I Remember... Mix Tapes

Before I get into this blog, I want to first congratulate my cousin Jeremy for recently completing his 365 Trek! I know it has been a hard journey but one that is totally worth it. And to honor my cousin, I am going to swipe one of his column ideas. A good idea is a good idea! I hope he doesn't mind but by the time he finds out it will be too late.

I have been in another one of my melancholy moods where I get reflective about the past and I spend way too much time reminiscing. Combine this mood with my "I have too much crap" mood and that spells trouble. This afternoon I targeted my small filing cabinet. I file a lot of things away (schoolwork, church stuff, notes, drawings) and it was time to go through it and clean out some stuff that I really don't need. I found a small cassette insert and it made me smile.

A few years ago I threw out all my old cassette tapes. I don't use them anymore and they were just taking up room (I must have been in this mood then). I had a ton of cassettes, most of them were mix tapes. For those that are unfamiliar with mixtapes, basically you would either record (using blank tapes) music from another tape, record or even from the radio. Like I said, I had a ton of these mix tapes ranging from musical scores to Queen to heavy metal to well... ...just about everything. But there were about 10-12 tapes that I struggled to part with. These were tapes that I made when I was young and living in Canada.

Living in a big city like Edmonton definitely had its advantages. One of the biggest was their library system. In downtown Edmonton they had this huge library and my dad used to take my sister and I there quite a lot. But I was not interested in the books, I was interested in the music! They had a ton of records (of course this is really all they had since this was back in the 80's) but they also had those small 45 records that normally had only a single song on them. But they usually had the latest hits! My sister and I would spend hours looking for songs and we would come home with about thirty of them. Then the next day I would get up early and record them on to tape and make my own mixtapes. I loved spending all that time mixing music. It was like I was Dr. Johnny Fever! I made about ten volumes of music from borrowing those old 45's from the library and I listened to these tapes all the way until I started getting CDs. But now they are just taking up space so I made the tough decision and dumped them.

But I filed one of the tape covers in my files as a remembrance of those old glory days.

This was Volume One. Can you name some of the artists? And yeah, that is not a typo. I had a song called Sexcrime 1984. I don't know how that slipped past the parents.

About a year ago I found these cool USB Flash discs that mimic mixtapes. I need to get me one of these things. Aren't they nifty?