Mixed emotions

Revisiting youth as captured on cassette

by Ron Fletcher

Today is my 32nd birthday. The cracked, crumb-encrusted tape cases to my right hold the soundtrack to my life through adolescence. Most of these tapes have endured purgatory in glove compartments and unopened desk drawers for more than a decade. Today I’ve decided to revisit them.

The Clash’s “Stay Free” opens my first homemade mix, recorded in 1986, an offering of 24 tunes titled — and I wish I were making this up — “Alternative Music for People with Taste.” Songs from the Cult, the Violent Femmes, O Positive, Joy Division, and the like follow. As I listen, I find that they offer something finer than nostalgia, something less wince-worthy than my mid-teen journals — something about which I’m not entirely ambivalent.

This maiden-voyage mix reveals my debt to radio. Born of vigil as much as volition, “AMFPWT” is an amateurish affair, with missed song beginnings, static, and DJ-spoiled fade-outs. The tape testifies to countless bedroom hours spent waiting at the ready to capture a particular song or band. On hearing the opening notes of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” or “Jumping Someone Else’s Train,” I would bound across the bedroom to attack the tape deck, thumb and index finger poised in the gesture one uses to describe an inch. Play-record. Play-record. I had to depress both buttons simultaneously to preserve on tape the song that time or money had denied a place in my permanent collection.

Crude, radio-dependent mixes eventually gave way to polished compilations created from vinyl and tapes. CD players were prohibitively expensive back then, plus they offered no recording option, and some were predicting that the technology would soon foll~w the eight-track and Betamax into the A/V graveyard. So the tape deck, or its upscale counterpart, the double deck, was the sine qua non for any aspiring audiophile. Best of all, it offered a way to dub and distribute a self.

Existing uneasily between indolence and eloquence, mix tapes lightened the burden of expression. The two sides of a tape seemed to capture and convey what one hoped was a many-sided self. The well-placed B-side from, say, a Lloyd Cole and the Commotions 12-inch single (import, of course) neatly outlined character in fewer than four minutes, leaving 80-plus for filling in the details. These tapes were personal ads writ large, hour-and-a-half monologues scripted for friendship or romance. Shameless, craven, and beautiful, they stand as headstones to a certain headiness and heedlessness.

et us survey the wreckage with the benefit of hindsight.

Mistaking solipsism for insight, self for audience, and desperation for depth, my early mixes were the aural equivalent of navel-gazing. Whatever led me to believe others cared about my interest in songs of unrequited love, morbid introspection, and social gracelessness remains a mystery. Couldn’t someone have stepped in and put the kibosh on “From Manchester Without Love,” a positively red-flag-raising autumnal mix on which I had placed, back-to-back-to-back, the Smiths’ “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” “Back to the Old House,” and “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want”? Really, someone should have suggested less time between the foam-fitted headphones.

To whom did I subject this clunker? I can’t recall. My sanguine side wants to believe that I kept “FMWL” to myself, but I have some half-lit memory that it either nixed a nascent friendship or compelled some Molly Ringwald ringer to lose my number fast.

From Hell to Hull and Kerry Cohan. She and I met at Vogue, the crown jewel of Nantasket Beach, Massachusetts teen nightlife in the ’80s. In what still seems an act of providence, the Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now” cracked a set of songs from the pop sound wall of Sheila E and Janet Jackson, calling Kerry and me to the emptied dance floor. Somehow she saw past my ridiculous windmill dance — arms flailing, hips twisting, head lolling. Though short-lived, the relationship forever changed my thinking about mix tapes.

On our first weekend together I traded my black Swatch for Kerry’s five-song New Order cassette. The infectious first track, “Temptation,” with its too-obvious line “I never met anyone quite like you before,” closed the door on my bedroom crooners and silenced my anti-synth rants. Danceable songs from Soft Cell, Heaven 17, and Depeche Mode started appearing on quixotically titled mixes. “Mourning Is Broken” and “Kerry on a Wayward Son” offered three hours of blissed-out love songs that severed the “un” from “requited.” My sister no longer insisted on the immediate removal of “my tape” during family rides in the Buick Century. Clouds lifted. The sun shone. Mosquitoes stopped biting.

Then they started again. Kerry soon fell for a guy who was able to dance to “Heroin” by the Velvet Underground, a feat I could not possibly rival. “From Manchester Without Love” returned to heavy rotation.

In time I returned to compiling songs that occupied the middle ground between doleful self-indulgence and lust-induced lightness. On a 1990 mix unironically titled “No Pretentious Title,” Manchester bands figure prominently, revealing the Anglophilia that had me driving on the left and setting my watch to Greenwich Mean Time. Hearing again the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, and James brings me back to a time when music — and most other matters of taste — mattered more than anything. Sure, it was pure luxury to mistake levity for gravity, or to treat another’s haircut, shoes, or favorite band as the Rosetta stone of character. The same impulse today would find one confusing salary with self-worth. What folly!

A few years ago I befriended a colleague about my age who shared an interest in the music at the heart of my mixes. He spoke with authority and enthusiasm about the Smiths, the Jam, the Wedding Present. When I asked to look at his CD collection, he presented me with a thick black binder of classical CDs. Not a pop group in the lot. He told me that he had traded in all his Brit pop — hundreds of discs — for store credit to create a collection of classical music, an act about which I’m not entirely ambivalent.

Ron A. Fletcher made his latest mix, the eponymously titled “A RAFfish Offering,” with a CD burner.