Good Riddance Project: Cassette Tapes

As we've swept through different areas of the house we encountered, in a couple of places, stashes of old cassette tapes.  I put them aside in a pile because I wasn't ready to deal with them.  This morning, I poured myself a cup of coffee (!) and went through the pile.

What do you do with cassette tapes?  My stereo system is now all digital.  I have the capability, through my laptop, of listening to CDs and adding them to my music library.  I have an old boom box that can play cassettes, but I think that will have its new home in the basement where Housemate's new art work area will be set up.  The only place I can play cassettes in the car.  But I listen to CDs most of the time.  The truth is, most of my cassettes are obsolete.

But my cassettes are linked to memories that I don't want to let go of.   Just going through the pile made me think about cars I've owned, drives I've taken, places I once lived, people I used to be close to.  I culled about eighty cassettes down to thirty.  The easy giveaways were the ones that I now have on CD.  The hard ones were old mixes, or tapes given to me that I once loved.  I picked up a Bocelli Aria cassette and immediately remembered driving alone down from Montville to Portland, the day before law school was to begin.  I remember how that music and the golden brown grasses of late August outside combined with my own confusion and sadness about what I was leaving behind and my trepidation about what I was moving into, and I drove the whole hour and a half with tears streaming down my face.  And then my fingers found a mixtape I made my senior year of high school, that I loved, and then misplaced, then found and loved again, then lost again.  Can I really throw it away?  The first cassette tape I ever bought -- U2's Wide Awake in America.  I remember choreographing a dance to that with my best friend when we were about 13.  And then there are the tapes of CDs I really like but have somehow lost and haven't gotten around to replacing. 

What I kept: Billy Bragg Back To Basics, Robert Cray Strong Persuader, Volebeats The Sky and the Ocean, Byrds/Gram Parsons, Patsy Cline Sweet Dreams, Gillian Welch Revival/Hell Among the Yearlings, Bap Kennedy Domestic Blues, Ana Egge/Gillian Welch, Fred Eaglesmith Things Is Changin', Don Walser Down at the Sky Vue Drive In, Fred Eaglesmith Lipstick Lies & Gasoline, Shivaree I Oughta Give You A Shot In The Head for Making Me Live In A Dump Like This, Marah Lets Cut The Crap And Hook Up Later On Tonight, Bocelli Aria, Bartoli Mozart Arias, Joe Ely, Alison Moorer Alabama Song, Los Super Seven, Julie Miller Broken Things, Buddy Miller Cruel Moons, Fred Eaglesmith Drive In Movie, Ray Wylie Hubbard Crusades of the Restless Knights, Beaver Nelson  Last Hurrah, Beck Mellow Gold, Prince Purple Rain, Coltrane My Favorite Things, Farmer Not So John Receiver, five or six mixtapes, and five mysterious unlabeled blank tapes that I suspect of holding memories.  A few of these I am keeping for the music, but most I'm keeping because they have such strong associations with a time and place, with a younger me.  Even holding the tape reminds me of who I once was, what thoughts I was struggling with, what my dreams used to be.   

Housemate is doing an art project called the Music Release Project.  It involves leaving cassette tapes with notes for people to find in odd places.  She's even started a blog, but she's asked me not to link to it just yet.  She'll be taking digital photos to document the tapes released.  It is a small comfort to believe that the fifty or so cassettes I'm not holding onto will be made into Art. 

Comments

[mr. fun ball]

Hey, I think you might be the first person I've come across outside my group of friends that has even heard of Farmer Not So John. Their first album is pretty great, too.

[Convert_Cassette]

One thing you can do with cassettes that are irreplaceable and you don't have time or energy to deal with is have a trained engineer digitize them. Here is a reliable service which specializes in professional archiving and restoration of audio and video.

Digitize-It! use state of the art studio equipment and will include metadata (session comments) in a spreadsheet. Convert cassette to cd, transfer tape to cd or mp3, vhs to dvd, reels, microcassettes & more.

[Josh]

I kept back to basics also...

[RW Stoufus]

You can pick up a Creative MP3 unit for about $40.00 bucks that will allow an analog to digital conversion to any number of formats.

I have digitized about 600+ and its pretty seamless. It will take some time however all we did was set up a cassette deck on the computer table. I work from a home office so run tapes continously when while we are on the computer.

We were just passing them on to friends and family but nobody wants cassette now!

It takes time but you will gain alot of space in your closets and be able to carry around 10,000 albums on a portable drive.

Well worth the trade-off.

bobstoufus@gmail.com