[This is the second post in a sub-series of my music mix series. It’s basically a story about some music discovery event in my life, so it’s a combo of music info and personal history info. You can find a list of all the music stories in the mix series list.
Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week. Just that I will eventually finish it, someday. Unless I get hit by a bus.]
You may recall that music story #1 started like so:
Once upon a time, sound was recorded on wax cylinders, and you had to crank the phonograph yourself. That didn’t last too long, though, and we invented vinyl.
Well, after vinyl, we invented a bunch of other formats, primarily trying to get more and mor portable. (Please note that, just like last time, I’m deliberately not looking any of this up, so don’t expect 100% factual accuracy.) We had reel-to-reel tape recorders, which honestly weren’t any more portable than record players, so I dunno where that came from. And then we had 8-track tapes, which were portable enough to put into your cars, so that was a win. It was a plastic rectangle, roughly the size of a large smartphone (or a small tablet), and it had 4 “channels” that you could switch between (it was called an “8”-track because each channel had two tracks, so you’d get stereo sound). It was a wide tape on a continuous loop, and once it got to the “end” the head would just drop down to the next lower channel, or pop back up to the top if it had finished channel 4. But there was also a button where you could switch the channel manually. There was no rewind, since it was one big tape loop, and, while I’m sure some 8-track players had fast-forward capabilities, most of the time you just listened to whatever happened to be on that spot on the tape at the time.
The next evolution was cassettes, which were smaller (and therefore more portable), but they only had two “channels,” and, instead of the tape head moving, you physically had to take the cassette out and flip it over to hear the other channel. So the music on one channel went from the beginning of the tape to the end, and the music on the other channel went from the end to the beginning. This made rewinding necessary, so fast-forwarding was more common (if you’re making the player do the one, may as well have it do both), and it also meant that you could correspond the tape more closely to the original (vinyl) album: each format had two “sides,” so the entirety of side A of the ablum would go on the first channel of the cassette, and side B on the reverse. This meant there would be blank space at the end of either one side or the other (the tape was made as long as the longer side), which was wasted tape, but it was still better than the old 8-tracks, which would often switch channels right in the middle of a song (typically with an audible “thunk” sound). So overall it was better.
My father had reel-to-reel tapes, and he had 8-tracks, but, by the time I started buying my own music, it was cassettes all the way, baby. I owned a metric shit-ton of cassettes at one point, even after CDs came out: I was daunted by the expense of trying to replace a huge cassette collection.1 So I had many, many years of cassettes, from high school all the way to my second stint in college. And what I want to tell you about today is the two times that I actually found cassettes and adopted them into my collection.
The first story is very simple. I was walking back to my grandmother’s house from somewhere, and I found a copy of Ice Cream Castle on the sidewalk in a very battered case. Though the plastic case was essentially destroyed, and the paper insert was pretty torn up, the cassette itself was in surprisingly good shape, and I counted myself lucky to have found it. I only recognized one of the songs (undoubtedly “Jungle Love”), but I knew that the Time were a band associated with Prince, and had a role in the movie Purple Rain (which I hadn’t seen, admittedly). Honestly, the music reminded me a lot of Prince, whose 1999 I had owned for many years and nearly worn out. A lot of it was very silly, but it was good, and it was exactly the sort of thing that I enjoyed enough to play since I’d gotten it for free, but not nearly enough to have ever paid for the full album out of my own pocket, so I considered it a great find.2
The second story is more complex. I went to college in two stints: my first two years were spent at two different colleges in two different states, then I dropped out for a few years, and then went back to school at a third college. At the first school, I lived in the dorms; by the time of the third, I was paying for it myself and considered living in the dorm an unjustifiable expense. Even then, though, I had a lot of friends who did live in the dorms, so I spent a lot of time hanging out with them (and even lived on my best friend’s dorm room floor for a brief period between houses, much to his roommate’s annoyance). And the dorms in these two colleges all had elevators.3 As a freshman, my own dorm was 3 stories, so we mostly just used the stairs. But there were other dorms where elevators were necessary, and all of the dorms at the last college had them, and so we spent a bunch of time on them, so we invented dumb things to do on them to keep ourselves amused. The absolute dumbest of these was “bumper people,” a “game” in which one person would randomly shout “bumper people!” and everyone else would just put their hands down by their sides and start bouncing off the walls—and each other, of course—like we were balls in a small, jumbled pinball machine. Woe betide anyone who’d never heard of this when it spontaneously erupted; initiation into the society of bumper people was disorienting, to say the least.
But it’s the other thing we often did in the elevators that is relevant to this story. Someone long ago had figured this out and apparently passed it on throughout the years, so that we all learned to do it eventually ... at both schools, even.4 It was simple, really: you could put your fingers in the crack of the eleveator doors and just push them open. It required a bit of strength, but it was surprisingly easy, especially if you could manage to get the proper leverage. And the best bit was, you could even do this while the elevator was in motion, and, if you did that, the elevator would stop. Completely. Between floors. And stay that way until you allowed the doors to close again.
Now, I’m not entirely sure why this fascinated us so much. Perhaps just because the inside of the elevator shaft is a thing that the vast majority of us never get to actually see in real life. We see it in the movies, sometimes, but who can say how accurate that is? Well, anyone who attended either of these two universities5 in the 80s and 90s can say, and, as one such person, I’ll tell you that the primary difference between actual elevator shafts and what you see in the movies is that the cinematic versions are very clean. In real life, elevator shafts are filthy, disgusting things, full of rust and grease and all the gunk and debris that slovenly college kids accidentally (or purposefully) drop into the crack between the elevator car and the outside doors. In fact, part of the fun of stopping the elevator by opening the doors (this only opened the inside doors, of course) was to see what you could find in the empty spaces. The outer doors weren’t solid, so there was plenty of room inside them for papers or whatever to get trapped by the curled metal edges. And of course there was a set of outer doors for each floor, so there were a bunch of them to explore. If you opened the doors all the way, you could actually see into the parts of the elevator shaft beyond the edges of the doors, and they too had little recesses and cubbies where detritus would fetch up. I shudder to think how many times we stuck our entire arms between the car and the shaft, reaching for something that looked interesting. Sure, the elevator was fully stopped at the time, but there was no way for us to be sure that that would hold. We were young and stupid, of course, and convinced of our own immortality, so I don’t believe it ever even occurred to any of us that something might go wrong and the elevator might start up suddenly and, if that were to happen at such a time, someone was absolutely going to lose an arm. Certainly it never occurred to me.
So we often stopped the elevator just to look and see what “treasures” we could find. I have to put “treasures” in quotes, of course, because it was always trash. There was never anything actually cool or useful that we found in the elevator shafts of the dorms at either of these schools. Except, one time ...
During my freshman year, I got a job at a local sub shop. Which delivered, so I spent probably just as much time running deliveries to places as I did making sandwiches. The really interesting thing about this local (non-chain) sub shop was that it had a huge ice cream maker, a giant metal monster of a machine that you fed ice cream mix and whatever bits of flavoring you could imagine into, and you ended up with ... whatever ice cream. I used to make ice cream too: I would feed entire packages of Oreos into the hole, or cut up pieces of strawberry cheesecake, or actual pistachios. And of course we delivered that too. In fact, sometimes people would call up and order nothing but ice cream, although you had to order a decent amount of it to hit the minimum order. But people in the dorms would just get together with their neighbors and order a round of ice cream for the whole floor in the same way that they might all go in on a pizza. So I spent a lot of time taking people bags of freshly made ice cream, and a lot of that time was spent in elevators.
There was one dorm in particular that was taller than all the other dorms. I can’t remember exactly how big it was, but it was definitely the tallest dorm that I’ve ever been in, though of course not nearly the tallest building. It was probably somewhere between 7 and 15 floors, and it was mostly upper class students. I had a delivery one day around exam time to one of the girls’ floors near the top, and I brought them their favorite study aid: Oreo ice cream. They were very happy to see me, and they paid me, and then I got back in the elevator for the long ride down. I was all alone in the elevator car, and I must have been bored, because I decided to open the doors to look for cool shit in the crannies of the shaft. I did so once and found nothing (as expected, really). Then I closed the doors and went down a little further and opened them again, and I just stared in shock, because there was an actual thing. A useful, even exciting thing, stuck in the hollow of the outer elevator doors, that was not trash. It was a cassette by a band I’d never heard of before. It was, in fact, In a Roman Mood, by Human Sexual Response.
Now, I hope I’ve managed to convey how extremely unlikely it was for me to find this cassette. This was a Boston band who was barely known outside their native state, but someone had bought the cassette of their sophomore (lesser known) album and brought it to South Carolina, where they somehow managed to drop it into the crack of the elevator, where it fell down the shaft, not all the way to the bottom, but rather getting caught neatly inside one of the outer doors, where it did not break, or even crack, but sat patiently waiting for who knows how long until someone else—me—just happened to ride the elevator and just happened to know the trick of opening the doors while the car was in motion and just happened to pick the exact right spot to do it so that they would see this cassette. This set of coincidences is so very unlikely, in fact, that for many years I didn’t believe it: I assumed that someone had deliberately placed it there. Obviously they too knew the trick of opening the doors, and they just stuck the cassette there one day. But why? There’s no rational reason I could ever think of for it ... Somebody stuck it in there for safekeeping, meaning to come back and get it later? Rubbish. Somebody left it there hoping it would be found by someone else as a way to pass on the music? Nonsense: almost any other place in the universe would have been more likely to be discovered than this one. About the best I could come up with was that someone stole it from someone else that they were very pissed at and “disposed” of the thing in this way. Except ... again, why in the elevator shaft, when a trash can would have been far simpler and far more effective? I just couldn’t wrap my brain around it. While I’m not much inclined to believe that everything happens for a reason, things like this that have happened in my life do make me occasionally ponder whether fate might be an actual thing.
Now, my musical tastes are wide-ranging and eclectic, and I often go back and revisit periods in my musical history. So, while I had never heard of Human Sexual Response at that time, perhaps I would have stumbled across them later. They do have something of a reputation in new wave circles. Of course, the vast majority of that reputation centers around their debut album, and the later single “Butt Fuck,” which caused a stir for obvious reasons. And, here’s the thing: by this point in my life, I’ve heard the early HSR stuff. It doesn’t particularly impress me. Had I heard that stuff first, would I have even bothered to check out their second, less critically acclaimed, album? And, the thing is, In a Roman Mood contains the excellent, nearly-impossible-to-describe “Land of the Glass Pinecones,” which is the mix starter for Totally Different Head, so that feels like a pretty serious deviation in my personal musical trajectory had I never discovered it. Not to mention that the research for TDH is what led me to discover the music of HSR’s only female member’s daughter, Glasser, whose music is now slotted to appear in many of mixes (although so far we’ve only seen her pop up on Fulminant Cadenza). So that original discovery had a small but very significant impact in my musical development, and it’s all thanks to stupid college elevator games.
Next time ... well, actually, I don’t have anything planned for next time in this sub-series. But so far I’ve covered vinyl and tape, so obviously the next topic must be: digital.
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1 Eventually what happened was that about half my cassettes got stolen, and at that point I figured, WTF: may as well start buying the replacements on CD.
2 I never did buy it on CD, but I have a digital copy now.
3 At the second school, I neither lived in nor knew anyone who lived in the dorms, so it doesn’t figure much into the story.
4 I’m pretty sure I didn’t carry the practice from one school to the other; I think I’d remember that. But I can’t swear to it.
5 At least! Probably folks at other schools knew this trick as well.