This post has nothing to do with food, gardening or travel.
It is nostalgic though.
While cleaning the back guest bedroom (which is usually just used as a catch-all storage room—read junk room), I found a stash of cassette tapes. Some of these artifacts date back to the mid-80s.
(No, I did not find any 8-tracks! Shame on you. I just celebrated a birthday but I am NOT that old!)
This collection covered an eclectic array of musical trends as my tastes shifted.
What did I find in these archives?
- Some rockabilly (Stray Cats and The Honeydrippers)
- What I would call arena-style rockers (Def Leppard, Scorpions, Quiet Riot, Motley Crue)
- Some Vivaldi, Aaron Copeland, and Clannad.
- Bob Seger, Bruce Springsteen, Indigo Girls, Nine Inch Nails (vintage stuff), Go-Gos, Blondie, Joan Jett, Eurythmics, Berlin, George Strait, Adam Ant, Cyndi Lauper, Toby Keith (the early years), and lots of mixed tapes. 🙂
This morning on the way to work, I grabbed a mixed tape with a long-ago faded label. (Yes, my car still is equipped with a cassette player.) I popped it in.
To my surprise it was Michelle Shocked, that “skate board punk rocker” from Texas. I still remembered every word to almost every song. A few memories flooded my brain:
- Sharing music with friends via the “mixed tape” format. (Remember this was way before Napster, which is even outdated today.)
- The friend who made this particular tape for me.
- Seeing Michelle on stage at a Farm Aid concert in the early 90s. (We had two back stage passes we were sharing with another family. My best friend and I were so bummed when our mothers came back from their turn and told us they had seen her up close but they really didn’t recognize her until she was on stage. When we went back stage, we did meet Bruce Jenner and Dennis Hopper so that more than made up for it.)
And of course a “mixed tape” discussion could not be fully finished before the romantic mixed tape was mentioned—those sappy things that you would make for each other in a relationship’s infancy.
My goal this week is to reach my hand in my jumbled box of vintage cassettes each morning and play a surprise “blast from the past” on the way to work.
I am sure that each cassette will spark a different memory.