I've got you on tape!

The passing away of anyone is always somehow sad. Most of the time they leave a family behind that will miss them, or a group of friends which will have an empty stool at the bar for a while. But when you die at age 94 as Dutch engineer Lou Ottens did last weekend, and after having invented a technology like the cassette tapes, which had a huge impact at least in two generations (it did for me and I believe it did for my parents too), you can depart this world with a certain sense of accomplishment. I am far from achieving a similar feat, so instead I will take the chance to reminisce of the tapes and the influence they had in the first 30 years of my life.

One of the first memories I have linked to a tape is listening to the audio version of the 1967 Walt Disney movie "The Jungle Book" probably somewhere around 1979. We did not have that many tapes at the time, so "The Bare Necessities" was the backdrop to many of our weekend outings, alongside all the other pieces in the soundtrack, and everybody sang along to kill the time. On a side bar, I do not know what got into my parents with "The Jungle Book", but I know for a fact that we also had the vinyl record at home and I clearly remember watching the movie at the theater. I should probably ask my mother one of these days.

Photo: snd63 on Pixabay

Looking at it from the distance it is remarkable, but also understandable, that the first decks were powered by a relatively simple mechanism that would keep running (and skidding) whenever the tape reached the end. It was a common practice to eject the tape to see if it was done, because the tapes were double sided but the players were not (at least for many years), so one would have to turn around the tape to play the side B.

One unexpected consequence of the release of music in cloned vinyl record and tape is that sometimes the B side of the tape contained a lot of silence. On records, the gap at the end of each side was solved by a quick spiral that would drive the needle into the end groove, where the turntable would detect that it was done and, in most cases, stop automatically. However, on tape, the duration is strictly proportional to the length of the tape, so if the A side was three minutes longer than the B side there was no way around having these three minutes of silence at the end of the B side. Furthermore, if you flipped the tape unaware of this fact, you would occasionally find yourself halfway through the first song of the A side, having to flip the tape again to reach the end and only then flip once more to listen to the A side from the start.

One of the big advantages of the cassette against other tape formats like the 8-track is that it was much smaller and therefore more easily portable, not only the media, but also the players. The Walkman was introduced by Sony in 1979, but I was too young at the time. However, in I remember that one of my biggest autonomous purchase decisions was the acquisition in 1990 of an auto-reverse Aiwa portable player (probably the HS-G35), which even had a 3-band equalizer. The hours that I spent on that device probably range in the 5 digits, and the cost of the batteries could probably fund a small Caribbean country, but it certainly provided a lot of entertainment.

Adding auto-reverse to the decks in the cars was a significant improvement, because it provided not only the possibility to play the B side without having to flip the tape, but it also incorporated a second motor, so it was possible not only to wind the tape forward, but also to rewind, so one could easily play the same song twice without much effort. Besides, thanks to the auto-reverse the same tape could be running uninterrupted for months on end, especially once we started to cook our own mix tapes.

One of the blockbuster presents that everyone wanted for Christmas at the time was a stereo with recording capability, so that you could have a blank tape ready and record from the radio the songs that you liked. It was not infrequent to hear the voice of the DJ as song was ending, or even the ever-present time signal at the top of the hour. In those cases my heart was torn between trashing the recording and waiting for the next opportunity or sticking with the current one even if it was not perfect. These mix-tapes were the backdrop for my teen years, where I had already developed a certain musical taste and I chose which songs to record.

Some years later, my brother Jack also asked for a stereo, but his had to be a dual deck, because he was more into copying whole tapes than patching something together. Of course, the tapes were getting cheaper and cheaper, so there was no reason to save on minutes anymore. His stereo had even the "dubbing" feature, so that the copying happened at twice the speed. It goes without saying that he quickly grew a very impressive collection of (copies of) tapes.

However, the most endearing moments that any tape has provided are the recordings of our early childhood. Karen has a tape from the time she was three or four years old singing (!) the 1977 song by Bonny Tyler "It's a heartache": pitch, vocalization and rhythm were all off, but still good enough that the song can be unmistakably recognized.

Now I have fulfilled my debt of gratitude with Mr. Ottens (which sadly I never knew, even by name, while he was alive) it is time to close the box of nostalgia and travel back to the present, because it is almost dinner time. I hope you have enjoyed the trip. Have a nice evening.