Over at Sound on the Sound, my friend Abbey is running a contest in which you can win the new cassette being released by Hobosexual. Yes, they are releasing a cassette tape. Anyway, to win you have to tell about your favorite tape…. I couldn’t come up with just one, but here’s my answer.

I immediately thought of a favorite tape when I saw this. Then as I read the above comments I came up with two more that could rank.

The first tape I thought of was a bootleg Phish show at The Bomb Factory in Dallas from sometime in the early 90s. I was (still am to be honest) big into Phish in college and had a ton of tapes like this. I knew their provenance so could tell you which generation removed from the actual taper my copy was, among other details. They were all on Maxell II-S tapes; anything else was too-low quality for us. The ones I didn’t get by trading with a friend (I tape a show for him/her, they tape one for me), I got from a now-defunct record/head shop  in Hempstead, NY on Long Island. They had books and books of show lists. You’d flip through, find the one you want, buy a blank tape from them and come back in a week or two to get it. They made a small profit on the blank tape, but that was it. Charging for a bootleg show was and is completely uncool.

 It was the ultimate in low-fi and it was great. Now I can download any show I want in pristine, soundboard quality and have it instantly. I don’t do that as much as I got tapes from that store.

The second tape I thought of was a mix tape my sister (who is 14 years older than me) made for me when I was about 10. Her name is Nina and she called it Neener-Beaners Rock n Roll vol. 1. It was full of the best damn songs I’d ever heard at that point. The Radiators, The Pretenders, Rolling Stones, Bob Marley, Clapton. Stuff that literally blew my young mind. Plus the fact that it came from my sister who was (still is) way too cool for school in my mind. That she thought of me and wanted to be an influence on me from 1,000 miles away was so awe inspiring to me… I listened to that tape way too much. I’ve still got it in a box somewhere (with a bunch of other mix tapes and shows I can’t give up) and will likely pull it out tonight just to get the songs from it so I can re-build the playlist. 

But the last tape I thought of was also probably the last tape I got and loved. It was a copy of Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory on side A and People’s Insntictive Travels on the other. Two of the best hip-hop records ever produced.

I got it from a friend of mine in the winter of 1998 and even though I mostly listened to CDs by then, I still traveled around with my old Sony Sports Walkman (the big clunky yellow one with the hinged door that you had to flip open in order to open the tape door. That thing was so indestrctible that when I ran over it with my bike when it fell out of my pocket on Broadway on night, it didn’t miss a beat. Try THAT with your iPhone.)

 I had recently broken up with a serious girlfriend and was morbid. I was riding my bike and the bus everywhere and I was working the opening shift at a downtown Starbucks at 5:30 am and rehearsing the last play I’ll ever work on every night from 6-10 pm. All of this was taking place in Seattle in February. It meant spending a lot of time in the dark, cold, rain and this tape was my soundtrack. It was all I listened to for weeks and it got me through that very hard time. I still listen to both those albums a lot. Based on visceral memories alone, that tape is easily my favorite one.

Image by Flickr user mikael altemark. Used under Creative Commons.