Cassette Tapes Were Serious Business

Image: stuart.childs

The following is a small excerpt from an unpublished memoir that I am currently writing. All text ©2016 Jim Younkin. Keep an eye out for the book sometime in the future.



Do you know what a pencil and a cassette tape have in common? Do you know what a cassette tape even is? Your answers the preceding questions will largely depend on when you were born.



I was born in 1977. The following is a reminder of the struggle all of us who grew up in the 80s had to go through to have our music.



I remember first starting my relationship with music when I was about 7 or 8 years old. I had a small radio cassette tape player and I remember listening to the radio at night and recording songs off the radio onto cassette tapes.



Cassettes had a special feature that would make it so that you wouldn't accidentally record over a tape. In the upper right and left corners if the cassette were small indentions. When you would push Record on a tape player a small piece of plastic would try to move down into this square hole. If it could move down into the square hole than the tape couldn't be recorded on to. If, however there was a small plastic tab covering the square hole than the tape could be recorded on to.



All new blank cassettes came with this little tab and after you recorded your tape you would use a pen or some other instrument to break off the little tab this making the tape unwritable.



But what if you wanted to record onto a blank tape that had already had the tabs broken out or, what was far more often the case, you wanted to record on to a tape that wasn't originally meant to be recorded on, like a pre-recorded cassette, you had to find a way to cover over those holes.



The most often used technique was to put a piece of tape, usually Scotch tape, over the holes. Scotch worked the best as other tapes, namely masking tape, weren't always strong enough to resist the plastic tab that went into the square hole often causing the tape to simply be pushed into the hole.



A lot of the time when you needed to record something you could always find some old unwanted cassette to record onto. I know I recorded over my fare share of commercial cassettes.



No discussion of cassette tapes would be complete (although this is far from a complete history) without talking about pencils and cassette tapes.



One thing about cassette tapes was that the tape was exposed on the bottom of the tape. If you were careful about putting the tape back into its case you were usually alright.



At other times though you might have a little brother who decided that pulling the tape out of your favorite cassette was a grand idea. More often than that you would hear your cassette start to sound a bit "wobbly" and maybe even slow down in the tape player. When you opened your tape player you would sometimes be welcomed with the sight of you tape player having "ate" your tape.



As you lifted the tape out of the player you would find the entrails of your cassette tape stuck inside the player. You had to be very careful. This was surgery. As you slowly pulled the cassette tape up the two spools would be letting out tape. You would then carefully tug and pull the tape our of the tape player.



If you got lucky you would get your tape out without having broken the tape. This was a miracle. You were not left with the task of winding all of the tape that had come out of the cassette back into the tape. This was accomplished with a specialty tool that was made just for the job: a No. 2 pencil.



For some reason the sides of a No. 2 pencil not only fit almost perfectly inside the sprocket of a cassette tape. You'd straighten out the tape as best you could (your tape would often have been folded and mangled and that part of the tape would forever more have a "bad" spot in the tape which would sound a bit weird from then on) and then you would wind it with the pencil being careful not to accidentally let it fold over while winding.



If you weren't so lucky and your tape had been broken or you had to break the tape in order to get it out of the tape players you would then have to cut the bad section out of the tape and put a piece of Scotch tape on the back of it and then trim the tape to the width of the tape with scissors.



While this would allow you to still listen to the tape is also meant that at a certain spot in the tape there would be a noticeable jump in the music as it skipped over the part of the tape that had been trimmed out.



We worked hard for our music back then.