One of the coolest technological devices I've ever owned is the tape recorder. Some of you are too young to know what that is. And I was going to post some photos of the different recording devices I've had in my possession for most of my life. I discovered, however, upon a visit to my parent's home, that all of them are gone, with the exception of this gem, that we had when I was around 7 or so:
Somewhere, there's a tape of me, some time around 1976 or so, playing "school" in my room. Occasionally, my sister would pop in and instruct me to clean it up. That recording was made using this machine.
The recording devices I currently own are these:
This particular average-size tape recorder was a "gift," of sorts. My friend Jennifer used to get an exorbitant amount of financial aid money to help pay for her college textbooks, so she bought this for me with some of the leftover cash. So I guess it's really hers. It records nothing but static and the rollers won't turn.
This mini-cassette recorder was purchased at Wal-Mart back in the late nineties. I lost it, then it was discovered buried in the recesses of our old Dodge conversion van, when some friends of ours had borrowed the vehicle for a family trip. It never has worked very well.
This "boom-box," or whatever you want to call it, officially died this last September. It was purchased at Radio Shack, Christmas 1999, for use in the Los Alamos Christmas parade. It hung in there for 11 years.
The only one that works, of course, is the digital recorder, which I bought...two years ago? Gee, where does the time go?
And here's a cassette tape, the original KWAR master:
You can still buy them-usually at super discount stores like Fred's. Some can hold up to an entire 120 minutes of music. Wow. Those always cost more, like $5.00 a pop. As a teenager, I started with the 60 minute tapes, which came three to package, no cover, no case, then I graduated up to 90 minutes, when I wanted better quality, and a cover and a case. And, if you got tired of what was on the tape, you could record over it with new stuff. I did that a lot, and sometimes recorded over stuff I didn't mean to, important events like my first band's stellar performance of Led Zeppelin's "Rock and Roll" one time at HSU Band Camp, 1991. (Or at least I think that's the year.) After the evolution of the compact disk, I'm down to a couple of boxes of these little things.
I used to have over 300.
And this...is an 8-track tape:
Which is a whole other animal entirely.
This is the way we old people used to purchase music. It's also how we use to "file-share." We'd borrow albums(both on cassette and vinyl LPs) and make copies on tape. And we'd tape stuff direct from the radio.
Is it possible to still do that? I guess it doesn't matter anymore. We bootlegged stuff all the time and the ASCAP Police never showed up at the door demanding to confiscate our scratchy, warped copy of Thriller.
One method I'm currently using to stay OFF the computer is to transfer some of my old, rare albums on cassette to .mp3 using a program I've had since about 2005. Why to stay OFF the computer? Well, if I'm working on something else when I'm recording audio, it doesn't just record the album but also every click, bonk, pop that occurs when surfing the web or screwing up a Word document. So, while I'm taking a break, I'm reliving some odd memories. I can now listen to Jean Beauvoir's Drums Along the Mohawk without having to pay the hefty $69.99 price for a used copy of the CD.
(You ask: "Who the hell is Jean Beauvoir??" Staunch rock fans know him as the former guitarist for the Plasmatics and a "behind-the-scenes" guy for Kiss, John Waite, and the Ramones. I first saw him in a video for the song "Feel the Heat" which was featured in Sylvester Stallone's film Cobra. I thought he was one of the coolest looking people I ever saw, with his dark skin, green eyes, and blond mohawk. That was just killer. And my husband is now shaking his head, wondering how in the world he married someone whose head is filled with such useless information.)
Anyway, after loading up a little known album called "Squeeze" by the singer Fiona, and the somewhat worthless soundtrack to a film she starred in called Hearts of Fire, I decided to sift through some of these moldy oldies and look for songs that I MIGHT possibly be able to find online to download, some of those I originally "stole" from the radio. I found some real winners. I'd forgotten all about Thomas Dolby's "She Blinded Me with Science." And Jeffrey Osbourne's "On the Wings of Love," which has to be on somebody's list of "all-time fantastic wedding songs."
But I came across something else: Some of my own "broadcasts" right from my parents' home on Gary Drive, using an old LP player/cassette recorder console that has been relegated to the landfill of old recording equipment. Somehow we figured out that you could plug an old tape recorder microphone into the headphone jack and voila! We're on the air! Not really, but it was nice to pretend. We also didn't realize that even though we were playing LPs and 45s, the microphone was still picking up every noise in the room, so there's all this jabber over our barrage of greatest hits of 1984. We were freshmen in high school at that time, but some things are still pretty damn funny twenty some odd years later.
And now I can convert that afternoon to digital also! And share it with the world!
Our station was KWAR, in Grand Garbage, Arkansas. RM (Rob Sanders, PLEASE don't kill me!) and Toxic...Something or other. (I can't remember the second half of my DJ alter ego. Oh wait! Maniac. Toxic Maniac. I don't have the slightest idea how I came up with that).
Anyway, we are spinning the greatest songs of all-time long before they were the greatest hits of all-time. There's even an "Avid Listener" in the studio(Janna Liles, who really wasn't into talking on the air). There's news (Russians invading) and refreshments (Caffeine-free Coke in its first incarnation). There's an interview (that has been mysteriously omitted) with someone named "Wolfgang the Wolfman." Whoever the hell he was. We provide an impromptu review of the new action film, Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom. We have a guest appearance by Yogurt, who is a sloppy version of Yoda. (And this was LONG before "Spaceballs" came out. Weird, huh?)
DISCLAIMER: You may need to make various volume adjustments throughout the podcast. Some of it is loud, some is not...It's a 26-year-old recording, after all.)
The tape kicks off with me, announcing that KWAR is officially on the air, followed by RM's rather explosive self-produced explosion, that almost clipped my input source. Then Wham's "Careless Whisper" comes on, straight off REAL radio station B98, out of Little Rock. Then, KWAR takes over again.
I'll spare you the endless chatter over our playlist, which included:
1. Total Eclipse of the Heart-Bonnie Tyler
2. Flashdance(What a Feeling)-Irene Cara
(Yes-these photos of LPs and 45s are the ACTUAL records used on the KWAR broadcast. Go figure.)
We open the phone lines here-and the phone actually does ring. You can even hear it. Bizarre. It's actually RM's mom calling looking for him.
3. Let's Hear It For the Boy-Deniece Williams (I'm out of breath on my intro. It was hard to carry all those 45s around.)
4. Open Arms-Journey (who DIDN'T know this song???) After this is where that Wolfgang interview just "ends." ????
5. Truly-Lionel Richie (and you can hear my ridiculous South Arkansas accent in certain vowels. Eek.)
6. Down Under-Men at Work (RM seems really upset that this band didn't seem to have any more hits after this one. Must have been that vegamite sandwich. There's also a lot of Caffeine-free Coke can-popping as background percussion to accent the flute solo.)
There's a break for news here, complete with the "deet-deet-deet-deet" sound. We mention the Olympics. Wasn't that in Los Angeles that year? There's an announcement to kill E.T., and a plug for Liberace in concert playing "Oh, Sherrie." After this is the death of Yogurt. (Turn down your speakers-It's rather unpleasant. It's one of those "Is it live, or is it Memorex?" moments. Some of you understand what I mean.) I don't know what the point of this was, but it seemed entertaining at the time. This also signals the end of Side 1.
(Cassettes have "sides". You turn them over and get to hear more stuff. It took some work and interrupted our listening pleasure, but we were happy. Then they started making tape decks that had Auto-Reverse and it "turned it over" for you. I don't think I ever had one of those. I did, however, have a dual cassette boom box that would automatically transfer from one deck to the other. That was pretty cool.)
Side 2 consists of some stolen radio songs, some of which never even made it to the "one-hit wonder" stage, like Dan Hartman's "We Are the Young" and Supertramp's "Sleeping With the Enemy," which I think lasts about 20 minutes. This was surely the one and only time these tunes were ever played on the air, anywhere. I forget the station, but I think it was still B98. And in Mena, the only time you could pick up this station was at about 2 in the morning.
Following Supertramp is Duran Duran's "Wild Boys,"(I have a story about this song, but I'll save that.), then Chicago's "You're the Inspiration." General Hospital fans will appreciate "You're All I Need" by Jack "Frisco Jones" Wagner. This song turns up on Side 2 twice, but I don't remember being just bowled over by the tune to record it twice even then. That'll just have to be another mystery. Early hair metal power ballad "Call to the Heart" by Guiffria is next.
(NOTE: We DID NOT call it "hair metal" in 1984. That derogatory moniker came much later. We just called it ROCK. I prefer to still call it that, but no one knows what that means anymore.)
We conclude the bootlegs with Jack Wagner's second appearance. (Why? Why, why, oh why???) Then we're tuned back into KWAR, with Moon Unit Zappa's "Valley Girl," which cuts out after about 30 seconds.
And we must have figured out how to turn the mike off, because there's no more background noise. Either that, or we finally got tired of talking, which I doubt, because we NEVER ran out of things to talk about. At least we were TALKING, and not TEXTING.
Here's what REALLY alarming, though: There are times when I can't tell the difference between Rob's voice and mine. And I still remember EVERY WORD of all these songs. Even the off-the-wall ones.
(You know, why can't I write like this when I HAVE to? Do you think they'd let me do my dissertation on the effect of obscure 80s songs on a Siamese cat? Ted the Cat lost interest hours ago and went to bed without me.)
I don't know what the equivalent of this type of mayhem among adolescents now would be. I do notice there are a lot of people who have their own vodcasts and podcasts, which is pretty much the same thing but EVERYBODY who has an Internet connection can see it and hear it. Our only audience was ourselves, because our parents were all at work.
I don't know if it would have been cool or not to have a real broadcast, if we'd had this kind of technology in '84. Maybe. It's hard to say. We wouldn't have had Lars Ulrich hunting us down for his 2 cents per song, that's for dang sure. I don't know if Lionel Richie would have been that upset or not.
BUT NOW!!!! We can ALL tune in to KWAR, just for a moment! And excuse me while I go grab a Caffeine Coke and some Pop Rocks.
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