Different Drum: Held together by Magic tape and cassette tapes

Sometimes, life is too busy to keep on top of everything you should. Scrap that thought and let’s get real: MOST of the time life is too busy to keep on top of everything you should.

I can unabashedly vouch for that. I don’t change my bedding as often as the manufacturer recommends; I sometimes run out of salt in my water softener before I get around to buying another several bags of it; and I have been known to have to beg my friends, my family or my boss to put this week’s garbage bags in their dumpster after failing on my own garbage pick-up day to wheel my big green trash container out to the road in time for assigned pick-up.

What kind of loser neglects those kind of small but crucial life details? This one, that’s who. But why? Because you could pave the Highway to Hell with my good intentions, although they actually do not amount to even a smallish hill of beans. Sure, I mean well, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into swift action. I frequently find myself running along behind life, hoping to thumb a ride and catch up.

While we’re talking roads and roadsides, I implore those old enough to recall the cassette tape era. Can you remember occasionally glimpsing along the roadside a cracked and thoroughly-run-over cassette with hundreds of feet of tape spilling out everywhere, looking all disgusting, like synthetic, ribbonish intestines.

You may recall there were two basic explanations for such a sight. First, the tape deck in someone’s vehicle suddenly went on the fritz and started silently eating the cassette tape that it had been playing. Murphy’s Law dictates that’s never immediately discoverable, but rather discernible only after a good half of the recording-bearing tape has been swallowed into the bowels of your audio equipment.

The second basic explanation for the sight of a mangled cassette tape along the roadside is that a courting couple listening to music in one of their vehicles viciously got into a pointless argument during the thousandth playing of “their song.” That led someone (typically the passenger) to yank out the cassette tape mid-ballad, with the tail of the tape still caught in the tape deck, which required yet further force to disengage, after which the whole mess got flung out the window.

Believe me, I know how these things happened because once when I was riding my bike down the roadside in the late 1970s, simply minding my own business, I got Tony Maneroed upside the head with a flying pile of broken cassette and magnetic tape tendrils that contained the Bee Gees-dominated “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack. The song that looked to have been playing at the time of the inner-vehicle relationship meltdown was “How Deep is Your Love?” Much shallower than expected, apparently.

Conversely, if you could resist those kinds of musical reactionary urges, it was possible to salvage, splice (using Magic tape) and re-wind the clear plastic magnetic ribbon contents of your cassette. But painstaking effort was required. You’d think such memories would have turned me permanently off on cassettes; however, in truth, they simply added to cassette tape character and counter-culture. I continued to purchase my music on cassettes (versus CDs) despite knowing all too well the frailty and frustration of my one-sided love affair with the medium.

Admittedly, I still own a few cassette tapes from that era, although I’ve only one remaining cassette tape player. I can’t really say why, but there’s a splash of sentimentality in the mix. My owning cassette tapes means I haven’t had the time to update my ever-changing existence. The cabinet in which I keep my cassettes is a makeshift time-capsule from an era where Kenny G played soothing instrumentals and true love seemed possible. Cassette tapes were sources of optimism when I still gave a rat’s patootie.

Recently, after watching “Hoarders,” I headed toward my cassette tapes, intent upon a clean-out. But my nearby laptop flashed an online article headline, “Three Reasons Why Audio Cassette Tapes are Coming Back” (price, portability and sound quality). What?! I’m not obsolete, just pre-re-cutting edge! So for now, no tape purging until this vintage trend passes.

— Kristy Smith’s Different Drum humor columns are archived at her blog: diffdrum.wordpress.com.

This article originally appeared on Sturgis Journal: Different Drum: Held together by Magic tape and cassette tapes