A DUAL CASSETTE TAPE PLAYER. Now not only could this amazing piece of equipment play purchased or borrowed music, but the dual cassette idea had created a breakthrough in customizing media that was unparalleled. No more changing from tape to tape or heaven forbid all you had was a record player. Then you gotta just listen to the band you have on until you get tired of it and stop the record, lift the needle ever so careful, because if you scratch it that record will never sound the same again and whats worse you may have created a spot where the record needle gets caught in a never ending vortex of "ya,ya,ya,ya,ya,ya,ya,ya". Yaaaaa way too delicate for all the music traffic I was gonna have going on. Yes the cassette tape was far superior to the record in my mind at the time. Come on this thing has a thin hard plastic protector encasing the ribbon of sound inside, only leaving enough space showing so that ribbon could be read by the tape player. The breakthrough with the side by side dual cassette feature made it so you could create your own mix of songs all on one tape! You put the recordable blank tape in the side with the record button and the tape cued up to the song you wanted first on your mix and GO! WOOOOOWWW how amazing. What an incredible idea. Who were the geniuses that came up with that one. I wanted to not only shake their hands, but throw them a parade. This was the paramount accomplishment in my life at this time. I had plans. BIG PLANS!! I was going to be the best tape mixer the world had ever seen, because right at that moment I had all the professional equipment I needed to fulfill that. As I sat there admiring my new loot and day dreaming of all the money I would make selling customized mixed tapes and all the fame I would have as the best mixer in the world I realized one thing. I DON'T HAVE ANY TAPES! That wasn't a problem I could buy blank tapes in pack of 3 at the store I had seen them there. There was ones that were all fancy in nice cases and cellophane wrapping and then there were the ones that were much more economically minded for the person who was going to say become the greatest mixed tape artist EVER. These beauties had no cases and were stacked one on top of each other in a nice thin plastic sleeve. If you absolutely needed cases for them, well they sold those separately. I was glad they gave me the choice and made it cheaper to go caseless. Defiantly geared towards a business man. I would later find out that those were the worst tapes to buy. Even as a child with an untrained ear I could tell the difference when songs were put on the cheap tapes as opposed to the high quality TDK and Maxell ones. So my room was soon going to look like this.
Rows and rows of blank tapes with no cases (to save space and money). I had visions in my mind of how I would spend all day at my dual cassette player creating the perfect mixes. That may seem really boring to some people but it was my whole world at the time in my mind. I was like Ralphie dreaming about what he was going to do when he got his Red Ryder BB gun (only I didn't have the dangerous possibility of shooting my eye out). As I was in this world of bliss another reality was brought to my attention when my mom said to my older brother "Can you make him some tapes to listen to?" AWWWWWWWWW. I had totally spaced the fact that even if I had a large amount of blank tapes that did me no good with no inventory of music at all.
While getting my business plan together My brother and I discovered another great thing we could do now that we had two tape players in the house. We could start a band! Oh yes we could record ourselves displaying our awesome talents in writing, singing, playing the guitar and playing the drums (Which were upside down mop buckets). Oh yes and we invented a new instrument that I played too. I took a thick beam of wood and put nails at differing lengths and then ran a series of rubber bands between two nails each. Ya it was just a rubber band guitar but we did it on our own and when it made sound It was such a sense of accomplishment. Now we had never done any of these things, but we were sure we would be great. Well because my dual cassette player had a side with a record button and speakers that picked up everything including someone walking into the room ("Come on I'm recording here!"), so what we decided to do was play music or other sounds from one tape player set close to the one recording as kind of a background track while we supplemented that sound with us singing our new song sometimes with drums, guitar (real or rubber band). Then we found out something really cool about tapes; you can take all the screw and flip the tape and put the screws back in and when you play it everything is backwards. WHAT A CRAZY NEW SOUND. Drums going backwards was such a crazy sound. The attack was at the end of the note instead of the beginning. WOW. Backwards guitar, SO COOL. Then when the guy would sing. BACKWARDS SINGING, Now that was the most AMAZING language ever. We started to frequent this type of backup in our songs. We were getting really progressive, we were cutting edge. The Beatles had nothing on us. Nothing. What they could learn for a teenager and his kid brother, HA. Then we got into splicing tapes and repairing tapes that were getting eaten by the player (Worst part about tapes). Man what amazing stuff. I don't why it took me 15 years after that to find out that I should probably go to audio engineering school. It made all that stuff seem like child's play and you know that's just what it was, the most life changing child's play in my life. Of course I have had countless other great experience with the same brother but those are still the fondest memories I have. To this day not only do I still have both albums we made together (Songs and Poems and Spanish Assignment Prepared) but I have digitized all 53 tracks and have over an hour of mp3s that I can listen to any time and it's a lot easier to get to any track I want now of course. Ya 53 songs in 68 minutes with the shortest being 15 seconds and the longest being 3:40.
I was a very reluctant acceptor of the CD and stayed with my tapes until I saw there was no way for me to get new stuff on tape (more on that later). I still have a large collection of tapes in a chest that I have toted around for probably over a decade and while I have made all of them into mp3s and got rid of a few of them to sell on amazon, there are a number of tapes that I think I will probably never get rid of. I am hoping that I can eventually give them to my son and hopefully share in his love of music. What a great cycle-of-life kind of moment that would be for me.
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