Music Got All Tangled Up
Unruly Spools: Part 2 of my music playback journey
As a young child approaching my preteen years, I eventually determined that I liked music but I didn’t like listening to it on my father’s big ol’ record player stereo console (as detailed in Part 1 of this series). I wanted to be able to listen in my bedroom instead of the living room or family room, and I didn’t want the rest of the family complaining about it. What to do, what to do? At some point I had acquired a portable cassette tape recorder, though I’m not sure how or why. This was a self-contained unit that included a speaker and a microphone, so you could record your voice. This sort of thing. This was in the pre-boombox, pre-Walkman days.
I discovered this unwieldy but still portable device could also be used to play back cassettes, of course. Strangely enough, prerecorded music cassette tapes¹ were available for sale pretty much anywhere you could buy vinyl records at the time, though the selection wasn’t as good. This was in the very early 70s.
In addition, the recorder unit I had included an earphone jack and an earphone, so I could actually listen to my music in complete privacy. Granted it was mono instead of stereo, was in just one ear, and was uncomfortable and looked like a giant hearing aid. A far cry from the in-ear headphones of today. But hey, to me it was progress.
I am pretty sure that the first cassette I bought was Up To Date by The Partridge Family. Yes, my musical tastes continued to be dictated by what I saw on TV, apparently. What can I say? I had a massive prepubescent crush on Susan Dey (who didn’t actually perform on the songs, I believe) and the tunes were mega-catchy to my young brain. I think at some point I had most of the PF catalog on cassette tape.
But the tape that got the most play in the early days was There Goes Rhymin’ Simon by Paul Simon. I was obssessed with the song “Kodachrome” and needed to hear it whenever I wanted, not just when it played on the radio. I grew to love the rest of the album as well. “American Tune” is an undisputed classic.
The other tape I remember playing a lot, and this was near the end of my prerecorded cassette days, was Leftoverture by Kansas. “Carry On Wayward Son” was the huge draw for me there, though I did come to appreciate the album as a whole.
Strangely, I don’t think I ever acquired any of these three albums on any other media, even up to the current day. I must’ve really burned out on them. I need to check those out on streaming.
Compact cassette tapes had many issues. You didn’t have to worry about pops and scratches and such like with vinyl records. But those early players could eat a tape like no one’s business. I spent many an hour extracting the mangled mess of a magnetic brown worm from the player and then rewinding it in the cassette shell with my pinky finger in the spindle hole. If you have never had to do that, then you are leading a charmed, enchanted life. Sometimes you couldn’t get the tape back on the reel correctly, or part of it would be folded over on the wrong side, or the tape would get creased/damaged to the point of having some garbled sound on part of the playback. Also, the tape heads on the machine had to be cleaned constantly, with Q-tips and rubbing alcohol, IIRC.
So the listening experience was less than optimal. The fidelity through the small speaker was not good and tapes that size couldn’t hold a candle to the sound quality from those vinyl grooves. But what really pushed me away from the format is that I acquired a car in high school. I really wanted to listen to music while driving and it didn’t have a cassette player. In fact, I don’t think many cars at the time had one. It did have something else though…
Next: Trackus Interruptus
¹ Prerecorded tapes had holes at the top of the housing as a write-protect mechanism to prevent tape recorders from recording over them. Recordable cassettes had those holes filled in, and you could break off the tabs to make them read-only.
Please let me know if you are enjoying this series or if this Boomer Nostalgia is a bit too much. I promise to get to more current concerns along this path as the series moves forward…
