(Originally appeared in Shat Upon 'zine in 1998 or so)

Just so you know, I am the world's biggest fag when it comes to cassette preparation and care. Sure, any half-witted, jerk-‘em-off audiophile can try and tell you that commercial (i.e. "store-bought, i.e.e. "pre-recorded") tapes are vastly inferior to taping your own records or CDs. That's all well and good, but how much topical weight can it really swing? There are a great many more issues at play here, creampuff, issues with which I've become intimately familiar. Like four or five other Americans, I am cursed with both Compulsive Compilation of Mix Tapes and Obsessive Cassette Care. Don't chortle, asshole! For me this is very, very real. It's here today, and by gum, it'll be here tomorrow. Making a various tape is verily a religious and painstaking process for me, much like a dog that sniffs around looking for a bitchin' spot to cut cable. First I get me a Maxell XLIIS-90, a bag of David Sunflower Seeds, a 32 oz. Pepsi (30% ice), and a Bic Round Stic Fine Point with the cap properly chewed up. There are no substitutions for these accoutrements, please. Then I park my dorky ergonomic taping chair in front of my vinyl stack and pick out the tapeables. I always take time before taping to consider the recipient's tastes and level of tolerance. I mean, god damn, I'm not gonna put some whiny-ass Dag Nasty song from the "Field Day" LP on a tape for, say, Rob Disgruntled! What would be the point? Aside from thinking I'm into shitty, late-80's emo, he's gonna hate the tune and probably FF past it every time. And unless he's got AMS (Automatic Music Search) on his tape deck, he might miss the brilliant intro to the next tune, say, "Soul Craft" by Bad Brains. It's like this tape that Dana Hendrickson made for me a couple years back. The whole thing's real good, except for this abominable, sickening Archers of Loaf tune he threw on there. It's so bad that it fouls the next two or three songs, which are ordinarily decent songs. That reminds me, it's just bad form to include a song that you know the person already has. Like Dana put Husker Du's "The Girl Who Lives on Heaven Hill" on it. I'm all, "Fuck, Dana, everything you know about me should tell you that I've already got that fuckin' record! That's not even a good Husker Du song!" Okay, I suppose it would have been slightly less offensive if he'd put a quick blast like "Indecision Time," but I don't really think that any greater purpose is served by taping such non-un-do-without-able songs. In fact I'm gonna take and go ahead and say that this is setting home taping back twenty years, and I'll thank you to eschew such a practice.

Another consideration of tantamount motherfucking import is the continuity and/or gestalt of the tape. You can't start a mix and just sort of chip away at it over the course of a couple months. Fuck no, you gotta make at least an entire side at a time to just to preserve the meter. The more you put off finishing a side, the more disjointed and incoherent the tape will sound when taken as a whole. That's not to say that I always abide by this rule of thumb, but I am always mindful of keeping that gestalt thing intact. I guess you could say you're successful in doing so if, after a few listens, you're ready to hum the opening riffle1 of the songs before they occur, just like on those "Guitar Rock" compilations that they advertise on TV. But is the tape supposed to be a showcase of the albums you've recently acquired, or more of just a greeting card-type thing? See? This shit is fractal-like in its complexity! It's a big ol' sack o' hot potatoes!

I'm a huge fan of interlarding the tape with freaked out samples from various and sundry sources. I especially like to begin a tape with that thing from the Chemical People's "So Sexist!" album where Tesco Vee says, "This album's gonna pack yer puckered starfish full of motherfuckin', hot-boxin', rock and fuckin' roll!" Another fave is this Mr. Rogers record where he sings "You Can Never Go Down the Drain" wherein he advises that "you're bigger than the water, bigger than the soap, much bigger than a telescope." It's a real hoot to follow that one up with a song off the Dirty Rotten LP, oh yeah. But never have I found such fertile soil in soundbites as I have in the jive brother sequences from the Airplane! movies. So fertile in fact, that I'm far too overwhelmed presently to comment any further on them.

Upon finishing the recording, the taper must prepare to confront the gargantuan yet strangely fulfilling task of filling out the J-card. (If this does not apply to you, that is to say, if you generally don't bother filling out the J-card and would prefer just to hand someone a caseless mix tape, for Christ's sake, please go read something else. You and your pagan taping practices are a grievous affront to everything I stand for. Here's a hall pass; you're excused from the remainder of my lecture. Please leave now.) This is one arena in which my overwhelming anal-osity really shines. See, if I mess up on the J-card, I gotta shitcan it. I just can't live with having such blemishes in the tape stack. Gone are the days of the double-sided J-cards which allowed for one mistake (actually, Maxell recently went back to a two-sided card after years of single-sided mayhem). But what do most humans do when they can't navigate tasks such as ordering flowers or reupholstering their car by themselves? Get a computer, creampuff! By employing but a miniscule portion of my vast computer skills, I am now able to render visually arresting, full-color, graphically rich cassette covers for you and yours. I've even produced an industry-standard tape cover template for users of CorelDraw! which is now in heavy Internet circulation (well, one other person has it).

It used to be that every prospective girlfriend of mine would receive a custom tape which I'd carefully tailored to her perceived tastes and tolerances. See, I took Psychology of Loving Relations in college, and, as such, am hip to the fact that girls start associating a man's company with other sensory data, such as air fresheners and power ballads, thus making them more malleable and tractable. And as you virile young swashbucklers know, that kind of shit can often hasten the anticipated pink-sinking. Around '92 though, I decided that the tape-making was gay, some sort of Hello Kitty, let's-listen-to-"Jane Says"-together type of move, and I know that's just gonna get me off on the wrong foot (as opposed to just getting me off). Additionally, I finally came to realize that, despite what any Kalispell rocker will tell you, Exploited songs cannot possibly make girls even slightly horny. Besides, I've seen what happens when girls make tapes for each other, and I'll have no part of it: they get those shitty New Kids on the Block Memorex tapes that don't even come with a case, and write shit like "Summer Songs ‘89" or "Kendra's Freshman Mix" on the sticker. They proceed to record stuff like "With or Without You" and "Ramble On" when they could achieve the same end by listening to KZOQ. This leads me to believe that most girls don't really appreciate the effort and you're more than likely to see your tape on the floor of her Fiero under a bunch of spent air fresheners and 22 oz. Diet Coke bottles . Nowadays when I'm courtin' a new bird, I still make the tape, only I keep it for myself and play it repeatedly while she's in my car in an attempt to foist it onto her psyche. I figure I can get all the personal utility of a new various tape and the Aural Association Helper without suffering the indignity of watching it be neglected. Then, if she inquires about enough of the selections, I can go, "Yeah, I suppose you could probably have it..." Hugs and kisses and all of the attendant fondling and groping are certain to ensue. This has proven to be one of my svelter moves, and has brought the Penetration Countdown to a far less agonizing level. You're welcome, creampuff.

This may not be the right time to get into this, but I may as well say it now and play the bad guy: girls often have a knack for starting to talk exactly during the cool part of the song that I'd anticipated showcasing for them. Case in point: I'm driving back from Johnsrud Aquapark this past summer with Rusty riding shotgun and two girls in the back. The car stereo was feeble, but I grappled with the tone and fader knobs to attain optimal volume. We were feeling fairly macho; we'd both jumped off of the Big Boy cliff that day (I got about a quart of river water up my ass doing it, but the girls needn't have known that). The highly-anticipated opening tuba riffle from "The Ballad of Pee-Pee the Sailor" (Bad Livers' version) had just come on, and one of the girls starts blabbing on about mooses or elks or some such shit. I grind my teeth and mutter to myself and calmly go for the rewind, taking us about 30 seconds into the previous song. Finally, the tuba lick comes on again: "furf, furf, furf fa furf," ah...ah...shit!!! Before they even get to the "Sleepy, sleepy Pee-Pee, somebody carry him home" verse she starts fucking yakking again! I'm pulling the remainder of my hair out, not even watching the road. I go for the rewind again, but by now the song just sounds like a Wendy's commercial. The load is blown; I'm a dangling condom. I wanted to just dump my tapes on the floor and pour Sprite all over them.

In preparation for a trip to Chicago a couple of years ago, I got one of them 20-pack cassette caddies. I figured that this putting tapes in a shoebox deal doesn't quite jibe with my value system anymore, so what else can a brother do? I already knew that cassette caddies were the object of worldwide scorn, but you know, function over form, right? Wrestlers look like complete dipshits in singlets, but what are you gonna do, wear a leather jacket and Ray-Bans on the mat? My point here is that cassette caddies, however uncool, are the uniform of the obsessive audiophile. Ideally, chicks should look at a brother with a cassette caddy in his car and think "This guy is doing his swingin' best to ensure that his passengers will enjoy all of the sound fidelity that they so richly deserve. I think I'll let him throw it in."

Making a tape for someone is considered to be the greatest show of goodwill I can muster. Ergo, when I see the tape on the floor of someone's car OUT OF ITS FUCKING CASE, covered in dried Zima with dog hair stuck to it, it really breaks my heart. I know, tapes are meant to be portable and get kicked around and shit, but personally, I just can't bring myself to give them anything but the most tender lovin'. I still have all my tapes from the high school days; I just don't want to get rid of ‘em, even though I doubt I'll ever listen to the Leaving Trains or Zoogz Rift's Island of the Living Puke again. The point is that I could if ever I felt like it, and they're gonna sound as good as when I bought them on account of they've been resting safely in their cases all these years. This guy I work with (hi) always brings in a fanny pack full of caseless tapes and every one of them sounds like he dropped it in a grease trap, fading in and out of fidelity, hissing and warbling like a buggered banshee. I will go so far as to cede him that, yes, Licensed to Ill does pack a certain nostalgic cachet when you can hear the dried Pabst and Doral ashes being stretched over the capstans, but the same cannot be said of many other albums.

Oh me, I do feel some hot air blowin' in here! I kinda feel bad ‘cause I've been ridin' you like a rented mule, but I'll wrap this up now. Look, I don't really give a frog's fat ass what you do with your own tapes, I just needed to get this off my chest. However, I do need you to know that taping and tape care are two very weighty topix, and you seem really nice and everything, so I just don't want you to do yourself or anyone else any disservice.