fire hazard media

scenes from an analog treasure hoard

[firehazardmedia]

First things first: If I had handwriting as effortless and even-keeled as this, I would write phrases like “Tom Petty + The Heartbreakers” and “A Buncha Good Ones I assure you” all day.

“A Buncha Good Ones I assure you” is a great title for a Tom Petty mixtape. (”Hello CD Listeners” is the best title for a Tom Petty mix CD, but I digress.)

All of the songs on this tape are from the 1995 boxset Playback, basically in their original running order, even. It has been noted and points have been deducted.

But the human element is still in play: This is not the entirety of Playback. Someone picked out and recorded “a buncha good ones” that covers a good range of territory and sounds. I respect that.

I like the implication from the title that this tape was given to a friend. Tom Petty’s music is made to be shared. I can’t count how many times I’ve done it. I think that’s why I feel starved for Tom Petty mixtapes: because I know they’re out there. As mainstream, popular, and fucking great as Tom Petty is, this is the only TP mixtape I’ve ever come across at a thrift store. It’s nice to think that everyone else who’s ever been given a Tom Petty mixtape is still treasuring it (or it’s in some junkyard inside a totaled Honda Accord, but that’s a different story).

The one word I think that encompasses Tom’s music as a whole: honest. The chords and the lyrics are straightforward, but not so much “obvious” as “elemental.” With all this talk of sharing, Tom always felt like he was talking straight to you. Not even to you…  Bruce Springsteen, who I love, talks to you. Dylan does it with a sneer. No, Tom Petty talks for you, with you, in parallel, stereo, you and Tom ready to take on the world.

I’ve never claimed that Tom Petty’s music is the soundtrack of my life. Instead, I’ve often said it is my life– melodramatic, but true.

Take a song like “You Got Lucky”. If any other person sang that, you’d be the “you” in “You Got Lucky”. But who doesn’t imagine themselves as the protagonist in that song?

Even though I never write on this blog, I intended to post pictures of this tape for Tom Petty’s birthday in October. (I’m the kind of person that remembers Tom Petty’s birthday and take comfort in the fact that most of my family does too.) Writing this instead as a (belated) memorial is the hugest fucking bummer.

He always felt like one of the family. Like, it’s a blow that our daily lives haven’t changed without him here, a reminder that he was a famous singer and not a personal friend. He wasn’t you in disguise. Of course, he had real family and my heart hurts for them.

But he means a lot to me and he leaves behind a buncha good ones. I assure you.

[firehazardmedia]

A switch over to VHS again, briefly, for a little tribute:

Over two years ago, I began going through VHS tapes I “inherited”. What I mean to say is “I” inherited- the owners did pass away, but no one gave me the tapes. Quite by chance, they ended up with me- someone who really appreciates them. I think of myself as a good custodian. I’ve been slow to go through them, but I have the interest, the patience, and the equipment! I have tried to find people who appreciate what’s recorded and I’m quick to share what I have.

The tapes number over 400. They are by and large dance-related programs recorded from TV. I didn’t know the people who recorded them very well. I’ve been calling them “Tape Patron,” despite the slightly unfortunate abbreviation.

As impersonal as TV recordings seem, I’ve been getting to know TP these past few years. TP taped every. dance. show. for over 15 years. The earliest tapes are from 1979, and it appears they had cable back then, too. I would have watched TV all day! Who had cable and a VCR in ‘79?! The one thing I remember about TP (the TP’s? Mr. and Mrs. TP?) is that their house was wonderful, so ahead of its time in the 70s (it then seemed to become dated overnight, but I still love it), so the pieces fit.

TP must have spent- over years, but still- thousands on blank VHS tapes. I can only imagine the time spent pouring over TV Guide each week, searching for dance programs, clipping the descriptions, and setting the VCR. Recently I found a tape of an obscure movie that wouldn’t have aired more than once, midday, on a local channel, to fill time. But it had Tommy Steele in it. So TP found it and recorded it and saved it oh so many years.

It’s art. It really is.

You can go to Salvation Army or your uncle’s basement all you want: you will not find a collection like this. I have enjoyed these tapes so much (and there’s still so many more!). I’ve become a super sleuth on identifying shows and when they aired. Even though I’m a bit tired of all the dance programs, I have learned so much. It will never be my passion, but... Dance is pretty all right. For the first time, I can throw around names like Baryshnikov and Twyla Tharp and Paul Taylor and I’ve actually searched for things they’ve done that I don’t have on tape and watched them voluntarily. Another tape I found recently was labelled “Good.” A year ago, I would have no idea what it meant, even after I watched the tape. But after spending so much time in TP’s world and the world of dance, it only took a few minutes of watching the long-haired dancer to realize that “Good” was an unconventional abbreviation for “Alexander Godunov”!

If that’s not art, I don’t really care to know what art is.

[firehazardmedia]

A year ago this week I was in New York when Prince died. To be in a big city when something like that happened was nice, in a way. There was a collective experience that just wouldn’t happen where I’m from. Huge tributes were arranged- occurred spontaneously, really- immediately: by Spike Lee, Questlove, the entirety of purple line commuters.

I didn’t have to search hard for people in purple or Prince t-shirts. His face was on papers on every block. There were a lot of new O(+>’s floating around, scrawled on jeans or backpacks.

“Purple Rain” played in enough cinemas enough times that my cousin and I had a chance to see it. It was pouring when we got out. It wasn’t purple.

I can’t tell you how many places that month I heard his music, which I’ve always loved. It was best coming from car stereos. We followed the sound down the street, dancing.

That weekend I went out for a walk in a borrowed purple jacket and bought this tape at a thrift store.

It’s just an album(s) dub, but I’m easy to charm. A newspaper photo of Prince’s torso and guitar is carefully cut into three pieces and taped onto one side of the case. I’m left wondering why the creator stopped there. Got bored, accidentally ripped the picture? Decided from the start that headless Prince was distinctive enough to give the case some character? Which– yes, but it’s strange that alongside clear effort, the tracklisting on the reverse of the case is the very definition of “uninspired.”

And I love the top: “Prince Purple Rain & The Revolution”. Place your bet: sudden guilt about leaving The Revolution off the credits, or a failed attempt to add style to the label? Either option is endearing.

I probably won’t play this tape today. (My old records are more evocative, Spotify more convenient.) But I’m glad to have it. If nothing else, I have never and probably will never have another copy of the Batman soundtrack and sometimes you just need to hear “Electric Chair.”

[firehazardmedia]

Do you remember karaoke-style recording booths that provided you with a cassette copy of your song? I have a vague recollection of it existing, but don’t remember the details.

I picked up this tape at Goodwill for $0.49 because I do have good memories of a similar service with music videos on VHS. “Fun Flicks” set up at our mall several times with cameras, green screens, and costumes, and it was always fun to stand and gawk at people making fools of themselves on film. I may have made one.

This tape contains, as you may well guess, a teen or preteen singing “Like a Virgin” by Madonna. It’s not really good enough or bad enough to upload. It’s not good, though. The back of the case has a Houston, TX phone number.

[firehazardmedia]

“Funk + Cool Sounds 80′s” - I had high hopes for this tape that it didn’t live up to.

One side is some instrumentals that don’t strike me as very “funk” or “cool”. The other side is the soundtrack album to “Saturday Night Fever”.

I definitely deducted points because over half of one side is blank. Why do people do this?! It makes for such frustrating playback. It’s wasteful and unimaginative.

[firehazardmedia]

I intend for this blog to feature home-taped cassettes I wouldn’t otherwise upload, but right now, none are as exciting to me as this VHS.

I always have high hopes for recorded VHS tapes with black covers. They usually predate their rainbow/color-striped sleeved friends, and the older a tape’s programming is, the rarer and more exciting it is to find.

If you feel the same, you’ll agree with me that this TDK Super Avilyn tape really lives up to its “Super” name. The quality is great, too!

It was recorded in 1980. 1980 is the oldest year I have found programs from, and it really thrills me to bring them to light, partly because I have a particular fascination with the year.

The tape begins with a report about Alexander Godunov. I think it’s actually from ‘79, when he defected! He was a Soviet dancer who briefly made a hot news story. This is followed by several dance programs from PBS in early 1980. Besides the age, they weren’t my favorite, but I will revisit them eventually. I was settling into the next PBS program, “Reminiscing”, about Buddy Holly, when the broadcast cut off.

Here’s where things got exciting: The tape had been used for multiple recordings- 8 times in fact- each time for a shorter period. I was an archaeologist at an excavation. Each layer of dirt took me further into the past.

I cheered (I might have literally cheered, don’t judge) when the tape switched to part of an episode of Three’s Company and a special about the Winter Olympics (Dan Fogelberg’s “The Power of Gold” is still playing in my head). I was disappointed when it ended, only to cheer again when news from a different, earlier date appeared out of the harsh static. I eventually saw news from four different days over two months before the tape sadly reached its end and began auto-rewinding.

All of the news focused on the Iran Hostage Crisis, which is just so classic. I tried to explain it to several people and they couldn’t understand why I was cheering over Americans being held hostage. Guess you either get it or you don’t.

[firehazardmedia]

Most people, whether they admit it or not, have a preferred form of gambling, like the lottery, or slot machines. Mine is unlabeled tapes.

I’ve felt the need to document things on cassette and VHS since about birth. I loved television, not film, and I never dreamed that one day my favorite TV shows would be as readily available as movies. 

Even before DVD box sets, Netflix, and the realization that the Brady Bunch would air in syndication until the end of days, my focus in re-watching my tapes changed. I had captured incidentally hundreds of fleeting windows into American life: the commercials.

I am probably the reason ads were invented. I swapped Coke for Pepsi for several years, not because Pepsi was better (it’s not), but because they had better ads. But what happens to these moments after their campaign outlives its usefulness? Will I be the last person quoting UpWords commercials in the board game aisle? (”We like Scrabble, but we love Upwords.”) Am I the only one who still sports a Spuds MacKenzie t-shirt? Do you remember, baby, the times of your life?

I became the family archivist early on, after my brother passed away. I was always sorting through photos and videos and creating more, interested in the stories they told. Stories that were all we had.

My call to collect took on a new concentration. I started buying recorded tapes at thrift stores. I started feeling a little guilty if I didn’t. All of those stories: unremembered, never told, gone. 

Most tapes I buy aren’t overtly personal. Some are just movies taped from TV. But all seem to conjure a story about the person who recorded it: a sweet mystery that will never be confirmed. 

I can clearly picture the teenager who sat down to record the Top Hits of 1985 and had to decide how to approach it when the tape ran 90 minutes but the program was 5 hours. I can see the mom cursing the VCR timer when she discovered the end of the Liza Minnelli special was cut off. The young lovers who made tapes for each other and always included “our song.” The musician putting his heart into his demos. The dad who had to tape the finale of Miami Vice since it was sure to be a classic.

And oh yes, of course, there’s the gambling. “Porn roulette” you might call it. Could that tape at the Salvation Army labeled “MTV Music III” really yield vintage VJ content or will it be a bad quality copy of an episode of Ally McBeal? Is it going to play at all or hurt your VCR? Is it worth 29¢?

If you answered “of course it is!”, you’re in the right place.

So how many cassettes, magazines, letters, photos, and VHS tapes, how many stories, do I have? Unfortunately the answer is too gosh darn many. I am hoping preserving them in a less space-consuming way (i.e. detailing their contents on this blog) will help me get rid of some of the physical evidence with less guilt.

That being said, all cassettes are up for adoption. Just don’t let me know if you use them as blanks.