From: The Cassette Mythos, Autonomedia 1990
It is unfortunate but true that when people talk of "music" or "tapes" they never seem to transcend the usual bland Springsteen types. Not all people, but people in general. It's like, you get yer typical FM radio noize--the usual "contemporary hits" kinda deal--AOR (Album Oriented Rock), CHR (Contemporary Hit Radio), AC (Adult Contemporary), oldies, and little or no "progressive" or "experimental." If your tastes are very mainstream, you can go to any city in the U.S. and you will find your music all over the place. If you live in or near a college town or big city, you can often find alternatives or different musics with little or no difficulty. Even so--there should be some discussion of the manifold uses of cassettes as a medium for long-forgotten and/or obscure musics that the average pop-muzick phan couldn't care less about. Yes, it's true that yer MTV generation, after spending all their time and money in some video arcade in some mall someplace, needs to go somewhere and relax and and be told how to react to all the current pop trends and miasma which pass for entertainment these days. It's as simple as this: Young MTV fan turns on yon TV, is mucho impressed with fabulous babe on the screen, runs out and buys the LP--and for this reason you can't buy a copy of Amon Duul II Live at Arnie's Bowl-A-Rama. With all that MTV synthetic wheatena going through the roof (sales-wise), why should the mall disceteria bother with the (maybe two) copies of any Planet Gong release? Does it matter?
But even so--the fabulous and wonderful invention that is the Cassette Recorder makes such arguments obsolete. In fact, now, wonderfully bizarre and primitive muzick is no further away than your mailbox, if you know who to write to.
As it is, one of my fave parts of being a cassette artist is trading tapes. I've traded cassettes with lots of different folks doing weird and strange musics and anti-musics. This is one thing that makes listening to tapes really fun--the wide variety of possibilities that exist within the wide and wonderful world of tape recording. Types of music usually extinct and/or nonexistent on the radio now live and flourish on and in your cassette collection.
Another thing that is fun to do is trade concert tapes. Altho' illegal to sell, trading is perfectly okey-dokey (to use the legal term), and so this opens up yet another world of cassette possibilities--which brings up the subject of Our Man in Brooklyn, Doug Walker (also of the band Alien Planetscapes). Here's a guy with an enormous tape collection. He reports having about 170 Pink Floyd concert recordings in his apartment (obviously a big apartment!), plus lots and lots of seventies European progressive groups, and probably any other group you can think of. Similarly, Deadheads have always been known for legendary feats of concert tape trading, searching high and low for that specific Dead show at the Coliseum, on October 7, when they played "Dark Star" for three and a half hours with special guest Dickie Betts of the Allman Brothers--not October 6 or 7 which totally suck, although October 8 has an awesome "Cumberland Blues" which segues into "The Banana Boat Song"--or is it "The Partridge Family Theme"? Anyway, the Dead only know about three hundred thousand songs, which is why each and every Dead show is completely and totally different--not only from every other one, but from everything else in the universe. But the simple fact is, if you don't have at least eleven versions of "China Cat Sunflower"/"I Know You Rider" or something similar, you're not really a die-hard Dead tape collector.
But more on Our Man in Brooklyn, who not only has everything that exists on tape, but everything that doesn't. Such things as the '79 National Health tour with Bill Bruford and Steve Hillage. It's difficult at best to find any National Health at all, Hatfield and the North, Soft Machine, Gong, all of that stuff. But this guy has not only all that stuff, he even has the stuff they didn't do! Jimi Hendrix jams with Mahavishnu John McLaughlin, Cream, Traffic--not all at once, but still fun to listen to separately. Not that the MTV people would mind or care, though--"Crosstown Traffic" is a great tune, to be sure, but still, it's great to listen to jams not made for public consumption. Not surprisingly, absolutely no record companies seem to show any interest in the thirty- to forty- minute Jimi jams, even being made by people whose records have sold in the millions-and-millions, except outside the realm of the Pop-Muzick Industry. Aren't cassettes wonderful? But even so...
The very next thing you could do with cassettes is use them to make nice little original noize. That's not to say that you play an actual instrument of some type. Let's say you don't. If you have three or four tape recorders, FM, disc, what-have-you, you could make neato sound collages from that, which you would hear from those speakers when everything is switched on and plugged in all at once. With a cheap delay (I bought a used Memory Man for $30) and experimenting with different tape speeds (some dual-cassette decks have hi-speed dubbing), not to mention simple percussion thingies as well as even a really cheesy porto-keyboard (my first was was the $35 Yamaha PSS-110--now that's cheesy!), you could theoretically interface lots o' great sounds and noize.
OK, you say, but what does all this sound like? Well, at the time of this writing I have eighty solo tapes--but overall in my cassette distribution--which includes other artists and collabs, and compilation tapes--there are as many as one hundred tapes. The hundredth was a collab under the name Victims Of Cinerama--that's me and Minoy. Minoy thought of the name, I titled the cassette and the "songs." Previously I have worked with Don Campau, Heather Perkins, Justin Saragoza, Ken Hunt, Ken Clinger, Nick, and also Charles Laurel, for a series of collabs under the name Dan Fioretti and the All-Star Blues Revue. All such collabs are usually designated "and Friends," but I thought such a title as "The All-Star Blues Revue" would be more appropriate. This way, the tapes seem like some sort of grand "event"--which they are. People from all over getting together via the mail, playing all sorts of exciting muzick. Another fun thing you could do with tapes! Well, yeah, that's all well and good, but is any o' this stuff going to be exciting and worthwhile, or will it all be mindless and self-indulgent? Let's turn to the pages of Sound Choice magazine. In recent issues, reviews have been enthusiastic, marginal, unimpressed, impressed, positive, and negative. Robin James said I'll Get The Chainsaw, You Make the Salad was "crazy like a hurricane without the mess or fuss of wind and rain"; on the other hand Glen Thrasher thought Jane Fonda's Cookout was "muzak," even though he "meant to listen to it." Ostensibly he played it three times and still hadn't heard anything interesting happening. Not so with John Baxter, who enjoyed the "wry but disturbed alien intelligence," "savagely satiric compositions," and "pointed sense of humor" of Dave's Faves.
But even so, with all the different uses of cassettes for taping your own or obscure musics, trading original sounds or non-commercial concert recordings, leave us say right now that not all blank tape purchased in this country is for the use of recording copyrighted material--that not everyone buys a blank C-60 or C-90 just so they can tape a Bon Jovi LP or tape their fave toonz off the radio. In fact, some of the most fun things about cassettes have nothing to do with muzick. I remember when me and all my cousins and my two sisters and brother would get together and do weird audio tapes. We even did a parody of The Brady Bunch once! So there's all kinds of things you can do with cassettes.
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