Birthdays
Film critic Gene Shalit is 95. Former astronaut James Lovell is 93. Feminist activist and author Gloria Steinem is 87. Singer Anita Bryant is 81. Actor Paul Michael Glaser is 78. Singer Sir Elton John is 74. Actor Bonnie Bedelia is 73. Movie producer Amy Pascal is 63. Actor Fred Goss is 60. Actor-writer-director
John Stockwell is 60. Actor Lisa Gay Hamilton is 57. Actor Sarah Jessica Parker is 56. Former auto racer Danica Patrick is 39.
Netflix series “Stranger Things.”
In a sure sign that cassettes are a cool object of the moment, Urban Outfitters now sells both cassette tape releases and cassette tape players.
Hot cassette releases on the Urban website include Taylor Swift’s “Evermore” and Arcade Fire’s score to the 2013 sci-fi movie “Her,” which came out last month and is designed to look like a homemade cassette.
Urban carries portable cassette players that start at $30 and a dual cassette deck “Retro Street Bluetooth Boombox” for $150.
Demand for vintage tape players is also spiking. “I bought so many Walkmen for $4,” says Carlough. “Now they’re going for
$30 or $40.”
“There’s a coolness factor,” says Edwin Perez, 33, an art teacher and cassette collector who works part time at Main Street Music.
“The kids see ‘Stranger Things’ and then they find a bag of cassettes in their parents’ basement, and it starts from there,” Perez says. “A lot of people, millennials, people in my generation, are really into thrifting, looking for clothing, or anything old. That’s a big part of the culture.”
The medium has a strong emotional hold on Perez. His parents emigrated from Bolivia, where his father had owned a record store. Relatives kept in touch by sending tapes with a mix of songs and personal messages. “My grandparents would be like, ‘We miss you, have you forgotten about us?’ And by the end of Side B, everyone would be a little tipsy. It was beautiful.”
For me, digging through racks of old tapes and excavating the past has made pandemic lockdowns less lonely.
Sometimes even the empty case from a longago homemade mixtape send me to Spotify to recreate a playlist. That happened with a 1990s road trip mix I made called “Lost Highway” that had included two versions of the title song, by Hank Williams and Jason & the Scorchers.
An office cleanup turned up a stellar mix made by a friend of a friend sometime around 1993. Titled “Charlie Parker, Forgive Me for Not Answering
Your Eyes,” it featured
Jack Kerouac, Sonic Youth, Katie Webster, and Thomas Mapfumo. My life flashed before my eyes.
That sent me out on a record shop hunt for more tapes, and made me dearly miss the 1998 Lexus with a tape deck that I drove until it broke down two years ago.
This week, I came up with a haul of used tapes from Common Beat Music in West Philly, bringing home Pete Townshend’s “Empty Glass,” Jimmy Witherspoon and Ben Webster’s “Roots” (for $1), Kris Kristofferson’s “The Silver Tongued Devil and I,” and “Burn in Hell” by the metal band Sinister Purpose.
My favorite acquisition, though, was “Sound Defects,” by Philly punk stalwarts F.O.D., on the local SRA label. I bought it mainly because its cover is an homage to “Sound Affects,” the 1980 album by one of my favorite bands, The Jam.
When I opened it, I not only found a download code for the digital album, which was a nice bonus, but also learned the cover was designed by renowned Philly album cover artist Perry Shall, which he made exclusively for the cassette release. Score!