CASSETTES

historydeletesitse
Nov 15, 2022
2 min read

My allowance was 25 cents a week as a kid so it took a month to save up for a 3-pack of Certron C-90 blank cassettes at K-Mart. Calling it The Frog Collection, WEBN 102.7FM the AOR station in Cincinnati used to play an album in its entirety every weeknight at midnight. If it was an artist I liked I would stay up late to record it on one of these cassettes. The weekends were the best though because that's when 'EBN would broadcast The King Biscuit Flower Hour, a syndicated show that featured current artists performing live in concert.

Both of these programs coincided neatly with my initial discovery of Pat Benatar and her guitarist husband Neil Giraldo. I distinctly recall dubbing cassettes of her album Crimes Of Passion (released on August 5, 1980) and a King Biscuit Flower Hour concert recorded in Houston, Texas on October 6, 1981 and broadcast on November 22 of that year.

Here it is on Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/album/6HcazRvNt7KspsGaAt3SaW?si=Hc3pIW_qROOFvrc9UiAxcg&utm_source=copy-link

There was a small eternity in the late '70s when KISS records were forbidden in my household. Ever resourceful beyond parental comprehension, I would dub cassette copies of my friend's KISS albums and deliberately mislabel them as Cheap Trick or BTO or Ted Nugent. This way in case my mom ever discovered the tapes it would appear to her that I had no KISS music in my collection. Before I was 15 years old I probably had 250 or more cassettes. It was the easiest way to stockpile the most music while taking up a minimum of storage space in dresser drawers and on the bookshelf in my teenage bedroom. From a growing collection of Frank Zappa interviews in guitar magazines I learned the virtues of archiving everything. As I began to play guitar in a series of garage bands that would eventually morph into my first original band the Speed Hickeys, I documented everything on cassette by recording rehearsals and gigs such as they were on my boombox. I also found cassettes to be the most convenient format for learning how to play along with my favorite songs. Press stop - rewind - and play again was easier than lifting the needle off a record and trying to drop it back down in the same part of a song.