I religiously collected cassette tapes/1980-1983

When I was a teenager, I used to religiously collect cassette tapes. I began in 1980. I wanted to tape every song I ever liked, that was my goal. With a cassette recorder pushed up against my 8 -track tape player, I was determined to do just that. Between my chores and school, I sat faithfully beside that radio, switching the radio channels until I recorded the song, or only part of a song I really liked. This was my ritual to come home from school, sit next to my 8 -track tape player, anticipating my play list to come over the air waves.

This was my mindset, my coping mechanism from two quarreling parents, to hide from the domestic violence, to fill my soul with music, because I couldn’t change these two bickering parents, who used every swear word in the book in both English and Spanish. This was my insulation from my reality, collecting cassette tapes, with my favorite songs. It was almost an obligation I had made to myself, a sort of promise that I had to keep. It all seems so silly, now, childish even, but when I was a teenager, the cassettes were my gold nuggets, literally.

My parents bought me a stereo on my 16th birthday that made it a lot easier to record. The recordings came out clearer with less static. Tape recording was like a passion, an obsession, like a bee swirling inside my blood, to continue to create more chambers with the cassettes which had become like a massive bee hive. I cared more about this than clothes, than boys, than dates, than anything.

I spent my allowance money, and my summer employment wages on buying cassettes at K-mart, the red ones were 90 minutes, the blue ones, were for only 60 minutes. Of course I had 60 minute ones when I was short on cash. This was the splinter I put on my broken bones, a child of domestic violence, to drown the sounds out, inside there was another agenda it was a place to run to, it was a world to feel safe in.

I did this all through high school, and I collected over 500 cassette tapes. I tried to record every 60’s song I could, Kicks by Paul Revere and the Raiders, Green Grass by Gary Lewis and the Playboys, Liar, Liar by the Castaways to name a few. I had bags full of cassette tapes, some broken, with the tape snapped some repaired, some on the repair list, many of them still in working order. This was the extent of my passion of recording all of my favorite songs. I was fully committed to this endeavor, to this dream. I listened faithfully to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 every Sunday from 8:00 a.m. to noon. Some of the hits I taped were Jim Steinman’s “Rock n- Roll dreams come through”, Rush’s “New World Man”, Diesel’s “Sausalito Summer Nights.” That was the only place I heard these songs.

I am grieved to say that I would miss Church, Mass, at that time. But by this time my parents weren’t really going anymore.

This was my way of escaping, sitting cross legged on the floor for hours, turning the radio, pushing the buttons on my cassette recorder then stereo, I had to have control over something, I was obsessed.