Road Tapes: How did they survive?

What you’re looking at there is the answer to the question “How did they survive on road trips in the days before MP3 players that could carry a ridiculous number of hours of music?” Of course, it’s only the answer for that small subset of “they” who couldn’t be satisfied with the radio, and needed to have their own music available in preselected playlists. This is important when you are frequently heading out on 30-hour drives at the drop of a hat, and even more important when you need to do things like drive from Halifax to San Francisco in four days.

That’s around 50 hours of carefully mixed music you’re looking at, accumulated over several years in fits and starts.

I am an obsessive collector type, so I had to print out liners for each tape, with the song lists and some other obsessive details. They were all printed in a consistent format, with a single panel image on the front, a panel of track listings folded inside, and a sequence number and amusing title on the spine–all in the same fonts, etc. The images are greyscale on the first dozen or so, since they predate easily available colour printers, but eventually they move into colour images, as you can see with the scattered cases around the box.

For many, many years, a box like that graced the interior of whatever vehicle I was driving. When it was the van, I actually had a box that held 60 of these cassettes on the floor between the driver and passenger seat. When I moved to less spacious vehicles I switched to the 30 cassette trays you see here.

Of course, it’s been ages since I even had a car with a tape deck. With an 80Gb MP3 player, I can carry a hell of a lot more than 50 hours of music, in a hell of a lot less space. These tapes are gathering dust now, and I just ran into them when looking for something else. I probably should just throw them out (I don’t even have a cassette player in my stereo stack anymore), but there’s a lot of sentimentality tied up there, even though I haven’t looked at them for more than half a decade now.

Here’s an example, looking at the first tape in the series, recorded something like fifteen years ago now. That means I would have been 19 years old, and in my first year of university.

01. Mellow Road Tunes
When I started down this road, I started with two tapes, the Mellow tape and the Loud tape, thinking that I would then have a tape for both important music situations. Looking at them now, I’m not sure what the distinction was here–the mellow tape has Sabbath on it, and the Loud tape has some equally questionable picks.

Side A

Tony Banks with Fish – Angel Face

I came out of high school a big Marillion fan, and that included the first couple of solo albums that Fish (former Marillion singer) did. I know that being the kind of geek who reads science fiction and fantasy, goes into engineering, and listens to Marillion is somewhat stereotypical (at least in the UK–in North America Marillion is too obscure to sustain a stereotype, although it was quite well known in my little high school), and I can live with that. Anyway, as the obsessive collector type (see above) I tracked down some “rare’ Fish tracks, including some collaborations with ex-Genesis artist Tony Banks on the Quicksilver soundtrack. This is one of those two, and the one that I connected with more deeply. It’s also, by far, the meaner of the two. In my mind, this song is about a very specific girl, although not the one that it should be about if I were being fair.

“I’ve got no memories just a photograph
I’ve got the best there is of you”

Bob Dylan – Tangled Up In Blue

A guy named Hugh put me onto Dylan during high schoolWell, actually during my session at the Northern Summer School For Excellence In Science but, as they say on the riverbank, that’s another story…, but it didn’t really stick util the first time I listened to ‘Blood On The Tracks‘. What a perfect album. And this song is just too fabulous, with Dylan working the kind of characters that interest me into a swirl of poetic brevity. (This isn’t my favourite song from that album, but it is the most accessible, and thus the first one I knew I liked.)

But me, I’m still on the road
Headin’ for another joint
We always did feel the same,
We just saw it from a different point of view

Rush – A Passage To Bangkok

When you read an article that mentions that the troops in Afghanistan are “listening to Rush“, it means completely different things for Canadian troops and for Americans. For Yanks, it means they’re listening to some oxycotin-addicted gasbag. For Canucks it means they’re listening to a power-trio with a nasal vocalist. This tune is off the back side of 2112, and is a not-very-cleverly disguised paen to drug use. I may have thought it was rebellious when I was 19. Now it seems a bit corny, but still makes me smile.

Sweet jamaican pipe dreams
Golden acapulco nights

National Velvet – Change My Mind

I saw National Velvet perform in a packed bar during my frosh week. The singer, Maria del Mar, was the essence of sex. She wasn’t pretty, but she just dripped sexuality. I wouldn’t know the right term for this until many years later when my friend Ian introduced the idea of a “bull-face girl”. (“You know, the kind of woman who gets you to put your bull face on: your nostrils flaring, your eyes kind of glazed, and has your hoof pounding in the dirt. The kind of woman who will break you in all kind of ways, but it doesn’t matter.” I assure you that when this is accompanied by a demonstration of Ian’s “bull face” it will lock the concept in your memory for life.) Listening to their songs is mostly about remembering the several times I saw them live, and reminiscing about how it felt. I am told this is the male equivalent of how a lot of women my age feel about The Cult. This is far from their best song, but I liked how Maria moved during the opening music.

I used to idolize Lucy In The Sky
but you can’t see clear through far-away eyes.

Jerry Jerry and Sons Of Rhythm Orchestra – Banner Day

My social mentor in the first year of university was a guy named Marty White. Marty took me to my first Jerry Jerry show. I think I saw every subsequent show that Jerry did in Ontario. (My first date with my wife was a trip to see a Jerry Jerry show, where the band didn’t show up.) Jerry is a prophet, and may be the drunkest performer I’ve ever seen–and I’ve seen both Ministry and John Sjogren on St. Patrick’s Day. This song was my personal theme song for most of the four months I was on a co-op work term at Atomic Energy. Jerry bought me a beer when I told him that, saying “well, that must have been a pretty sad fucking stretch”.

It’s time to make some new mistakes
I’ve made this one too long

Fish – Credo

I mentioned the Fish thing up there, right? Well this is more of that. That moment where he sings “It don’t mean nothing, it don’t mean nothing, it don’t mean nothing to me” and the meaning of the phrase changes 180 degrees while the words repeat pretty much captures teen angst: a pose of uncaring over an emtional sensibility where everything is deeply fraught with meaning, a need to find something worth believing in overlaid with a cynical pessimissm. (I’m a not-so-closet Romantic, so this still works for me, by the way.)

The more you scream, the less you hear,
Or that’s how it used to be

Steve Earle – Justice in Ontario

This one should be obvious: it’s a song that juxtaposes the story of the Black Donnellys with a knifing in a biker bar in Port Hope in the 90s. It references my home province. It calls the entire justice system into question, and raises the specter of institutional injustice that spans centuries. And it’s written by an outsider, as an outsider. And it’s a damn good song.

When you live on the edge of the law
You know, justice in Ontario

Damn Yankees – Damn Yankees

I spent a few of my high school years working nights in restaurants. One of my pals from those days, and one of the people I most regret having lost contact with over the years, was a guy named Jason Monette. We used to play a lot of Cat Scratch Fever and If You Can’t Lick ‘Em… Lick ‘Em while cleaning up the kitchen at night. This was before I knew that Nugent’s madness was so right-wing–I was just into his gonzo guitar stylings. So I picked up the Damn Yankees album, and thought the title track was a brilliant satire of America. I later realized that he meant it, and that took a lot of the fun out of it for me.

Suck on the barrel of my hot shotgun
Smile when you say “Damn Yankee”

Chieftains with Roger Daltry – Behind Blue Eyes

Look, it’s Behind Blue Eyes with a bodhran and a more mature Daltry on vocals. It’s awesome. “No one knows what it’s like to feel these feelings like I do.” There’s another perfect snapshot of being a teen.

No one bites back as hard on their anger
None of my pain and woe can show through

Jim Croce – Ball of Kerrymuir

Everybody knows Bad, Bad Leroy Brown, but there’s so much more. According to my mother, I was indoctrinated into Croce in vitro, and it might well be true. It certainly wasn’t cool to listen to him when I was 19, but I didn’t care. When I found the Final Tour Live album, I was ecstatic, because it had not just the songs, but also Croce talking about them. And then I found this track. The notion of something traditional and transgressive at the same time, and the sheer amount of fun Croce was having with it hooked me. And hell, some of the lyrics are pretty funny. (I didn’t put it on the tape, but you should really listen to Croce‘s Intro before checking out the track.)

Side B

Tesla – Signs

I first heard this song in the Tesla version, at the home of another of my pals from the restaurant days. So for me it’s the defining version, although I did later learn the Canadian history of the song. I had long hair, and I hated the establishment, so it worked for me. Plus, this version has cussin’.

And the sign said long haired freaky people need not apply
So I tucked my hair up under my hat and I went in to ask him why

Jerry Jerry and Sons Of Rhythm Orchestra – Superpowers

See above. I assure you this song is about Robin Givens and Mike Tyson.

We’ll show each other how to live like normal people do;
People with lots of money

Neil Young with Crazy Horse – Powderfinger

I like songs with history in them. My attraction to this song was probably one of the early signs that I would eventually get addicted to folk music, which is the music of telling stories about a particular place and time.

Think of me as one you’d never figured
Would fade away so young with so much left undone

Tori Amos – Precious Things

This album was recommended to me by the guy that ran my local music store during my high school years. He knew I liked Kate Bush, and he recommended this. Despite my disappointment with where Tori has gone over the years, I still think this album is great (all except the rape song). And hell “Just because you can make me cum, it doesn’t make you Jesus” is a great line.

Those demigods
With their nine-inch nails and little fascist panties tucked inside the heart of every nice girl

Black Sabbath – Sweet Leaf

Sure it’s about tobacco, Ozzy. Sure. Nobody has replicated what Sabbath did with their bass lines. And I did once see Ozzy play in an football stadium in Milan, surrounded by 5000 Italian headbangers, so I’m sentimental about him.

Straight people don’t know what you’re about
They put you down and shut you out

Jefferson Airplane – White Rabbit

I didn’t know about this song until I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I suspect that most people find those things in the other order. There’s sure a lot of “gee drugs are fun” songs on this tape, aren’t there. Hmmmm.

When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead

Pink Floyd – Cymbaline

Knowing all the Waters-era and earlier Floyd was de rigeur for my high school crowd. I always liked this track from the obscure end of the spectrum because it references Dr. Strange, and because I had to do a course in Engineering Drafting, so that whole bit about “lines converging where you stand, they must have moved the picture plane” makes me feel connected to the members of Floyd in their school days. Note also that Gilmour could sing back in the day.

Apprehension creeping
Like a tube-train up your spine
Will the tightrope reach the end
Will the final couplet rhyme

Iggy Pop – Brick By Brick

I wasn’t ready for the Stooges, but I was sure ready for Don Was moulding Iggy. What a great album. And the idea of changing the world, or at least a small part of it, one piece at a time, and damn the consequences was also a pretty easy sell to me.

I’m building it with simplicity
And the way that we feel, you and me
I’m building it with what I believe in.

Rush – A Farewell To Kings

I quite liked the whole “how will the future look back at us” conceit, and I liked the obvious story about how the Old People were keeping the Young People down. Now I just hear more early warnings of what’s gone wrong with North American (and British) politics in the last couple of decades. “Eyes cast down/On the path of least resistance” indeed. And if Cheney isn’t the poster boy for “Scheming demons/Dressed in kingly guise/Beating down the multitude/And scoffing at the wise” then I don’t know who is. (Remember Strom Thurmond is still dead.) Still, it ends on an up note, which is a rare enough thing for music that appealed to me then.

The hypocrites are slandering the sacred halls of truth
Ancient nobles showering their bitterness on youth

Jim Croce – Box No. 10

Someone said to me once “I usually don’t like pretty little folk songs, but I like this one”, and that works for this extremely simple two-and-a-half minute song, too. Of course this pretty little folk song has muggings, women of ill repute, and hopeful artists reduced to homelessness and poverty. Those are pluses for me, though. This is probably my favourite Croce tune. I remember sitting out at the end of the “government dock” one afternoon with my pal Jay, and listening to him sing and play some tunes on his guitar. He sang this–another favourite for late night restaurant cleaning–and I always get a visual of that moment when I hear the song.

I was gonna be a great success
Things sure ended up a mess
But in the process I got messed up too