Rediscovering Cassettes
Lately I’ve been reading Anna Jane Grossman’s wonderful book ‘Obsolete’, self-described as an encyclopedia of once-common things passing us by, and it inspired me to resurrect my long-forgotten cassette collection. For years, a huge stack of cassettes has lived under my desk in my home office. Surviving multiple relocations, even a relocation from London to Philadelphia, I always brought them with me wherever I lived, even if for years I had nothing to play them on.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve very much resumed my efforts to build a great record collection, something I’d lapsed on for far too long, and this happened in parallel with starting to go to shows again - something that hadn’t happened for far too long either. A trip to Charleston and spending some time at Monster Music (which certainly lives up to it’s name, that place is enormous) scratched a long-held itch, and the collecting resumed, mainly on vinyl.
Over the past weekend, I decided to attack the dormant cassette collection, and see what was going on there. And of course, there was a ton of great memories in there. Memories of festivals, shows and things heard on the radio. Even memories of being in a band myself. But the main thing I loved was finding the bootlegs of bands I’d seen at festivals in the early nineties. These were always frowned on at the top, and vaguely seen as ‘illegal’, but today they provide me with a warm nostalgia that takes me right back to the hot and humid pit of Glastonbury in the summer of 1992, or the rainy afternoon in August 1991 when Nirvana were near the bottom of the bill.
These tapes sound terrible, but it doesn’t matter, you can’t hear anything at a festival either. This week in the studio I’ve been loving what these cassettes have done for me - they’ve taken me back to a great time for music, with great memories of great friends, and I’m really happy I kept them all, through thick and thin.
I hear that cassettes are somewhat making a comeback, off the back of the resurgence in folks buying vinyl (I even saw Vinyl for sale at Target this week, which probably means something), but for me it doesn’t have the staying power of vinyl. The only cassettes I’d be interested in are those festival bootlegs I never got to buy at the time, which I’m sure are long gone from the world now.
