Drunken Owls and Other Delights

I came to a sad realization yesterday--a lot of the old cassettes of stuff I've taped off the radio back in the early to mid 80s have started (or are well on their way to) demagnetizing and fading away into nothing. That's the one downside to magnetic tape, really...with age and repeated listening, the little magnetic bits that make up the surface of the tape start realigning themselves and the sound that's been recorded on it starts getting cloudier and fainter, until it becomes nothing but faded white noise. Some of the tapes are just fine, however, and that's most likely due to the fact that these were higher-end tapes. Most of the earlier ones were cheap knock-off tapes bought at a stationery store or elsewhere that didn't even have a Norelco box (its case) packaged with it. You get what you pay for when you buy the good stuff at Radio Shack for $2.99 a tape versus $1.99 for a pack of three no-name brand wrapped in plastic.

I suppose the worst part of this, which really isn't all that bad, is that I won't ever be able to listen to the jabber of the deejays in between songs, or the random commercials that I so rarely taped alongside. The good thing is that, even at a young age, I was enough of a completist/collector that I wrote down the track listing. I now have a binder that has nearly all my compilations and radio tapes from over the years, so if I so desire, I can recreate the playlist as an mp3 compilation on my computer.

This, in fact, is what I've been doing for some time now. I just recently finished recreating the compilations from 1988 to the present (and created a few new compilations just this year). Now I'm working my way backwards, recreating the playlists from 1987 back to 1983--the earliest of the compilations that I made myself that I can find.

In preparing myself for this yesterday, I surprised myself by noting just how many radio tapes I'd made between 1985 and 1987. I'd always thought the highest was 1989, which included many college radio tapes (nearly all on mp3 now) and compilations I'd made and those Chris had made at the same time...but 1985-1987 makes sense, because that was the Era of Listening to Commercial Radio for me. I'd started taping off the radio regularly in 1984, but it really picked up the next year.

Another thing that I find interesting is that, nearly all my mp3s are date-tagged down to the month and day of release, I can further narrow down when these tapes might have been made. For instance, I'd created a tape that I thought had been made during late summer, but was actually more like mid-October due to a few songs that hadn't been released until then.

This, in particular, I find fascinating because it further puts my memories into some semblance of order, and it also helps me figure out more of what I want to write about for Walk in Silence. It's quite interesting to see things in chronological order and compare what else was going on and what else had been released at the time. I came to the realization that I'd finished my John Hughes knockoff screenplay One Step Closer to You just a few weeks before Depeche Mode's Music for the Masses came out, even though the music I shoehorned into the screenplay was dated somewhat earlier.

So I'm not entirely sad that some of these tapes are slowly disintegrating with time. It's sad that I won't ever be able to listen to them again, but thanks to my ever-present nerdiness in creating music lists, I can still recreate them digitally, minus the deejay chat.