Hello! Let’s talk cassette players, cassette tapes, and how they enabled the world go round&round back in a day when although things weighed on me, they were weighted so incredibly differently. More fleeting freakouts than existential glimpses into mortality.

I think I mentioned that as I go through and clean out the things in my dad’s former home as we ready it for selling, that the places those items take me, the memories they evoke, tumble me down the rabbit hole of my heart. (And speaking of tumble, he is making a steady recovery from the one he took last week. Although his face is bruised all over as if he’s wearing a superhero’s mask of blacks and purples and the cut on his arm still requires two sterile pads and a good wind-around of self-adhesive wrap once a day, overall things are moving in the healing direction. He still toggles between the tunes: “I’m checking out of this place” and “I live here now and maybe itt’s OK” yet he hums along more often to the latter than the former. So…progress.) As to the music of life, it was his collection of cassettes that did me in during last week’s sorting session.

A zippered case holding handmade cassettes copied from his collection of jazz albums. Count Basie, Stan Kenton, Sarah Vaughn, Blue Note live recordings, and Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain. These artists and their tunes were the soundtrack to my young life. I don’t know if I loved jazz exactly but I recognized as I toddled around our house, then grew into my own set of ears, that it had an edge that the pop music on the car radio didn’t. When my mom drove me to school or when we did errands or if I went with her to her Saturday hair appointment, KHJ was always tuned in. It was LA’s pop station, 93 on the AM dial, and it was where I learned that my mom liked to sing, that she had an amazing voice, and that who cared what the lyrics were. Elton John (“Rocket Man”: “Burning down the street my friend lives on”) came in for particular whizzy-do-ing and it wasn’t until I became addicted to reading lyrics and liner notes did I realize her imagination for rewrites. I also had some funny ideas about what was going on in the Guess Who’s “She’s Come Undone” deciding the story was about a kangaroo. I don’t know. Don’t even ask.

So anyway, I came undone when I came across my dad’s cassette collection last week. It took me back to places in time to my own memories of music, when it was my lifeline. My first cassette tape, Aerosmith’s Toys in the Attic played in my first car, a blue VW Bug. I wore the F out of that tape. It did snag and catch and finally all the tape came off the little rollie wheels and I had to cut the thing out of the machine. I had my first kiss in that car while that cassette was rolling. I don’t remember the guy but I do remember the song, “Round and Round.” Kind of a slow grind for 5+ minutes…the song, not the kiss. There was nothing like driving the three blocks to my high school with a cassette blasting (Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy, Heart’s Little Queen), a cigarette in my left hand, elbow on the ledge of the unrolled window. I’d only really get through two-ish tunes but the importance of pulling into the parking lot with the right one blasting so (insert name of current crush material who was probably too stoned to focus on where the sound was coming from) would notice was crucial.

Then the college years and mixed tapes. How they wound and spooled pure love. The insane amounts of human hours that were spent picking the right songs for a 60-minute experience that was meant to A) show how cool I was (the B-side of a Roxy Music import recorded in Japan?? Who. Are. You?) B) tell the story of my soul that I now choose to share with you, most-excellent recipient of this tape (Bryan Ferry’s “Jealous Guy”, The Pretenders “Brass in Pocket”, The Smiths “Reel Around the Fountain“), and C) capture a snapshot of the time (wasn’t it amazing when we saw Charles Bukowski in the college bar? Don’t all these songs remind you of how drunk we got, like in a good way?). And then those tapes would get given, copied and passed, threading us all together, creator and recipient, on the waves of each song. There was always an excruciating moment of waiting to hear back about whether someone thought the tape was revolutionary or rubbish.

Then the NYC years and the Walkman, an invention of pure joy. My most magical memories of walking the twelve blocks (four cross, 14 up) from my apartment on 14th street between Avenues B&C to the SPIN offices in the 20’s off Broadway while listening to the advance tapes I’d gotten from various record companies. Nirvana’s Nevermind, Pearl Jam’s Ten, Metallica’s Metallica, Hole’s Pretty on the Inside, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, Babes in Toyland, and on and on. I’m not sure my feet touched the ground during this footfall commute. I do know that I felt like a badass. I was cocksure about being the only person on this stretch of sidewalk listening to this particular set of songs and that maybe I’d even be the one to introduce it to people in the magazine’s pages so that in a month or so when the album came out, folx could buy it. But mainly I just felt joy and power. To be able to be plugged in and traveling through the world with the music I loved pouring into my head because of this whirling machine on my hip. Nothing better, this freedom.

I still have those advance cassette tapes worn dangerously thin but perhaps still playable and since the Rocket has a tape deck I just might be the one driving (the speed limit) on the way to see my dad, window cranked, arm propped on the rolled-down window (sans cigarette), making up the lyrics to some of the songs that changed my life. “A potato, an amigo, a mosquito stole my speedo.”