There was a brief period where I was actually holding up a cassette recorder to a clock radio to tape songs.
Seriously, that was the height of technology in 1984, before Christmas found me getting a dual-cassette boom box from Sears that would be my primary music machine for three years. It did weird things when dubbing, and the speed was always just a little off with commercially-produced cassettes, but it got me through until Christmas 1987 when the CD age began.
I think that might have been a nodal point. I had the big JVC boom box with detachable speakers, dual cassette (one with auto-reverse or whatever that was called when it could flip itself to play the other side), a remote control, and of course CD-ROM. It was just the sort of system one would want for taking off to college – and it was an era when high school alternative meant “college rock.” It was the Age of Athens – REM, old B-52s, Indigo Girls, Love Tractor, BBQ Killers, the like. And Hoodoo Gurus, Robyn Hitchcock, the Smiths, Gene Love Jezebel, the Smithereens and the Replacements…all the stuff they were playing on campus radio stations other than Birmingham, because nobody had one here. UAB tried, and for their trouble wound up with a frequency that got handed off for another religious station.
I also went through a couple of Sony Walkmen – I got a very nice one for a summers’ worth of unpaid labor for a day care job that was damn near a permanent contraceptive, and it got replaced once or twice under Circuit City’s absurd warranty-return policy. Got it toward the end of 1986, and it was a constant companion thereafter, especially on the bus to school and back. With no car yet (and thus no car stereo) it was the only portable music I had.
And then there was the car, of course, the primitive car stereo that was installed specially RIGHT before the move to digital tuning. Which would get replaced upon high school graduation with a Pioneer system that included auto-reverse AND music-seek, critical to the driving experience – but not yet.
So that’s where things were as I was on the edge of sixteen and thinking about college in a serious way for the first time. And it was possible, with the door closed and the music up, to start visualizing what might be out there in the future. Somehow I came by an MIT course catalog and would peruse not just the course offerings, but the extracurriculars and the campus map. I started to imagine how things might be in college, and the music fed my dreams, even if my imagination seemed limited to the five-county metro area in other respects. I definitely wasn’t imagining college anywhere in the state…which was part of the problem later on. I neglected to put in college applications commensurate with my dreams and imagination, and things turned out about like you’d expect.
I replaced that boom box about the time I replaced the car, in 1993 – and while the Saturn had the stock cassette-based car stereo for its entire run, the boom box would also last over a decade. The same sound system that woke me up to let me know whether it was too cold for tennis class on senior autumn mornings in undergrad is the system that woke me up to the Sports Junkies or NPR the last spring in DC. It sat on my dresser at Vanderbilt playing drivin’ n’ cryin’ that first week in Nashville, and it sat on the floor of my empty apartment the first week in DC playing Z104’s hourly repetition of Puffy’s tribute to Biggie at 7:30 to roust me out for work.
The first cassette single I ever bought was “Rhythm of Love” by Yes. It was February ’88, and I kept buying them right up until I left grad school, which is about when I stopped making the mix tapes. I was on twelve a year through high school and into college, but it tailed off to three or four thereafter, and my last mix tape trailed off halfway through in January 1998 – the last song I ever put to magnetic tape being “Life in Mono.” So there I was in no-man’s land – and for obvious reasons I didn’t need much for music that summer and fall – until Christmastime, when I downloaded Hole’s “Celebrity Skin” – the first MP3 I ever went online to grab.
That was the transition point. From then on, music meant the laptop for a year and a half, until I finally invested in a Rio mp3 player – which crapped out inside a year, to be replaced with a similar Nike model. In the meantime, I would literally plug the tape adapter into the laptop to go for a drive with my digital music. Ultimately, the digital music problem would be cleared up for good when I got my first iPod as an out-of-nowhere gift from the wife. After that, it’s iPods all the way down, until the release of the iPhone.
Ultimately, that’s what it’s come to. Music is stored at home on the central Mac mini, and only some of it is on the iPhone at any given time, but the iPhone is the only thing that plays the music anymore. No car stereo (the iPhone plays through it), no songs on the laptop (work-only material), no home stereo at all. My musical life is down to that one pack-of-cards device in my pocket that handles everything else – and with the connection to the iTunes store, I’m as liable as not to acquire my music through it, too.
Odd, how the shift points in my musical technology line up with shift points in my greater life as a whole.