Cassette Music Memories

By Tom Poland

 

Last week my writer-daughter, Beth, wrote a story about her MTV years. She recalled the 1980s watching music videos. She wrote, “When my sister and I visited Dad in July of 1984, we fell into a treasured routine. Cookie Crisp cereal for breakfast, swimming at the neighborhood pool for the first half of the day, and lazily watching MTV for the rest of the afternoon. We watched it so much we’d often see the same video three times in one day.”

As I read her words “I Want My MTV” popped into my head and a kind of time-travel dream took over me. My heavy Hitachi TV came into view… my old Sony Walkman materialized and cassettes in a custom pine box appeared out of nowhere.

Of all the decades that make up my life I treasure the 1980s the most. As bad as my life had been, I was in a good place then, and music was a big part of it. Perhaps some of you can relate. Perhaps some of you remember those great groups that sprung up like mushrooms after a night of rain. Tears For Fears, the Eurhythmics, Talking Heads, Queen, Blondie, Foreigner, Pet Shop Boys, and R.E.M. Remember the bands whose names kept you guessing what they meant? Spandau Ballet, Wham!, The Bangles, A-ha, and Depeche Mode, to name a few. Whether a great name like Dire Straits, the Eagles, and the Police or something hard to decipher like Depeche Mode (fashion update), we played them in our cars, in our homes, and in our ears via a Walkman. I see folks today wearing white ear buds. They must be pretty good. I see a lot of them, but thank Heavens I no longer see the dorks who clipped cell phones to their ears. Mr. Dork was so busy he had to keep his hands free for … well, for something.

My hands pushed a lot of cassettes into my dash in the 1980s. I played them in my car all the time on a Blaupunkt. We’re talking high tech here back then, but cassettes would malfunction. The tape would get loose and spew out. Using a pencil you could wind back into the cassettes, but not always. I recall seeing cassettes in the highway, their shiny brown magnetic tape all coiled up, tangled, blowing about. As your eye followed the mess there lay the source, a cassette, that sealed plastic unit containing a pair of spools. Frustrated listeners would toss the cassette out their window into the highway.

As I continued reading my daughter’s story out of nowhere came a plain white cassette with one word scrawled on it in blue ink. I found it in a drawer in my father’s room not long after he died. He didn’t write rock ’n roll, or the Beatles, or gospel, or country. He wrote one word. “Music.”

Music used to be tangible. We could label it. We could hold it in our hands. My hands have held 45 RPMs, 33 & 1/3 vinyl albums, eight tracks, cassettes, CDs, and now they hold … they hold … nothing. They tap keys and push buttons.

Kids today stream services like Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, and Tidal to hear music. They can’t hold music in their hands like we did. They can’t stack it up or put it in a neat pine box like books on a shelf. Well, one can. My grandson, Ben, likes vinyl. That gives me hope for this world.

I still have my cassettes but I have no way to play them. I look at them though and radiant recall rises from the magic alchemy of memory. Memories aplenty, but if you ask me what song takes me straight back to the 1980s it’s Tears For Fears’s “Everybody Wants to Rule The World.”

Whenever I hear that cheerful melodic opening I am back in the 1980s where music saved my soul. I see the MTV video, the smiling singer, the old pay phone, those wonderful men dancing in front of two gas pumps, and I am happy again, young again, the people I loved are alive again, so much change is way down the road, and all is well with the world.

 

Georgia native Tom Poland writes a weekly column about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and culture and speaks frequently to groups in the South. Governor Henry McMaster conferred the Order of the Palmetto upon Tom, South Carolina’s highest civilian honor, stating, “His work is exceptional to the state.” Poland’s work appears in books, magazines, journals, and newspapers throughout the South.

Visit Tom’s website at www.tompoland.net

Email him at [email protected]