O P I N I O N

BOOMER LIFE

By Annette Kurman

Do you still have a box full of mixed tapes you made back in the ’80s?

Back when you listened to your boom box oh-so-carefully so you could catch the very beginning of that special song as you hit the “record” button on the tape player.

Whether for a special person or for your own enjoyment in the car, mixed tapes were “the” thing. Some say they were most popular in the 1980s because of the improvements in fidelity, but my “special person” (now my husband) wooed me as we drove around Philadelphia with the dozens of mixed tapes he created during the mid-’70s. I even thought we still had them in our basement, but after a search, I was sad to say they were finally gone.

Did you use the 60-minute or 90-minute cassette tapes? (Remember the television commercial: Is it live or is it Memorex?) Did you have a pencil handy to roll tape that had escaped in the middle, between both ends of the case? Did you slap a sticker on the cassette to update when you re-recorded the original mix?

Did you create a “mix” with songs from different bands or did you create tapes of the same band from different albums? Did you line the cassette holders up neatly on a shelf or toss them in a box, like the picture above?

Doesn’t really matter, children, because our old mix tapes are so last-century.

Yet, mixtapes were your playlist and perhaps one of the playlists to your life. Essayist Geoffrey O’Brien described this homemade compilation of music as “perhaps the most widely practiced art form.”

Said Max Mobley in “Requiem for the Mix Tape” in Riotgear! in 2007:

“Mix CDs could be made on a whim.
That was certainly not the case with a mix tape. It took hours to make just one: pulling apart your record collection of various formats and then listening to a few songs before making the commitment to sticking them on a cassette in real time. And you had to get the recording levels just right, muting the recorder at just the right point to avoid clumsy segues and clicks. And a mistake often meant going back several songs to fix it. Yes, making a mix tape required a level of commitment that just isn’t necessary in our precise copy, drag and drop, click, and burn world.”

The increased accessibility of online music downloads and the disappearance of cassette (and CD ) players in cars (do you have a cassette player or, yet, a CD player in your newer car?) led to a dramatic decline in the popularity of the audio cassette as a vehicle for homemade mixes.

So now all we have to do is head to our smart phone or computer to one of a multitude of online platforms to do in minutes what use to take hours, and lots of sweat, to create a new playlist.

Do you have Spotify or other paid music platforms? Or do you prefer the free sites? My husband has Spotify and paid Pandora. I have free Amazon Music. BUT, if I had a 60-minute cassette tape from which to create my own favorite mixed tape, here’s what would be on it (listed alphabetically so as to show no favoritism):

1. 3 Dog Night “Mama Told Me Not To Come”
2. Allman Brothers “Jessica”
3. Badfinger “No Matter What You Are”
4. Clapton, Eric “Layla”
5. Cocker, Joe “Feelin’ All Right”
6. Cream “Crossroads”
7. Crosby, Stills & Nash “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”
8. Derek and the Dominoes “Layla”
9. The Doors “Alabama Song (Whiskey Bar)”
10. Dylan, Bob “The Story of Hurricane”
11. Faces/Rod Stewart “Every Picture Tells a Story”
12. Fogerty, John “Centerfield”
13. Harrison, George “Got My Mind Set On You”
14. J. Geils Band “Centerfold”
15. King, Carole “I Feel the Earth Move”
16. Kinks “Lola”
17. Mitchell, Joni “Big Yellow Taxi”
18. Robinson, Smokey “Tears of a Clown”
19. Rolling Stones “Brown Sugar”
20. Springsteen, Bruce “Rosalita”
21. The Who “Baba O’Reily”
22. Spencer Davis Group “Gimme Some Lovin’”
23. Southside Johnny “Having a Party”

Now where is my Sony Walkman?