Staying Busy

Today we call them playlists. Back in the day we called them mixed tapes. We’d sit around for hours with our fraternity brothers, favorite LPs, 45s and stereos and put together what we were certain was the best combination of songs in the history of music. If we were serious (and weren’t we always) we’d clean the records first to attempt to rid them of static and dust in an attempt to avoid the dreaded “pops.” We’d tweak the controls of the cassette deck to attempt to get the right recording level. Like hawks we would try to avoid the tape ending before the song did. (We had marginal success in that area.). The true expertise was minimizing the “dead time” between songs; it was much more of an art than a science.

Courtney asked me how long it would take to make a 90 minute tape. My answer was “a couple of six packs.” For it wasn’t a race against a clock — we were creating masterpieces, and you can’t hurry that. Plus we were just lonely fratty boys spending a great time together dreaming of how this tape we were making would “get the girls.” For it was always about getting the girls, wasn’t it?

I still have most of the mixtapes I made back in the day — and I know exactly the ones I can’t find. I have spent the past week digitizing the tapes, something I did long ago in Herndon with Tom and Jack with the famous Chapter 10 cassette. After digitizing the tapes, I’ve diligently normalized the loudness of each song to assure they play at the same level. I’ve edited the dead space between each song to make them flow together. Where a tape ended mid song, I’ve faded the tune so the ending is natural as opposed to abrupt. In rare cases I’ve inserted a new recording of a song where the tape was damaged. The most rare action I took was to delete a song that clearly was included on the tape by mistake (🤪) such as a Supremes’ medley from an LP but recorded at 45 rpm — Chipmunk Supremes). (Some might say including any Supremes song was the original sin.)

I was impressed by how the “health” of the tapes has held up over 40 plus years. I have two tapes to mail to a place that says they can repair tapes that will no longer play. Two tapes out of probably 30 isn’t too bad. No one may ever listen to the digitized copies, but I can now rest better knowing if the tapes get damaged, I haven’t lost the music. Nor the memories.