Vinyl Exam

When cassettes landed (I think I was around 7 when I first started using them daily) the first thing I did was devise a hideous method for making my own mix tapes. By that time, I was a serious radio listener, but I was too impatient to wait for my favorite songs to come on. I was also too broke and too without car to go shopping for 45’s as often as I wanted to, so I settled for low tech.

I would borrow my dad’s tape recorder, and put the microphone up to one of the speakers on our home stereo, and when my favorite songs came on, I would record it. I would then pray to god that no one made any noise. This was impossible to ask from a house full of noisy Chicanos. Most of my tapes were littered with people in different phases of yelling.

This worked out fine for many years, until my dad brought home the family’s very first recording cassette deck. He showed me how to record records onto it, and how to adjust the levels, and I was a mix taping fool.

Sometime around junior high, everyone I knew stopped buying vinyl and buying pre recorded cassettes.. Not me. For the stuff I was into, having vinyl on hand to make mix tapes was something I could not have done without.

I was officially a slave to thinking up the best mixes of song I could come up with that would fit on a 30 minute (then, alter, 45 minute) side. I would make lists, calculate times, and dream of these things. When you were making a mix tape for a friend, it got even crazier. In those cases, there was a message being conveyed. Figuring out how to get that message across took some serious effort. Just the planning could take days.

The addiction to making and listening to mix tapes, 60 or 90 minutes of a perfect life, kept me from making the jump from vinyl to cassette. Unfortunately, it did nothing to keep me away from CD’s