Rant #1,567: Mix Tapes

Yes, I had my tooth worked on yesterday.

A temporary crown was put on, and I have to wait until early next year for the permanent one to be placed in my mouth.

And also, I found out that dental apparatus does, on occasion, break in a person's mouth, inside their tooth, so it isn't just me.

I don't have a perfect segueway to what I want to talk about today, but let's get to the "teeth" of the matter ...

I want to talk about the original mix tapes.

These were so popular in the 1970s probably through the early 1990s.

They are basically cassette tapes filled with your favorite songs. You made them for yourself to listen to in your car on your tape deck, and you also made them for friends.

In fact, I was making a mix tape 35 years ago to the moment I heard that John Lennon had been murdered, on December 8, 1980. And I had just finished putting a Yoko Ono song on the tape, believe it or not.

I made the tape for a friend who was away at school and couldn't find anything on the radio to listen to, so I made him a tape packed to the gills with the new music being played on the radio in New York.

That was the whole essence of mix tapes--it was probably the first time that people could actually listen to exactly what they wanted to in the car, not being fed only the music being played on their favorite radio station or on prerecorded tapes.

I used to spend hours making these tapes, some with themes--like, for instance, a best of compilation from some band that I liked--to just a conglomeration of songs.

And if it didn't turn out right, well, I could just tape over it.

It was fun, and each tape probably took a few hours to compile. I still have dozens and dozens of them scattered throughout my house.

Fast forward to today. We can stream music, put music onto a disk or a thumb drive or our MP3 player, and it is easier than ever to listen to the music you want to listen to in your car or generally on the go.

But people are digging out their original mix tapes and re-listening to them, seeing what they were into way back when.

I have dug out a couple of mine, and it is pretty interesting.

I like pretty much the same music, mostly 1960s to early 1970s tunes. That is what I put on these tapes, as well as come current music of whatever time I was recording them in, but mainly oldies for me.

And the practice, at least for me, continues to this day.

I have regular radio in the car, I have satellite radio, and I can still listen to exactly what I want to listen to simply by collecting various music files through the turntable that I have hooked up to my computer, recording them onto the computer, changing them over to MP3s and putting them on disk or thumb drive.

Some people simply stream what they want, I would prefer to actually have something that I can feel and touch and store my music on.

And again, my focus continues to be on the 1960s through the early 1970s.

A current track rarely sneaks into what I listen to, and that is fine with me, since I generally don't like the music of today at all.

But on my mix-CDRs, if you will, I am continuing the tradition I started for myself 30 or more years ago, putting on the music that I want to hear--seemingly everything from the Animals to the Zombies.

So, just to sum things up, mix tapes haven't really ever gone away, they have morphed over to the current ways to listen to the music that you want to listen to.

What could be better when you are stuck in traffic than listening to music that you really want to hear rather than what you are being programmed to hear?

And that is why these things will never really go away--and maybe one day, I will transfer over some of my original mix tapes digitally.

That would be a really fun thing to do.

I am sure you must have your own mix tapes from a different era. Get them out and listen to them!

It might give you a clue of where you were and what you were doing way back when, a reflection of your personality in a time that really is far, far away in the rear view mirror.