Obscurity Knocks, so Someday Someway I Turn to the Sky because you have All the Answers
Even since I read Love Is A Mix Tape a few months back, I’ve been re-examining my own mixtape collection bit by bit. It’s interesting to listen to what I thought was hip and current at the time, if for no other reason than I had just head that song and wanted to hear it some more. I really enjoy that, to my ears, most have stood the test of time and I still enjoy listening to them.
I grabbed a handful of cassettes as I left the door on my roadtrip back home last week, and one of them was the tape Highway Robbery. I have no idea what it’s real title is, if it had one at all. I named it such because it reflects how I came across it. I was living in Little Rock in the summer of 1996 and had made friends with a guy on the other side of the complex’s pool who was attending the police academy. I was without a car and so we bonded and he’d take me with him for weekly grocery shopping trips. One day at his place we were listening to a tape a friend of his back home in Ohio had made for him some time before (best I can tell it’s vintage 1991/earlyish ‘92). I heard it. I loved it. I immediately dubbed it and took that copy for myself. I don’t know a thing about her, but I wish I did. I listened to it again today to and from work and decided I need to try to replicate most of it onto CD. That’s the rub…most tapes were 60, 90, 100 or 110 minutes and a CD is 80. That’s ok, there’s a few songs that I think probably need to be left behind. While it may have been something quite personal, I’ll let Amy Grant and Baby, Baby do their own thing elsewhere, and I’m up in the air about a few others…I want Candy, It’s the End of the World As We Know It and Blitzkrieg Bop are so everywhere already, but then again, they help give this tape its flavor.
What I really love about it is that it could have been made by someone would I would have really gotten along with…I just sense this sort of thing by song and band choices, and the really special thing is that none of my friends have ever used close to any of these picks. It’s a completely new friend branch in my friend tree that I’ve missed out on, except for that tiny little bud sticking out that I call Highway Robbery.
After 11 years, the magnetic tape still sounds pretty good.
