great author. I found the straw man trilogy in a second hand bookstore and I still remember reading the back cover and thinking yeah I’ll try this… Now I have about 500 titles stored in a device and enough to read until I drop dead. Is it better? I don’t know. It seems a little less precious somehow.
Absolutely agree. I was looking for something in my Kindle app the other day and realize there's a dozen books or two on there I bought and then forgot to read. And being able to flip right to another rather than persisting with a book that seems difficult means you miss out, too...
I keep reminding myself that I have a Kindle app and an Apple Books app, with books in them! I’m actually reading one right now, when I remember to open the app.
It is the affliction of those of us who are GenX. Raised before mobile phones and access to the Internet. I genuinely think there isn't anything, technology wise, that I would miss that much if I went back there. It's hard to raise kids in this hyper-connected world, and still somehow give them something of what it was like for you growing up. Do they even want that? Was it actually better or are they our rose-tinted glasses, remembering endless summers playing out with friends, digging in the dirt, walking dogs and fishing at the local pond? My desk, crammed into the corner of a room filled with bookshelves LP's and CDs is a testament to that time. Memories are attached to music and books. Sometimes I still feel 25, in the midst of my obsession with 'The Cure' spurred on by my association with a lovely friend who never became more than that, but the increasing aches brutally remind me I am not - and that 25yr old me could drink me under the table 5 times over now. I remember those times with fondness but they have moved on, and so have I.
You touched on a theme that many people have in common!!! Not many people still keep those tapes. I do. But many understand and remember very well those sensations from times gone by, to which they belong. The technology that developed at a giant pace served us to get closer to music, always having it available, in the sad, difficult or happy moments of adolescence. The creativity of each of us was locked up in those MIXes.
Abuot of “Physical Process of Recording”. It didn't just involve recording from turntables, but sometimes from another cassette, lent along with the recorder by your friend. Sometimes, from the TV show. (there were special recording wires for TV, which didn't always work). It's true, the MIX composed was exclusively personal, yours. However, those cassettes were cutting edge technology. Not all families owned, therefore, a friend also happened to have a round cassette recorder and enormous so-called reels (but this is prehistory). It is not true that the broken ribbon was thrown away. No, sir!!! There was a very elaborate way of gluing and joining two ends of the ribbon together. (the recording quality was affected). Even the twisted tape... before throwing it away we tried to unwind the tape with great patience... sometimes it was possible... In short, a precious thing.
Still after the song «Marrakech express» by Crosby and Nash, the notes of “Can’t Buy Me Love.” by Beathles immediately come to mind – they were recorded together.
Good times of our youth.
P.S “You had to earn physical access to them” - how cut.
The cutting-tape-together option... yes, true: I was never that hardcore, I'm afraid. But like you, I do remember painstakingly trying to fix many tangled tapes, and gently pulling the tape out of the machine... and those little cassettes that were supposed to clean the head so it wouldn't happen... [had forgotten until just this minute!] And also the tape-to-tape thing with cables... god, I'd forgotten about that too! We earned our mixtapes in those days! :-)
I cleaned out about half of my album and cassette collection a few years ago, and it felt painful to part with so many memories. Then late that night, I ended up in the emergency room with a kidney stone, so I took that as a sign from the universe that I could keep the rest.
I still make Spotify playlists (some replicating old mixtapes, and some swapped with the same best friend with whom I traded cassettes forty years ago.)
I was just telling a younger friend about taping songs off the radio last night. In more recent times, my husband worked at a radio station and had a lot of down time he spent digging for new music. He worked weekends and I worked weekdays so on Monday mornings I'd get into my car and find a new mixed CD in the player. He also liked to give them random names according to his mood, so while there are a handful with a genre or real title on them, most just have cryptic titles and some are even titled in Japanese (which he speaks but I don't). My car is still full of them years later and when I get bored, I just grab one at random and see what's there.
I still have all my old cassettes and cds and vinyl. Well most of it. I think some may still be “on loan” to my old school friends - wonder what they’ve done with them!
I often think about the old mixtape when my wee boy is shouting at Alexa for his favourite songs to be played over and over again! And I love what you were saying about seemingly random songs being linking in your mind purely because of the order of a self taped cassette!! This happens to me so much!
I used to do an albums worth of studying when my exams were coming up, before allowing myself a break and a snack! How do people measure time now?!
Ha — I used to use an album as a measure of time, too! I've still got a few treasured LPs and cassettes... but the vast majority didn't make the cut for shipping to another country...
The most special cassettes to me in my early teens were recordings of the raves that were happening every weekend in the UK that I was much too young to attend. There was a shop in town that I would go to every weekend to buy a bootleg tape from one of the raves from the previous weekend - there would be two DJ sets per tape, out of dozens that performed that night, and since I could only afford one tape each week I had to choose carefully. If it turned out to be a banger, I would take it into school and pass it around to the kids who wanted to copy it. It enabled us to partake in what we had identified as the coolest scene of that decade, that was otherwise out of our reach, and also afforded me quite a bit of status at school. None of that would happen now: everyone would be able to both watch the rave live and pick and choose the sets they liked to download for themselves. From a purely listening-to-music point of view, that might be better, but had that been available then it would have taken away a whole lot of the intangibles and social experience that served to shape me as an individual.
On a similar note, Graham bought me one of those handheld gaming devices for Christmas that has all the games from any console ever - from the earliest Atari, through Sega, Nintendo and Playstation to actual arcade versions of the games. Thousands upon thousands of them: all the games that I once had to meticulously research in the gaming magazines and save up for weeks to buy, all the games that I had to go around to my friends' houses to play because I didn't own the right console, and vice versa, all the games that none of us got to play because we just couldn't afford to buy them, all there in the palm of my hand. After initially loving the nostalgia hit of playing the games I used to love, and trying out some of the ones I'd missed out on, I soon realised that the experience of playing them was a hollow one without the difficulty, expense and social intangibles of procuring them.
Interestingly, Matilda is currently obsessed with obtaining a VHS player: she gets excited every time she sees VHS tapes in the thrift store and begs me to get her one. I don't think she even cares about the content of the movies that she'd be able to get, there's just something about the analog experience of it that she craves. It has seemed way more hassle than it's worth to even consider the prospect, but now I'm thinking maybe I shouldn't be so anti the idea.
Maybe it is worth considering... to give her that quest of finding old VHS tapes in thrift stores... because you're so right about both the video games and those tapes you describe: part of what makes things special is being held back from them by circumstance or cost or availability... a lot of that's gone now (apart from with things that are downright illegal).
I still have hundreds of cassettes and close to five hundred lps, purchased at yard sales in the Woodstock area, where I lived, nearly a half century ago. While I wont part with them, I confess, it's easier to just tell Alexa to play whatever my mood dictates.
I think "curate" is entirely right! You put care and attention into it's make up and it's a process that involved picking and choosing a physical iteration of the music and then a process of deciding what song goes where.
Billy Bragg mentioned on a podcast that he would use a tape recorder with a microphone to tape songs from the radio and he still has his cassettes from decades ago!
The imagery as a teenager that I would try and copy onto tapes were generally inspired by Iron Maiden and the mighty Marillion.
We didn't have a great deal of money growing up so I owned very few vinyl and tape albums but my mates at school had loads so I could scrounge off them.
I was given a mix tape when I was training for the priesthood by a guy who thought I would appreciate the genre. It ended up being loads of 4AD stuff and started my still extant love of This Mortal Coil, Dead Can Dance and the Cocteau Twins.
My favourite mix tapes were still in my car, years after a friend had made them for me, when it was smashed into and towed away, never to be seen again. The tapes were a much bigger loss than the car! :-(
My burned-in memory of some tracks also includes the scratches/jumps, faithfully transferred to mix tapes (where the real reinforcement happened during the my-life-has-a-soundtrack years); and the garbled/jumpy bits of the very small number I was forced to buy on cassette in the first place, which inevitably got chewed and straightened, or cut like a film edit. I still do a minor double take when they aren't there on spotify's flawless instances.
In the end I think if there was value other than as bare nostalgia fodder, it was because it was like poetry, in which the constraints make you think more, and through thinking more make a better thing.
Also if we're remembering tech (qv. head cleaning cassettes), how about the transitional thingy that went into a car cassette player but had an audio lead coming out to plug in your mp3 player :) You often see interesting species at boundaries.
True... and yes, curating links is definitely a similar type of thoughtfulness.
Things were definitely better.
Maybe so :)
I definitely prefer ‘owning’ music to ‘renting’ it, same with books
Yes... it didn't bother me for a while, but it's starting to!
Yes Michael, things were different. They are still. Thanks for pointing up the continuum or creativity on which the roles of participant and recipient play out. The Woodstock Generation and the Swifties occupy different positions on that continuum. Sarah was AT Woodstock. I consumed and felt consumed by the film. CSN&Y, Country Joe and the Fish, Richie Havens all participated to the max. I consumed over and over and over again, the blood seeping out of the revolving album grooves. I was there with The Who because it was My Generation. As they revolved, we have evolved. But we certainly haven't got older.
That's the spirit :-) And you're right... it's a continuum, and the point at which you sit on it feels like the norm, from which all else differs... though if you were at a different point, your current position would seem odd too. Also odd is that you mention Woodstock, which is where I'm sitting right at this moment! Been here for a writing week... lovely place.
At the Sidmouth blues and jazz festival I just participated in my first blues harmonica class given by the 81 year old Johnny Mars who brought down the house at - yes - the Sidmouth Conservative Club last night. Wonderful. Though I promise to submit to a security search to ensure I don’t have a harp about my person the next time we meet
Ha :) Actually I'd love to hear it!
Music. But also books! Books were expensive and hard to get for me. You passed them around (and got them back) and reread them, and were knocked out when you found a really great author. I found the straw man trilogy in a second hand bookstore and I still remember reading the back cover and thinking yeah I’ll try this… Now I have about 500 titles stored in a device and enough to read until I drop dead. Is it better? I don’t know. It seems a little less precious somehow.
Absolutely agree. I was looking for something in my Kindle app the other day and realize there's a dozen books or two on there I bought and then forgot to read. And being able to flip right to another rather than persisting with a book that seems difficult means you miss out, too...
I keep reminding myself that I have a Kindle app and an Apple Books app, with books in them! I’m actually reading one right now, when I remember to open the app.
It is the affliction of those of us who are GenX. Raised before mobile phones and access to the Internet. I genuinely think there isn't anything, technology wise, that I would miss that much if I went back there. It's hard to raise kids in this hyper-connected world, and still somehow give them something of what it was like for you growing up. Do they even want that? Was it actually better or are they our rose-tinted glasses, remembering endless summers playing out with friends, digging in the dirt, walking dogs and fishing at the local pond? My desk, crammed into the corner of a room filled with bookshelves LP's and CDs is a testament to that time. Memories are attached to music and books. Sometimes I still feel 25, in the midst of my obsession with 'The Cure' spurred on by my association with a lovely friend who never became more than that, but the increasing aches brutally remind me I am not - and that 25yr old me could drink me under the table 5 times over now. I remember those times with fondness but they have moved on, and so have I.
Very good way of looking at it. Honoring the past while being fully here in the present.
Hi, Michael!
What a nostalgic piece……
You touched on a theme that many people have in common!!! Not many people still keep those tapes. I do. But many understand and remember very well those sensations from times gone by, to which they belong. The technology that developed at a giant pace served us to get closer to music, always having it available, in the sad, difficult or happy moments of adolescence. The creativity of each of us was locked up in those MIXes.
Abuot of “Physical Process of Recording”. It didn't just involve recording from turntables, but sometimes from another cassette, lent along with the recorder by your friend. Sometimes, from the TV show. (there were special recording wires for TV, which didn't always work). It's true, the MIX composed was exclusively personal, yours. However, those cassettes were cutting edge technology. Not all families owned, therefore, a friend also happened to have a round cassette recorder and enormous so-called reels (but this is prehistory). It is not true that the broken ribbon was thrown away. No, sir!!! There was a very elaborate way of gluing and joining two ends of the ribbon together. (the recording quality was affected). Even the twisted tape... before throwing it away we tried to unwind the tape with great patience... sometimes it was possible... In short, a precious thing.
Still after the song «Marrakech express» by Crosby and Nash, the notes of “Can’t Buy Me Love.” by Beathles immediately come to mind – they were recorded together.
Good times of our youth.
P.S “You had to earn physical access to them” - how cut.
———————————-
The cutting-tape-together option... yes, true: I was never that hardcore, I'm afraid. But like you, I do remember painstakingly trying to fix many tangled tapes, and gently pulling the tape out of the machine... and those little cassettes that were supposed to clean the head so it wouldn't happen... [had forgotten until just this minute!] And also the tape-to-tape thing with cables... god, I'd forgotten about that too! We earned our mixtapes in those days! :-)
Yes!
I cleaned out about half of my album and cassette collection a few years ago, and it felt painful to part with so many memories. Then late that night, I ended up in the emergency room with a kidney stone, so I took that as a sign from the universe that I could keep the rest.
I still make Spotify playlists (some replicating old mixtapes, and some swapped with the same best friend with whom I traded cassettes forty years ago.)
Yes, it's tough to do that... (and I think you took the right message from the universe) but a great idea to rebuild them online!
I was just telling a younger friend about taping songs off the radio last night. In more recent times, my husband worked at a radio station and had a lot of down time he spent digging for new music. He worked weekends and I worked weekdays so on Monday mornings I'd get into my car and find a new mixed CD in the player. He also liked to give them random names according to his mood, so while there are a handful with a genre or real title on them, most just have cryptic titles and some are even titled in Japanese (which he speaks but I don't). My car is still full of them years later and when I get bored, I just grab one at random and see what's there.
That's very cool — like strange time capsules :-)
I still have all my old cassettes and cds and vinyl. Well most of it. I think some may still be “on loan” to my old school friends - wonder what they’ve done with them!
I often think about the old mixtape when my wee boy is shouting at Alexa for his favourite songs to be played over and over again! And I love what you were saying about seemingly random songs being linking in your mind purely because of the order of a self taped cassette!! This happens to me so much!
I used to do an albums worth of studying when my exams were coming up, before allowing myself a break and a snack! How do people measure time now?!
Ha — I used to use an album as a measure of time, too! I've still got a few treasured LPs and cassettes... but the vast majority didn't make the cut for shipping to another country...
The most special cassettes to me in my early teens were recordings of the raves that were happening every weekend in the UK that I was much too young to attend. There was a shop in town that I would go to every weekend to buy a bootleg tape from one of the raves from the previous weekend - there would be two DJ sets per tape, out of dozens that performed that night, and since I could only afford one tape each week I had to choose carefully. If it turned out to be a banger, I would take it into school and pass it around to the kids who wanted to copy it. It enabled us to partake in what we had identified as the coolest scene of that decade, that was otherwise out of our reach, and also afforded me quite a bit of status at school. None of that would happen now: everyone would be able to both watch the rave live and pick and choose the sets they liked to download for themselves. From a purely listening-to-music point of view, that might be better, but had that been available then it would have taken away a whole lot of the intangibles and social experience that served to shape me as an individual.
On a similar note, Graham bought me one of those handheld gaming devices for Christmas that has all the games from any console ever - from the earliest Atari, through Sega, Nintendo and Playstation to actual arcade versions of the games. Thousands upon thousands of them: all the games that I once had to meticulously research in the gaming magazines and save up for weeks to buy, all the games that I had to go around to my friends' houses to play because I didn't own the right console, and vice versa, all the games that none of us got to play because we just couldn't afford to buy them, all there in the palm of my hand. After initially loving the nostalgia hit of playing the games I used to love, and trying out some of the ones I'd missed out on, I soon realised that the experience of playing them was a hollow one without the difficulty, expense and social intangibles of procuring them.
Interestingly, Matilda is currently obsessed with obtaining a VHS player: she gets excited every time she sees VHS tapes in the thrift store and begs me to get her one. I don't think she even cares about the content of the movies that she'd be able to get, there's just something about the analog experience of it that she craves. It has seemed way more hassle than it's worth to even consider the prospect, but now I'm thinking maybe I shouldn't be so anti the idea.
Maybe it is worth considering... to give her that quest of finding old VHS tapes in thrift stores... because you're so right about both the video games and those tapes you describe: part of what makes things special is being held back from them by circumstance or cost or availability... a lot of that's gone now (apart from with things that are downright illegal).
I still have hundreds of cassettes and close to five hundred lps, purchased at yard sales in the Woodstock area, where I lived, nearly a half century ago. While I wont part with them, I confess, it's easier to just tell Alexa to play whatever my mood dictates.
There's definitely advantages to both, I guess :-)
I think "curate" is entirely right! You put care and attention into it's make up and it's a process that involved picking and choosing a physical iteration of the music and then a process of deciding what song goes where.
Billy Bragg mentioned on a podcast that he would use a tape recorder with a microphone to tape songs from the radio and he still has his cassettes from decades ago!
The imagery as a teenager that I would try and copy onto tapes were generally inspired by Iron Maiden and the mighty Marillion.
We didn't have a great deal of money growing up so I owned very few vinyl and tape albums but my mates at school had loads so I could scrounge off them.
I was given a mix tape when I was training for the priesthood by a guy who thought I would appreciate the genre. It ended up being loads of 4AD stuff and started my still extant love of This Mortal Coil, Dead Can Dance and the Cocteau Twins.
Ha :-) It's funny how many memories that simple picture on a hotel wall — and the comments on this post — have brought flooding back to me...
My favourite mix tapes were still in my car, years after a friend had made them for me, when it was smashed into and towed away, never to be seen again. The tapes were a much bigger loss than the car! :-(
Ugh, yes — some things are less replaceable than others!
My burned-in memory of some tracks also includes the scratches/jumps, faithfully transferred to mix tapes (where the real reinforcement happened during the my-life-has-a-soundtrack years); and the garbled/jumpy bits of the very small number I was forced to buy on cassette in the first place, which inevitably got chewed and straightened, or cut like a film edit. I still do a minor double take when they aren't there on spotify's flawless instances.
In the end I think if there was value other than as bare nostalgia fodder, it was because it was like poetry, in which the constraints make you think more, and through thinking more make a better thing.
#okaygenxer
Ha on the hashtag :-) But yes, I do think that constraints lead to greater emotional involvement in a lot of things in life...
Also if we're remembering tech (qv. head cleaning cassettes), how about the transitional thingy that went into a car cassette player but had an audio lead coming out to plug in your mp3 player :) You often see interesting species at boundaries.
Goddddd... I'd forgotten those. And great point about weird fixed as tech time boundaries :)