By Garret Leiva
Community editor
November 18, 2009 12:00 am Sour notes or sweet refrains, music fine tunes memories -- even for a tape head like me. Music has always had a profound impact on my life and eardrums. Faces fade, names erase, but the right guitar riff or lyric can dial in forgotten moments. Earlier this week the music of my youth came crashing in on me -- literally. Honestly, I wasn't expecting to find Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five in the study closet, just AA batteries. The top shelf, however, is a Gordian knot of board games, tax returns and bobbleheads stacked Rube Goldberg style. I'm always hit by the unexpected when I open this door, often on the head. While the box marked "tapes" missed my noggin, it did touch an auditory nerve. Suddenly life hit rewind: compact cassettes. Between the early 1970s and late 1990s, cassette tapes, or simply tapes, ruled the airwaves. Unlike an arcane record, tapes didn't skip or scratch. You could also squeeze an ABBA tape in your Sergio Valente jeans pocket or zip multiple Run-D.M.C. cassettes inside a pair of parachute pants. I wore boot-cut Levi's, but I was still a cassette-era kid. Decades later 60 odd cassettes -- and I do mean odd in some cases -- were spread out on the study carpet. For at least an hour I was lost in thought and cheesy album covers. The cassettes were like a photographed succession of haircuts: good, bad and "you-actually-paid-money-for-that?" ugly. After all, mullets and music can say a lot about a person. Unfortunately, the cassette collection before me said "pop culture cut-and-paste letters ransom note." I mean, who puts Billy Idol, Billy Joel and Billy Ocean together unless you're a serial alphabetizer. Now we're all guilty of youthful indiscretions, but these cassettes were downright criminal: David Lee Roth solo effort, The Bay City Rollers, Milli Vanilli; no lie or lip-sync. I did have Jimi Hendrix, at his best, Vol. 2 -- not his finest hour or recorded minutes. Of course there is something to be said for musical guilty pleasures; for instance, how-to breakdance cassettes and Scorpions World Wide Live. Who said you can't meld pop and lock with Spandex, big hair and air guitars? "Daddy, what are those?" asked our 7-year-old, as she pointed to a stack of cassettes. I tried to avoid words like analog signal or The Monkees greatest hits, but she wrinkled her nose like I was explaining butter churning in pig Latin. "Oh, music," she said, smiling at me like I was a Stone Age man recently discovered in the Amazon. I smiled back but inside I knew she would never receive a mix-tape from a boy who sat by the radio for hours to record just the right songs. She is a digital download-era kid; a world without Side 1, auto-reverse or parachute pants. However, I'm in no rush to fast forward ahead. Perhaps I'll dust of the Sony Walkman and rewind time for a bit by pushing play. Now if I can only find those batteries.
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Garret Leiva