Noise in the attic

Trying to keep up the ongoing purge of the absolutely unnecessary, the inexplicably kept, the useless detritus of the past that seems to stick like glue — I’m throwing away things I swear I’ve thrown away three or four times before. Now of course we have the modern advantage of being able to scan some of those things, old pieces of ephemera tucked into notebooks and drawers just as reminders of things we once did or the people we once were, and I’m perfectly satisfied with a digital facsimile as the original meets the fate it should have met 25 years ago. But there are still some problematic items.

Cassettes, for example. From the time I bought my first cassette tape, I was addicted to the creation of tapes. (Now people call them mix tapes, but at the time, it was just a given that if I was making a tape it wasn’t simply a copy of an entire album or a single artist.) I still have some of my earlier efforts, barely preserved on the cheapest tape available at the time, though most of those have long since been tossed, broken and unplayable. There was a time when making a tape was almost a stress reflex, something I did as a way of avoiding whatever it was I was supposed to be doing (usually schoolwork). I made dozens and dozens of these during my college years and into my twenties, usually cuing off whatever latest and greatest finds I had made at Desert Shore, my most reliable used record source. Once I had my hands on some graphics gear, even the creation of the covers became an obsession. And I still have nearly all of them, and a tape deck to play them on.

But of course in the age of iTunes and digital music, even though I will get up every twenty minutes to flip over an LP, I almost never pop a cassette in the deck. The sound quality was substandard from the start, and hasn’t gotten better over thousands of plays. So I thought maybe I could gather up the bulk of them and consign them to history. But first, at least make a copy of the covers so I could remember what was on them, maybe even duplicate a few on CD. But as I looked at the playlists, I realized that I had very little of this music digitally — almost all of it is still locked up on my LPs. If I toss these tapes that WERE my musical base for my 20s and 30s, tapes whose song order is indelibly locked in our memories, I may never really get them back. And there’s all this fun music that I just haven’t heard in years.

So, ummm, the tapes are staying. Another victory for clutter. (But I am digitizing a few of them, anyway — hang the sound quality: I don’t have the rest of my life to recreate these things the way I used to.)