This collection represents some of the home-made cassette tapes that I made/received/carried around in the ’80s and first half of the ’90s. I got a CD player sometime during college (maybe 1988?) and I basically quit buying commercial cassette tapes at that point. (I recall re-purchasing a fair number of albums on CD that I already owned on cassette).
But cassettes were still great for recording mixes for friends, and for myself. Moreover, I didn’t have a CD player in my car until the mid-to-late 90s. Until then, road trips always involved a bunch of cassettes tapes.
Around 2011 I was organizing stuff in the house; while doing so I came to the realization that I would surely never play my cassette tapes again. I no longer even had a working cassette player (an observation that would have scandalized 18-year-old me). The tapes were all 20+ years old, and many of them were likely failing (e.g. I recall that the glue holding little pads guiding the tape tended to weaken with age and heat, and the pads would fall off….) So I scanned the hand-written covers of tapes that were still around and tossed the tapes. I remember feeling a bit sad about it…
See below for the scans!
