Loop back to that ole cassette
jazz LPs that my father played — but when I started hanging out with fellows a little older than me, the compact music cassettes that they played in their dens.
It was a transactional thing. I was still in school. They were already in college. As the youngest in the group, I had a price to pay for being allowed to be around. It was a task, really.
I was given a pencil and a bunch of cassettes and my task was simple: I had to spin each cassette like a Buddhist prayer wheel till they got fully rewound and ready to play. No one wanted to waste their sessions rewinding cassettes on the tape deck. Hence, the deployment of a slave.
I would gladly do their bidding. In exchange, a fascinating world of music opened up. While spinning cassettes, I got introduced to rock gods such as the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers, Traffic, the Who… It was heady. It was life-changing.
Things got even better when I scraped together and bought my first portable cassette recorder, a Panasonic. In came a world of tape-to-tape and LP-to-tape recordings, all obviously in blatant infringement of copyright laws that nobody ever even mentioned.
By the early 1980s, the Walkman, Sony's nifty portable personal cassette player, had become a generic name. I got myself a cheaper Indian BPL copycat. I could listen to my music wherever I went. How cool was that!
This month, the Sony Walkman turned 45. Sony doesn't make those anymore — its new Walkmans are not analogue, but purely digital doodads.
