The Blank Generation: 1979 As Audio Cassette Enabler
Sony introduced the Walkman in 1979, and I got mine a year later. The Walkman boosted the profile of audio cassettes, which had been challenging LPs and 8-Tracks as a music medium. They soon dominated the music scene.
A $185 TSC-300 I bought from J&R, my Walkman was also a stereo recorder. (Note the spiffy name—even when it was clueful, Sony was clueless.) No way you could put it in your pocket—it was about the size of a trade paperback book. But the music sounded great, and it doubled as a very solid, if bulky, recorder for interviews.
Besides the Walkman, a real driver of cassettes, so to speak, was the car experience. Cassettes were a big improvement over the first personal car audio technology, 8-Tracks, which had to switch from one “track” to another every few minutes, and to accommodate this, labels would often rearrange the order of songs on an album, or even cut off a long song in the middle. (I once went cross-country in a Trans Am with an 8-track, and to this day every time I hear The Doors play “The End,” my mind inserts an 8-second pause before Jim Morrison kills his dad and fucks his mum.)
As now, people had all kinds of exotic car-stereo rigs, but as an impoverished writer I outfitted my 1972 VW bug with a minimal unit (a no-name brand for $US99) that I bolted under the dashboard and wired up to the speakers. Not pretty, but I could control what music I heard in the car, which was actually a novelty then.
The other big advantage of cassettes, of course, were that they were recordable. You’d buy blank 90-minute cassettes (chrome high bias, if you were an audio nut) and tape one album on each side. (Since most records were shorter than 45 minutes, you’d grab a song or two from another album to avoid a long dead spot before the tape reversed.) And you’d borrow albums from friends and tape your own. You could also tape from other cassettes, but the quality degraded each time you made a copy made from a copy. It was like an organic form of DRM. Everybody had a box with hand-labeled cassettes and before you went on a car trip you’d dig in the box to find the tunes that would soundtrack your journey.
Cassettes weren’t the most reliable technology—it was pretty common for the music to stop and then, when you tried to eject, the player wouldn’t give up the tape. You’d use brute force, and sticking out of the plastic would be a tangle of brown spaghetti. But even though audio cassettes supposedly degrade after 20 years or so, I still have a couple in my car that I made in the ’70s—one of the early Stones, taped from the mono originals, and a Neil Young tape with “Tonight’s the Night” on one side and “On the Beach” on the other. Neither has lost its magnetism, physically or psychically.
The cassette era was a big setup for the age of iPod, a pocket-size digital device that was not only a playback unit, but the equivalent of a room-size cardboard box full of tapes. And, of course, Napster, which made the whole world into a big cassette-tape-swapping community, where everything was free.
Steven Levy is a senior writer for Wired, most recently writing about Google’s ad business and the secret of the CIA sculpture. He’s written six books, including Hackers, Artificial Life and The Perfect Thing, about the iPod. In 1979, he had just left his first real job, at a regional magazine called New Jersey Monthly, to become a freelance writer, and had yet to touch a computer.
Photos of every blank tape ever at tapedeck.org
Gizmodo ‘79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analogue age gave way to the digital, and most of our favourite toys were just being born.
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Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
@92BuickLeSabre: You cannot possibly mean Eat em' and Smile as that crappy DLR solo album! That tour was my first concert!
You remember everyone saying Van Halen was going to die without Roth, then 5150 comes out and everyone was like, Dave who?
@strider_mt2k:
I just used a trimmed piece of scotch tape, and it worked fine to rescue the tape, if not the audio fidelity.
Akibake-
It's weird to hear Steven talk about tapes in this way, but I guess someone has to blog their experience with tapes, for posterity. I imagine the younger generation won't be able to imagine how the music would degrade from a copy of a copy.
On a personal level, I still have a small box of my most prized and personal cassettes. I have a tape deck still, too, but I don't think I've powered it on in many years.
Akibake-
@token_illiterate_commenter: Even worse were the ones who started talking over the ending or cut it off earlier to start the next song.
@Ehrich Blackhound: Oh I do, my first cassette was one of those because I wasn't paying attention since they reused the same album cover.
@jp182: My Tears for Fears tape can confirm it.
quayzar
@FriarNurgle: Man... I'm only 20 and even I did that as a kid before CD-R was mainstream.
OblivionVII
@notsofresh: i'm pretty sure that happened except i never knew that's how you fixed it. i just considered the tape a lost
@Ehrich Blackhound: And the dreaded "dance mix".
@FriarNurgle:
Or having to explain to your parents at length how to push 'play and record' at the same time because you weren't going to be home to record a live concert on the radio?
@twitzgall: Did you play with the controls up top? It's a sortable database of tape images. The home screen doesn't show every tape—you have to mess with it.
My first cassette was Van Halen 1984. I actually bought that cassette 3 times. I kept wearing it out.
GeneralGozz
What was that thing that used to happen-- when you'd just let a cassette run on auto-reverse over and over and the tape would get so tightly wound on the spools that it wouldn't play anymore? You'd have to "unwind" it once with a pencil, all the way through, to get it to work? Right?
Did this really happen, or am I manufacturing 80s memories again?
notsofresh
@Skeetz: Great album! My first casette was a rip of Europe "Out of this world" on side A and "Yes - 90125" on Side B + few songs from "Yes - 9012 Live" (which was sadly cut off after first few bars of "soon")
cynep
@FriarNurgle: And then the damn DJ would talk over the intro, ruining everything. I hated those guys.
token_illiterate_commenter
How influential were casettes?
1. Music magazine Circa July 2009 advise for aspiring DJs - "Mix tape is a good way to demonstrate your set building skills"
2. Two of my cars (both made after 2006) still have a tape deck beneath DVD-A 6CD changer. Now, DVD-A - that's a format we don't have to worry too much about lingering on...
I am hearing some rumors about this geat new format called SACD that's supposed to take off any day now... Now that's some hot technology to get behind.
cynep
@OMG! Ponies!: I had to use a dictaphone in my first job after college. I rather liked the bulky clackiness of it....Well, actually I liked stomping down on something to shut my boss up.
@Ehrich Blackhound: My first cassette: Music from The Wonder Years
-eleventy-billion for myself.
(I was 7 at the time)
T-Will
@Ehrich Blackhound: Make that -2, lol...
1shado1
i still have an '89 Buick LeSabre where in the center console there was this awesome mechanism that popped the tapes up in their pertaining spot when you hit the button... Nowadays it's the most useless center console ever.
@32ndnote: That is my dictaphone (though not a Dictaphone brand recorder). This is actually easier to use than a full Dictaphone machine which is bulky and clacky.
And the trackball is my Microsoft optical trackball that I've had for over a decade. I brought it from home and keep the company-issue mouse in a drawer.
"sigh" oh the cassette and Napster days.... I remember buying my first cassette tape (Tag Team's "Whoomp There It Is"). I can also still remember chatting on AIM one night and someone sending me a link to Napster. I remember asking "what the fuck is Napster?". Little did I know that it would change my musical life forever!
@OMG! Ponies!: Micro works great for personal use, but why not use the trusty ol' phone to record things?
More importantly, I love the mouse in this picture. The world needs more trackballs.
I rarely bought music on a cassette. I always bought the record and put it on cassette while I was playing it for the first time. Then I would listen to the cassette most often because records would degrade every time you played it and the cassette was expendable.
I also had an 8 track player in my 69 Volvo. I had a Blondie's Greatest Hits and Squeeze's East Side story. I wanted one of those 8 Track adapters that you could stick a cassette inside and play it on your 8 track but they were expensive and I was poor.
reddingofish
@92BuickLeSabre: Thanks for the heads up ...
rDub
@EldonTexodus: Not sure about you, but I got lot of opportunities for dates. thanks to double-deck cassette recorder. When it came to copying cassette and making mixed tapes, I was THE guy in my circle. :)
It's convenient now, but mp3 or aac or flac or whatever format of music today is not capable to providing the pleasure of swapping and recording music from your friends, like cassettes did. Ahh.. good old days.
Don't forget the best part about cassettes... making a mixed tape! It allowed us all to be DJs, and to impress the ladies... NOT!
EldonTexodus
@rDub: This piece was written by Steven Levy of Wired.
He was 28 in 1979. Which would also be impressive or scary, depending on how you want to look at it.
I found a whole lot of my old tapes from the late 80s/early 90s in the shed in a box from a cleanup many years ago.
They still play.
CD-Rs I did in the mid 90s - nothing. CD-Rs from the early 2000's - also nothing.
IMO cassette is a much better format for things you want to keep. CD-R's are now a dead end, yet the tapes still bring back memories of swapping mixes, making mixes, getting something and trying to find someone with a better copy of it since the one I had was 5th generation and dubbed on a deck with slightly wonky speeds etc.
Digital audio is just too perfect. You dont get a sense of the journey it took to get to you with its perfect copys every time.
richms
My first vehicle had a Pioneer-Craig 8 track in it. I even got the cassette adapter for it so I could listen to the new fangled cassettes. Talk about a tape eater...
I still use (micro) cassette tapes on a daily basis. When you need to do dictation, it's a proven technology.
Who remembers Cassingles?! Or the maxi-single with like three or four barely-different remixes/version of the same song... Like the dreaded "acapella" version...
@NurseDave: I was under the impression that most of the Giz dudes were in there 30s or younger ... that makes getting laid in 79 impressive or scary depending on how you want to look at it.
rDub
All the effort we had to put in recording tapes made each track seem more precious. I would listen to an album and grow to love those 'grow on you tracks'. Now digital music is so throw away. If it's not a hit I won't get a chance to hear those grow on you tracks any more. Not unless I risk the extra money to buy the whole album, which I never do. So the album is dead and along with it goes the band fanaticism we all used to have for our favorite band. The new generation will never appreciate music as my generation did. They will only ever hear the instant pop that sells. Shame.
PrimroseFunguar
I remember tapes ... the glory days of recording songs off of the radio and cursing the hell out of the stupid DJ when they started talking over my favorite songs. I was a poor teenager and there was no such thing as Napster! Pirate is as pirate does?
Of course by the time i made if off to college CDs were just starting to get big and my days of recording radio were numbered...
rDub
The headboard of my childhood bedroom is still essentially stacks and stacks of recorded cassettes.
The two great challenges:
1) Deciding which two albums best belonged on opposite sides of a cassette. Prince, Under the Cherry Moon didn't really belong with The Black Album. Maybe with Sinead's Nothing Compares to U? Poison doesn't work with G'N'R after all. Maybe with that crappy David Lee Roth solo album? And hey, War works well with CSNY after all.
2) Trying to use my multi-colored sharpies to best re-create the album cover on the spine. I believe I spent all of my artistic capital (in life) on those little thin white glossy paper, bent back, spines.
Don't forget splicing them back together!
Radio Shack doesn't sell them anymore, bit i still have a splicing block...somehwere.
-probably next to the re-winder and the tape head demagnetizer!
Anyone remember requesting songs on the radio just to sit on the edge of your seat waiting with anticipation to slam down the play and record buttons. Those were the days
I don't think that link shows every blank tape ever...
twitzgall
@Skeetz: My first cassette: Huey Lewis and the News "Sports".
-1 for myself.
I'm guessing someone at Giz got laid for the first time in 1979?
NurseDave
This reminds me of my first cassette purchase: Queen Greatest Hits.
It was a kind of magic.
Skeetz
@notsofresh: Nope, I remember having to do this too.
Also I remember trying to salvage tapes that had been eaten by a tape deck.
snarktastic
Someone should tell Levy that you could buy 8-track recorders and blank tapes. My brother and I had tons of 8-tracks we recorded, both full albums and mix tapes. And we used a better method of dealing with the track-changing strip; just record right through it instead of trying to time it right to fade out and back in. You only lost a split second of music that way.