Personal Cassette Dub Archive.
Erasing my dad’s Saturday Night Fever cassette on a now extremely-rare Conion V-121F was the very first tape memory I had. I didn’t know better. I don’t know where my dad got the Conion or why, but I remember it sitting on our dining room table. It had to be a Saturday or Sunday evening during Summer recess where my dad invited his friends over to show off the family fire truck: a 1949 American LaFrance. That Conion would stay with us for a long time. The moment I hit that record button, my life-long relationship with cassettes and recorded media would begin. As an Eighties kid, I spent more time downstairs playing Atari, Nintendo, and watching WWF on weekend afternoons more than anything. Down there, I discovered another smaller, cheaper radio with a blank tape inside of it. It was one of those radios where it’d record off the FM while also recording natural sound via its built-in mic- at the same time.
It's Christmas-time after starting middle-school. Ma’ got me my own small red boombox from a petty electronics corner-store she worked at and three cassette tapes not worth mentioning. That boombox’s playback speed ran a little too fast and I knew something didn’t feel right. So she exchanged it for one that worked properly: a Sony CFS-213. Much better. I also received four matching Sony HF90 blanks and found whatever strays lying around in the house. It was that exact point in time I started getting into archiving and recording.
My first-ever keeps didn’t happen until the following Summer when I moved on from Z100 to WBLS, a hip-hop / rap station found at the end of the dial. I caught that frequency when they had T-Money, Ed Lover, Dr. Dre, and King Saul on their line-up. The CFS would begin a years-long habit of creating a music diary of sorts; a timeline of who my friends were, where I was, and when - all written by the record button and onto tape.
I was young and immature once. I found every piece of low-brow humor funny and everything fascinated me. I was huge into In Living Color, Howard Stern and Andrew Dice Clay. Guilty as charged. I asked ma’ if she had some Walkmans. She’d given me a couple out-of-closet, and one happened to have a built-in mic-. The only way I could record favorite one-liners from cartoons, comedies, one-time only interviews, and late-night specials was to place it near the TV speaker, press ‘record’, and let it run. For years that was the only way I could capture NES and Genesis game soundtracks. Back then there wasn’t as much permanence as we have now. I felt every day was now or never.
Occasionally the CFS would have a bad day and decide to eat one of my tapes. One-of-a-kind moments were just that, and they hung in the balance. Some tapes crinkled, and some even snapped. It was analog media, so I knew nothing was beyond repair. All I needed was a boxcutter to trim it to width and a few inches of Scotch Tape to re-join the snapped ends. I'm now back in business.
The CFS eventually went and ended its two-year run. Both ma’ and my dad upgraded my Sony to a CDF-50 for Christmas after middle school. With that came a ten-pack of Recoton XR90’s and Ice Cube’s The Predator, my first CD. Now I had another source to dub from and I could make better mixtapes out of them. Ma’ had a few more Walkmans lying around in the house which would play a memorable part of my life.
Gramma’ was ailing with kidney failure, so every week ma’ and I drove out to visit her in Bensonhurst which was off Bay Parkway’s Exit 5. I couldn’t stand ma’s music, which was why I packed a tote with her low-volume Walkmans and already-made Recotons to stay occupied during those long hot Summer drives with an Arizona and a bag of cheddar-pretzel Combos by my side. Rides out to Staten Island became a thing when my uncle fully recovered from a terribly nasty drug addiction, allowing my family to become closer with him, my aunt, and their four hoodlum kids. Even better, my bro- and I sat in the backseat as ma’ and dad drove to Harrah’s in Atlantic City, and once took the Orient Point ferry to Foxwoods up in Mashantucket. We were left behind at the video arcade while ma’ and dad gambled their salaries and disability checks away. Those Walkmans and Recotons were there with me the entire time.
I was still very much into hip-hop / rap, way before we now call it The Golden Era. WBLS had a format change so I switched to Hot 97 and their competitor Kiss FM. The boombox as we knew it was symbolic of hip-hop culture and made millions of us. From then until the end of the Brentwood era I would still compile that history. My friends usually failed me, but my Sony didn’t; always there faithfully waiting for me to come home. Every day, every night, every weekend when I struck out with plans I’d sit home to hit that record button once again. When my stock of Recotons finally ran out, I’d bike to the music store in the mall to purchase four- or five-packs of TDK D Series and Maxell UR tapes. Those two brands were a godsend to me as they continued to solidify my identity for years to come.
Everything - the Walkmans and tapes - came with me to countless bus rides to-and-from Brentwood when my wrestling and volleyball teams traveled to rival schools, or even sitting in the rafters during all-day tournaments. Even I shared the wealth with my friends to borrow my tapes for the ride when they had nothing to listen to. I’m forever thankful that they never pocketed them on me, not even once.
It wasn’t long until gramma’ succumbed to kidney failure. It would be our very last ride to Bensonhurst my ma’ and I would take. Both of us had one final shot to take as much of gramma’ and poppy’s possessions with us. They didn’t have much of a music collection, if any at all. Pop- only had a small cache of old cassettes he kept over the decades - opaque amber shells with white labels and gold print. I took them all along with a few of his old gambling books and a pair of heavy binoculars. I got home and curiously listened to what were on his tapes, sacrificing them only if I happened to run out of blanks to record. The rest would stay untouched for years. Meanwhile, ma’ took gramma’s Lafayette LR-810 receiver. Lafayettes were common on the island as they originated there. She already had one tied up with the living room CD player, so she gave me it. Now we had two of them back home.
The CDF only lasted through three-and-a-half years of high-school before I trashed it after senior year. I inherited one of dad’s Akais, the GXC-706D, which was a full tape deck I rescued from the basement. He loved Akais. We had another receiver of theirs and an eight-track player he built into the kitchen wall connected with in-ceiling speakers (!). They were never used and we never owned one single eight-track at the old Brentwood home. Go figure. That Akai cassette deck was a literal octopus sound system for me. My Lafayette, (either) a Super Nintendo or a Playstation, and two pairs of speakers - one disconnected from the Conion - were all tied to it. It connected what my Panasonic system couldn’t but that was still reserved for radio dubs only.
At this point, I shifted from radio hip-hop and bounced back and forth between Q104.3, K-Rock, and back to Z100. Again, the record button ran from end to end, letting the chips fall as they may. The tapes kept on accumulating and never gave up their mission as being reference points of my life.
Every now and then there’s a new piece of antiquity to be found in the basement. I don’t know where my ma’ and dad finds them or why they magically materialize. This time, it was a small turntable and it opened up a new world for me to preserve. I started buying vinyl records through mail-order catalogues, public libraries, and even hardcore shows. The brunt of my 7” library came from Centereach’s None Of The Above, Long Island’s hardcore and punk haven. The basement turntable couldn’t play for its life, so for my birthday, my best friend gave me his father’s 1972 Panasonic and a limited-edition Autechre 12”. I was at first nervous about vinyl’s fragility and adversion to physical damage. That Panasonic connected to and played through my Akai which recorded my most essential 12” records and were used for playback until I got used to handling my records on a regular basis.
When the final Akai broke, I replaced it with something else. I don’t remember the manufacturer. Was it Sony, Aiwa, or Philips? Chances are it was a black Aiwa, another Christmas present. That was my first micro-system featuring an FM/AM radio, a three-CD changer, a five-band equalizer, and dual tape decks - a first for me. That meant I could fill up my remaining blanks (save one) with dubs, take my favorite songs, and consolidate them to one. It also had removable speakers which replaced the Conion’s when they finally went. Aiwa’s dual tape decks would play an all-important role in my life that would change the way I did things forever.
There was a girl named Manzana whom my friends introduced me to. She was an Italian-Jewish girl I saw briefly in high-school who fell out of favor for a Dutch caramel blonde I fell for. It’s community college now. My best friend was now dating her and one Friday night she invited us and her friends over. We were all joking around and acting like immature fools throwing food and couch cushions at each other. As Manzana and my best-friend kissed each other on the couch opposite of me, I had an idea that would forever shape my music habits.
I already had a generous collection of tapes and numerous purchases of CDs in my possession. Why not make a compilation of songs to remind me of all the good feels and experiences I had? So I took everything I listened to from March, April, and May and put them all together on one Maxell UR120 using the Aiwa dual-tape deck. A new concept was born: the seasonal personal mixtape. I can record and keep a new personal diary every three months without using pen, paper, or words - only sounds. It’s a quarterly ritual which I’d made sure of myself to do religiously because that fit perfectly with my perception of time and would forever be the basis for my projects.
I was on a roll. Not only I made mixtapes for myself, but for friends in good standing as well. I gave my friend The Greek Tragedy 120 minutes of Henry Rollins’ spoken work because he asked and I had them. On the other hand, I had plenty of friends who gave me theirs as well. I still have most of them. Those gifts were a great way of seeing what my friends were made of. I had two fellow writers from the Suffolk Compass who tossed me a couple themselves. One, a true Boston punk who turned me on to R.L. Burnside, Crass, AxCx, and Rudimentary Peni. Another writer was part of a local synthpop band who felt his (and only his) favorite artists were better than everyone else’s, so he gave me a synthpop mixtape of Yaz, Erasure, New Order, and more. I gave him credit for sticking with a genre of music that many people at that time abandoned and deemed tacky.
Perhaps the most special and sentimental mix-cassettes I ever received from anyone was from a Polish girl from Ocean City whom I found online; before Facebook and Myspace even existed. We clicked almost instantly and progressed to where months later she’d send me a package of three mixtapes and some poems she written for me. Her purple tapes came in white slide-out cases which she scrawled personal messages on with black marker. It was a sweet, personal touch from a girl who was caring, charming, outgoing, and was interested in meeting me…or so I thought.
She canceled our plans at the last moment. No reason given. It was only a matter of time before she bought herself a few moments before ghosting me. The hits kept on coming as I abandoned my job and my synthpop ‘friend’ who hired me from the pool supply store, all by the end of that June. My summer was all almost over before it started and I had nothing going on except for a Playstation, my bike and stereo system. I had no choice but to stay home and wait it out until community college started again next Autumn.
All hope was lost at that point, but the turn of the millennium would give me an Ace card in the best way possible. I gave up all commercial radio and drew towards Stony Brook University’s station WUSB where they played everything the corporate or Top 40 stations wouldn’t. My recording game was constant and I did it every night for a few hours just to try and take the focus off of my latest losses. It was more than enough that I caught one of their resident hip-hop dee-jays play Lonnie Liston Smith (& The Cosmic Echoes) “Expansions”, followed by a sampling set on their ones-and-twos and Les McCann's "Valarta".
What is this? What is this? The sounds were pure magic, so out-of-this-world and not of this time. That’s when I started reaching back and re-connected with myself, and to think that moment would create another addiction for me for years to come: sample-searching. As if my life would change once already, there would be a second time before my stint at community-college era was finally over.
Our sober uncle gifted my family a new Dell desktop computer and VGA monitor for Christmas. That was a total surprise to me. Why did we get one? Because my dad wanted free music. That's why! Napster exploded into a worldwide phenomenon. My ma’ and dad spent countless nights for hours on end grabbing anything that moved: country, hippie rock, and the golden oldies up and down the charts.
So did I, staying up until 4AM in the morning finding every B-side, rarity, compilation, Japan-only and unreleased tracks from my favorite artists I could think of. Did I abandon my tapes for downloading? No way. I was still making radio dubs all night and every night without fail during my downloading free-for-all. Again: industrial, underground hip-hop, pop-punk, indie…and what they called “electronica” at the time. Sure.
I never gave up on dubbing and cassettes. It continued on during my time off from study, my relationship with Yenny, three jobs, and into Stony Brook. What first started as a listener of WUSB now continued on as me being selector and ultimately program-director. I still have my old demos- and auditions on Maxell UR120’s from when I first joined, forever capturing a few cold Winter and nicer Spring days inside a dilapidated studio which was built in their AM days (the Sixties) and had never been renovated before being torn down for good.
I was still doing double-duty downloading and dubbing, even after a former music-director who worked for Apple offered me to purchase my very first iPod Classic (30GB), which fully replaced my Walkman as the preferred player for all future night drives and train rides to New York City. That still wasn’t enough to replace my cassettes, and why would it? I still needed something to record and I still wasn’t over spending lots of time making them.
Eventually, all things had come to an end. Literally. I had enough of being stuck behind the register at my job with no one to back me up, because those same co-workers abandoned their post. So out of nowhere I decided to burn my bridges and walk out of my job. I didn’t plan on making it happen, but it did. I felt the entire weight on my shoulders collapse immediately; enough for me to break down. I stressed like no tomorrow to salvage whatever money in the account I had left to avoid moving to The Carolinas. I was bustling and jumping from one job to another until I found something that was only enough for me to survive.
I had no idea what I was getting into and turned out to be the worst mistake of my life. The toxic co-workers, asshole managers, and older down-on-their-luck has-beens who apexed in high-school were enough to wear me down even further. It took only a few months before I became a former shell of myself. I had almost nothing that I once did that kept me alive. No radio show, no computer, no blogging…nothing. I was too busy learning to survive and stay mouth above water. Recording and archiving were the last things on my mind. But, I still had my Aiwa micro-system.
Those tapes my poppy had? I finally got around to hear them all. Literal relics from a long-gone classic and golden era that no longer exists. I never knew his music tastes up until that point: Barbara Streisand, Sammy Davis Jr., Neil Sadaka, Tom Jones, Wayne Newton. Late Sixties classics and early Seventies American standards - things I’d never be caught dead or alive listening to. His tapes had a mucky, distorted quality to them. They were in a severe state of tape rot and natural degradation imperative to being case-less and exposed to the elements for decades.
I found a few more random discoveries from his small stash. There’s a thirty-second recording of him reciting Torah verses; the only artifact on Earth that will keep his voice alive for decades. And another tape…I can’t explain it, nor there’s any information about it, either. I called it the “r*pe tape”: vintage recordings and radio pornography of men fucking women and using explicit triple X-rated language. I don’t know when those recordings were made, where he got it from, when in his life he acquired it, or why he even had them. An unusual and peculiar swerve if I had to think of one.
By the Summer of ‘08, I dubbed the final radio session on tape, again a Maxell UR120. WCBS-FM just enlisted Joe Causi to replace Cousin Brucie for the legendary Saturday night slot (Brucie went to satellite radio), playing gold and platinum-selling hits of the Seventies. I still had a kick for the radio hits of that decade. Anne Murray’s “You Needed Me”, Alan O’Day’s “Undercover Angel”, and Minnie Riperton’s “Loving You” became three of the songs on that final radio recording I’d ever make.
I still made one more physical seasonal mixtape before the decade was done. I visited Amityville’s High Fidelity for the first time and purchased my usual Seventies jazz, fusion, and pop vinyl records. Roberta Flack, John Tropea, Les McCann, Roy Ayers Ubiquity, Karla Bonoff, Urbie Green, Marvin Gaye, Parliament, Phil Upchurch - it goes on. I also bought some best-of compilations from the Mercury label. Like everything else, I piece-mealed it all together. With that, Autumn ‘09 became my final physical mixtape I’d ever make.
And that was it. The end of an era for me. It was the very last time I ever hit record on analogue equipment.
There was no real reason for me to stop other than it being too cumbersome and time-consuming. I didn’t miss it, either. Graduating university meant the end of an almost two-decade hobby. Final count? At least 400+ tapes recorded from the beginning of the Brentwood era all the way to the end of Stony Brook. I saved enough money and two months later I eventually bought a Gateway NV laptop to return to downloading and burning discs - as my entire personal cassette archive sat to suffer in draws and shelves for another number of years.
I decided it be fun to revisit the Nineties and the Oughts, one tape at a time.
I wanted to do something about the cassette archive. I thought of digitizing it all. I knew it would be a huge undertaking and time-consuming. I didn’t do it during the nine months of in-home recovery from shoulder surgery, and I didn’t do it during the two months I was ordered to stay home on furlough during the pandemic. Why? Because I had other ongoing projects on the steady. But, I finally had the chance to at least chop away at the hundreds of tapes I have stacked.
They say cassette media lasts for thirty years, give or take the thickness of the tape, the type of metal used, how often they’ve been played and how they’re stored properly. Even though my archive was still in great condition and I could put it off for another few years, I wanted to do it now than never. Either digitize and duplicate my memories and timeline into one huge time machine...or have them disappear forever. No second chances.
My first attempt at digitizing the library was connecting a Jensen Walkman to my computer. Pop the tape in, hit record on the app-, and let it run its course. I played them back as soon as the recordings were completely converted to MP3 but noticed that the Jensen raised the pitch by 5%. No dice. So I went to the thrift store in Centereach and found a Yamaha KX-400U tape deck for $35.00 that perfectly matched the $85.00 Yamaha A-1000 stereo amplifier I got at High Fidelity during the pandemic summer. I wired the KX- to my desktop with a Roxio VHS-to DVD converter, set up Audacity to record, and hit play.
It all came back to me. One tape at a time.
Cassettes in bubble packaging hanging off the pharmacy’s peghooks. Limited-edition shells my bro- and I got from kids' meals that I erased over. Anticipating that one song on the radio that’s about to play. Vinardo’s after school for Street Fighter. Chasing the blue-eyed blonde-haired Irish girl at the 8th-grade picnic. A dance tape my sis- had that I recorded Kiss FM on. Abandoned tapes thrown out of passenger-side windows; encrusted in dirt and found on dirty sidewalks. Spending Thanksgiving weekend at home sick. Winter days and nights with a Super Nintendo. That Spanish girl with the glasses who wanted me to take her home from my friend’s backyard party. Early morning bike-rides to Brentwood. Sagat’s “Funk Dat” and Tucka Da’ Hunterman in the back of the bus. High up on the rafters during grappling tournaments. Reggie across the street dubbing me The Notorious B.I.G.’s and Wu-Tang Clan’s debut albums. My Rasta- friend attempting to run me over and apologized to me by giving me M. Doc & Stevio and Eazy-E tapes as a peace offering. That D90 I left at my cousin Dorona’s house which she recorded her R&B favorites over my hip-hop. Cute girls from rival volleyball teams approaching me to sweeten the deal. My first time meeting Jewish girls in Plainview. Diamond and I sitting on the curb. Donna and I at Adventureland. Her friend Julie who erased over the Nine Inch Nails’ Broken and Fixed mixtape I made for her. Christmas with my cousin Dorona and the rest of the Staten Island family. My alternative circle of friends walking the snowy neighborhood streets at 1AM in the morning. My brother and his hood friends from high-school recording themselves and acting like the animals that they were. Compilations from friends taped over with surviving track-listings. Endless downloading sessions. Making my dad a Shirelles mix. Indie hits playing while driving home through miserable snowstorms. J-Ro’s Antique Road Show while coding. The over-nighter I pulled creating blog-sites for cinema class. Cath- and I on our first date sitting across each other over Thursday dinner. Found answering messages from my Hampton uncle’s 50 year-old junkie girlfriend. Hopeless Summer days wondering in an era wondering where I would go in my life. Hand-made art and tracklists scribbled in blue pen on the back of J-cards. Every pop, fade out, snap, abrupt cut, distortion, XDR tone-burst, and Dolby calibration tone.
It’s there. All of it, there.
It wasn’t as exhausting as I thought it’d be. I manage to digitize about 75 tapes for every two weeks off. They go by quick. They’re all saved in 128 KBPS MP3 quality and files are named after the brand and type of tape with any discerning aesthetic qualities on them. Then the auditing process. That was the hardest part. Keeping track of each and every tape that has and has yet been once-overed, and playing them again just to be sure nothing has been overlooked.
At the time of posting, 100% of my personal tape archive has now been digitized. I’ve taken care of my entire library to know they’ll survive at least another ten to twenty years more before noticeable fading of quality. Further backup and duplication means a good portion of my life will be salvaged way after I’ve said good-bye for all eternity.
When that happens, my nephews will get it all. They can only imagine how I experienced the golden-era, the Nineties, and independent radio. They were born into the digital age, and though physical media is still very much alive, the industry has and will continue to push streaming and convenience over everything else. They won’t really grasp what it was like to salvage things themselves, to properly insert physical objects or press play. They won’t know what it’s like to slide a tape into a 25-pound boombox and hit the play button as they’re working on their car. They never experience coming over to a friend’s house to see Redman, Juliana Hatfield, The Cure, Stone Temple Pilots, and cracked Matthew Sweet tapes scattered all around someone’s disorganized bedroom as they’re playing video games through Summer nights, or to even discover a box of their mom’s old tapes somewhere hidden in a basement. She has no such thing.
Sure, the vinyl resurgence is still taking place after the dawn of downloading, but will that and all physical media still matter to them in the next 25 to 30 years? Highly unlikely as they live in a world of here-today gone-tomorrow TV shows, movies, and hottest pop playlists at the mercy of steaming content providers and contractual obligations.
There’s still lots of work to be done. The CD- and DVD-R archive is the next massive undertaking followed by digitizing my entire VHS dub library, the largest-than-life behemoth of them all. That’s another battle for another year.
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