52 Essentials: No. 16, Cassette Tapes / 88.7 KTRM, "The Edge" - "No Depression" (December 4, 1999)

Welcome to Maps & Legends, a project by two new parents looking forward to sharing our favorite art and culture with our new edition. Each week in this space, we'll pick a personal favorite of ours (or at least a favorite of one of us) and write about what it means to us and why we're excited to pass it down

Growing up, our house always had at least a couple of stereo systems. One was upstairs and, in relative terms only, the more modern of the two. That's where you'd find the cassette deck in the 80s, and where--after an impressive staring match between my dad and the inevitable march of time--you'd eventually find a CD player in the 90s.

My dad had tried to talk me out of getting a CD player for my own room when I was in my early teens. What's the point, he said, when the format's just going to move on as soon as you invest in a system? That advice rolled off my back like so much father-to-teenage-son advice does. Just another in a series of warnings from my dad against jumping on the latest technological fad (which is how we came to be a household ran by an aeronautical engineer working on cutting-edge technology that also didn't have a personal computer until we were just shy of Y2K).

It was a while before I put it together that his gun shy attitude to new music formats, and maybe changes in technology in general, may have had something to do with the other stereo system in our house. The one in the basement. The one with the built-in 8-track player .

I don't recall ever once playing an 8-track tape, although my parents had built a small library of them before the format (quickly) went bust. I do remember staring at the weird bulky shape of the tapes, pondering the inexplicable "Program Indicator" display on the player, and wondering why no one else in the world seemed to have one (let alone to know that they existed). It was never really a sound system to me anyways. It was closer to an archaeological relic, an object of fascination holding secrets of what life was like before I was born.

But that's the thing with physical objects, even those that outlive their usefulness. They each have a life of their own. They're created with a purpose, acquired for a reason, used and eventually discarded--beginning, middle and end. The world is slowly moving past physical recordings. Even CDs are basically obsolete in the face of MP3s. But for all the pompous talk about vinyl's superior sound quality (which I totally buy in some cases) or the DIY aesthetic of cassette tapes (which I kinda sorta get sometimes), I'm convinced it's ultimately less about sound quality, or texture or whatever they want to call it, than it is about this simple truth: Every physical recording you own comes with a story. MP3s just come with a download date.

Someday, Max is going to discover that our house also has a couple of stereo systems, one in the living room that we use most days, and a second in the basement. The one with the cassette player. My library of old cassette tapes may not be as inexplicable to him as the 8-tracks were to me, especially if the recent cassette resurgence continues in Seattle.  It's not just that it's remarkably easy to find used cassette tapes for sale at record stores and weekend markets. For reasons that I don't fully understand, legit bands have gone back to releasing new albums on cassette right alongside the CDs and prestige vinyl.

I honestly don't think cassettes will have the stamina that vinyl has, though, no matter how much nostalgia is fueling the resurgence. The sound quality just isn't there (unless you're trying to capture a very specific kind of grain and noise). But then, the appeal of cassettes never was sound quality. It was convenience., the ability to pop in a tape just as easily at home or on the go in a walkman, boombox or car stereo. And, perhaps above all else, it was the ability to record a mix tape at home with the mere push of a button.

The really amazing thing about recording on cassette tapes wasn't that you could order the songs any way you wanted, or even that you could encode all your deepest feelings into the specific arrangement of a mix-tape given to the object of your affections. If curation was all there was to it, then mix-CDs or MP3 playlists would do the trick just as well, and we wouldn't romanticize the cassette mix-tape the way we do. What made cassette tapes amazing for recording mix-tapes was that the process required that you listened through the entire recording in real-time every time you made a duplicate. When you handed that copy over to someone else, you weren't just sharing data. It was more than the push of a button and an instantaneous copy/paste job. You were handing them an experience of yours, magnetically encoded and captured in physical form, for them to experience too.

Each tape is a time machine, a tin can with a string tied to the past. You put your ear to it and hear the echoes as surely as waves in a seashell.

Max will have an entire stack of mix tapes to pore through if he ever has the impulse. Some will mean more to me than others for him to discover. If it hasn't been lost in the shuffle of life, he may find one with a recording that I pulled off of a morning radio show featuring Bruce Springsteen's "Streets of Philadelphia" inter-cut with Tom Hanks' Oscar acceptance speech for his role Philadelphia. I must've cried every damn time I replayed that recording back in high school. 

Maybe more than any other tape, though, I hope he one day discovers the recording I made of my college radio show, "No Depression" on 88.7 KTRM, "The Edge." It was a short-lived alt-country/rockabilly/folk show that ran Saturday nights for a few months of my junior year and maybe half of that last college summer in Kirksville, MO, before a flood knocked out the transmission tower and the entire station was put on hiatus. When they finally got back online the next fall semester, I was told that they were revamping the format and specialty shows like mine were mostly being converted to Top 40 only. 

I really had no interest in giving up my time just to air a bunch of songs that listeners could get literally anywhere else on the dial. Not when there was so little representation of sounds like the Cowboy Junkies on the air in northeast Missouri.

In all honesty, that story's true but it's also kind of horseshit. I wasn't taking some Pump Up the Volume-esque "pirate radio" stand. I mean, maybe I was a little, but it was really just a convenient excuse to drop what had started as a lark and grown into a time-consuming commitment. It was a fun ride while it lasted, though, and it gave me a couple of my favorite college memories.

There was the call I got one night, about halfway into my dead-of-Saturday-night shift. It was one of the few calls I got that wasn't asking for some pop tune or a prank call, and it was apparently from a driver passing through town (I like to imagine it was a trucker on a long haul) who just called to say he liked what I was doing. I thanked him and asked if I could dedicate a song for him, and he said, "Nah, man, you just keep doing what you're doing. You're doing it right."

Then there was the time my dad came to visit me. I don't recall the reason for the visit or even what we did while he was in town. I just remember that he dropped me off at the broadcasting booth before my show and stayed one more night before heading out early the next morning to get back to St. Louis. He had crashed at my place that night, and I realized the next day after he left that he had turned on the radio in the guest room to my radio show. He must have listened to it before he went to bed

I'm not sure I played his kind of music. It's not the sort of thing I ever saw in his vinyl or 8-track collections. Maybe he just enjoyed hearing his son on the radio. Maybe he just wanted to hear me doing something that I loved.

Down in that stack of cassettes in the basement closet is a tape labeled "No Depression KTRM 12/4/99." It's about 90 minutes of my radio show captured for eternity, or as long as the magnetic strip holds out. Across from the closet, there's a clunky hunk of plastic with an arcane set of gears and levers, operated by buttons and dials, that'll convert that magnetic strip back to sound. And if Max ever decides to give it a listen, he'll be back in that broadcasting booth with me, queuing tracks and rambling on about b-side collections and the backstory of Son Volt's name.

It won't sound all that good, assuming the tape hasn't already disintegrated. But it'll be the sounds I heard that night, the very same. It'll sound true.