TAPE TO TAPE
A dozen cassettes for a penny? Geoff Edgers still has his and now there’s time to listen to the choicest cuts.
“Take any 11 albums for a penny. Then take the 12th one for free!”
The mathematical absurdity still makes my mouth water. A penny! Come on now. For all that music?
Though business journalists have demystified the formula driving the Columbia Record & Tape Club, I remain hypnotized. Because in early 1983, when I was 12, there was no Craigslist or ebay or sidewalk boxes full of Crash Test Dummies discs. Back then, I marked my selections on the form in Parade magazine, added my mom’s cheque for
$1.86 — the penny plus $1.85 for shipping — and waited by the mailbox.
Technically, this deal was far from over. By signing up, you were also agreeing to purchase eight more tapes over the next three years at regular club prices, which were often $14.98 a pop. But we could face that reality later. What mattered in the moment was the cardboard container that arrived with your first dozen selections. I still remember pulling that box open.
Suddenly, I was no longer a kid forced to rotate between my cassette of the self-titled Cars debut, that red (1964-1967) Beatles greatest hits collection and an ABBA tape I’d acquired in Norway during my father’s yearlong teaching sabbatical. I was in “The Club.”
I could get pop music, funk, new wave, punk and at least three kinds of heavy metal: the devilish stuff (Ozzy, Judas Priest), the glossy (Def Leppard) and work I would be proud to share many decades later (AC/ DC, Van Halen). Which brings me to the pandemic, and how I recently rediscovered the Columbia collection I’d kept stored on a shelf above my desk all these years.
As my world has shrunk and my social interactions have lately become defined by social distancing protocol, I’ve been employing my still-pristine Panasonic 5085 boom box for parking lot chair circles and patio gatherings. And there is still magic in those tapes, at least the ones that will play. (Sorry, Prince’s 1999 and Black Flag’s The First Four Years.) They make people happy and all it takes is six D batteries.
Though I’ve had to replace a couple — Beauty and the Beat swapped out for a Go-go’s Greatest Hits collection — the music from my original box remains a powerful antidote to the psychological toll of isolation.
So, in no particular order, here are the Top 5 plays from my initial Record Club booty and their release dates.
THE GO-GO’S
BEAUTY AND THE BEAT (JULY8,1981)
The opening, Peter Gunnish-groove of the big single, We Got the Beat, is the musical equivalent of Atari, Growing Pains and legwarmers. Welcome to the ’80s. It’s no wonder the band’s No. 2 hit drove the mall scene opening of Fast Times at Ridgemont High. And The Go-go’s were more than one-hit wonders. They were a girl band, technically, though they were women in every way, sort of an instrument-playing update of The Shangri-las. You didn’t want to meet them in an alley or sign up against them in Battle of the Bands. They had chops, attitude and a legit Top 10 frontwoman in Belinda Carlisle.
AC/DC
BACK IN BLACK (JULY25,1980)
Like describing Matisse’s finest flowers, it’s hard to use words to explain the majestic sweep of AC/DC’S sixth record. The opener features a 2,000-pound bronze bell sounding before Angus
Young’s dirty doom chords kick in and we hear lead singer Brian Johnson for the first time. (Bon Scott had died only months earlier, after Highway to Hell.) The next AC/DC record, 1981’s For Those About to Rock (We Salute You), had cannons, but this rebirth features the band at its best.
SIMON AND GARFUNKEL GREATEST HITS
(JUNE 14, 1972)
The music itself is really secondary here, though it’s hard to argue with a tape that features Mrs. Robinson, The Boxer, The Sound of Silence and I Am a
Rock — and that’s just side one. The true highlight for me was the cover, with Paul Simon’s pornstache and weirdo fox-hunting chapeau as he stands next to Art Garfunkel. I admit, S&G were a little on the soft side for my 12-year-old self, but I’d grown up building forts in the living room out of my parents’ copies of the duo’s record jackets.
THE CLASH COMBAT ROCK (MAY 14, 1982)
Nothing was cooler than Joe Strummer, and that’s still true. His punk army get-up — fatigues, Mohawk haircut, worn Telecaster — was just perfect, as was his push to Know Your Rights. Nobody knew then that The Clash were so close to the end, that lead singer Strummer and guitarist Mick Jones would implode before they could record a sixth album.
OZZY OSBOURNE DIARY OF A MADMAN (NOV. 7, 1981)
There was a time when Ozzy didn’t stammer or do reality TV. He also created some of the most bannable covers this side of the PMRC. (That’s the group formed, in part, by Tipper Gore that pushed for labelling albums seen as unfit for children.) On Diary, Ozzy wears blood-streaked stretchy pants and stares out, with a menacing glare, from this monstrous, Medieval library that could be a laboratory. The music was anything but theatre. This would be his last record with Randy Rhoads, the guitar hero who died tragically in a plane crash at the age of 25.
The Washington Post