Time Capsule

Thirty-four years ago this month, I sat down in front of my stereo with some new albums, some 45s and one of Maxell's finest products in a dorm room in Evanston, IL to put together a tape of the stuff I liked best so I could carry it in a Walkman -- said Walkman fitting in my backpack much better than said stereo did.

I recently found this particular cassette in cleaning out some boxes. I think I made close to 30 in all before switching to a CD player that could play with both headphones and an adapter plugged into my car's tape deck. The one pictured above, creatively titled Tunes IV, is probably the only one I still have. I don't know if it would play without breaking.

Judging by the playlist, I had recently seen the Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Pfeiffer movie Into the Night, which featured some killer songs by B. B. King on the soundtrack along with a couple of R&B standards like "Let's Get It On."

I had also recently attended a record sale because I remember unloading several 12" singles a few years ago with titles I see on the tape, and some of them had the good old "promo copy only - not for sale" stamp on them. Tent record sales did not pay much heed to such, it seems. I went to more than a few of these during my Chicagoland days, but the one that sticks out as having the best collection of loot was in a tent in the parking lot of a mall in Skokie. The search engine answer says that would be the Old Orchard Mall, but I don't remember. They could have come from Big Daddy's Records and Tapes or Rose Records in Evanston, but I don't recall ever coming out of either of those with that big of a haul at one time.

The 45s, on the other hand, were almost certainly from Laury's Discount Records, which had a store basically across the street from campus. They were not from Vintage Vinyl, which was the Jack Black character from Hi Fidelity made into a business.

Since this was the fourth one of these I'd made, I'd gotten the process down pretty well. I'd also recorded a big chunk of songs off the Atlantic Rhythm & Blues 1947-1974 box set for my parents, so I'd mastered how much time to leave between songs and where to drop the needle so I could be ready to un-pause the "record" function at the right spot. Using the "pause" button made sure that the tape would not have a bunch of start and stop clicks on it in between the songs. I could also gauge how much time was left on a 45-minute side to see whether I had room for another song or it was time to flip it over.

The major purpose of these tapes -- which I don't remember calling "mixtapes" even if that's the most common word for them now -- was to have the songs from an album you really wanted to hear available without the baggage from the album. That was also the purpose of the 45s -- I'd heard the Charlie Daniels Bands' "American Farmer" on the radio and Daniels was, I think, donating some of the profits to Farm Aid. But the rest of the Me and the Boys album, with the exception of "Drinkin' My Baby Goodbye," was eminently skippable. And "Take on Me" was the first and second-to-last US charting single from Hunting High and Low from A-ha -- the rest were interchangeable synth-pop weighed down with singer Morten Harket's pretentiousness that were just as skippable.

Another purpose was sharing music with friends -- trading stuff around to showcase new tunes or record something for someone else who in turn sent along what you might request.

And there was the most serious purpose, of course, which was to pass along a tape to a crush with songs that you wanted him or her to like while including musical hints that you also wanted him or her to like you. Mixtapes as icebreakers, though, were usually a high-school tactic. By the time you were in college they were meant to communicate things in an actual relationship; your chromium dioxide Cyrano shows your Roxanne the feelings your own de Neuvillette words could not.

That taper was 21, and imagined his next few years getting his foot in the door at a newspaper somewhere, preferably a city of some size, where he and his buddies would hang out at a neighborhood pub that on weekends featured cover band versions of '60s soul and R&B classics, and close out the late Fridays and Saturdays with a drenched, buzzed, tired swaying embrace of Someone Special as the slow last sax solo kept the night alive for a few more measures (He even had Someone in mind, but that proved a non-starter). He wound up at a county-seat daily where a whole lot of the people he met thought an adult with a library card was kind of peculiar, but that path led him to hear and answer the great call he serves today.

It's a better life, if only because it's real and the imagined one owes more to assorted scenes from movies than to reality. But every now and again a reminder crops up of what that other life was going to be and the memory is sweet before history and reality add the tang of melancholy.