So these 90 tapes, enough to fit in my three cassette storage boxes, are the cream of the crop. There's actually 91 here, because this week I did receive in the mail a copy of the latest Octo Octa mixtape ordered off Bandcamp. I have a digital copy and I fully expect that I will never listen to the cassette itself - it's more the _idea_ of a physical artifact than something with any sort of utility. I can see the appeal of cassettes as fetish objects (I don't mean that, for once, in a sexual sense), because they take up a lot less space than vinyl or even CDs. A well-dubbed cassette can sound as good as anything else, but in any case I suspect that most of these cassettes, like mine, will never be listened to.
Most of the tapes in these boxes have stories behind them, and that's why I keep them. I can tell you who I got them from, when, what they mean to me. Ask me about any of them and I will be glad to go on. I have no intention of telling all those stories today.
The main thing I am going to eventually wind up talking about, with regard to MOD files, is the cassette labelled "MODS 7/26/93". For whatever reason the J-card of this is unusually well-documented, which is very helpful to me in 2020 since I can't remember any of this stuff. I have the exact date, the software I used to transfer it... I didn't write down the soundcard (edit: I was better at writing than I am at reading... the inlay clearly says "SB 2.0", i.e. Soundblaster 2.0) or computer I had at the time or the stereo system I dubbed it on, but by my haphazard standards, this is extremely good documentation indeed. I can tell that it's about the oldest tape of the 90, taped over summer break before my senior year of high school. I grew up in the same house in suburban New Jersey for the first 17 years of my life. Four months after this tape was made I would move to Kentucky, so in retrospect there's a certain bittersweet melancholy about it, an artifact from the last days of my youth.
The tape itself - tapes were expensive, so I taped over things a lot. This was taped over side D of a five-part special called "Led Zeppelin: The Final Chapter" that I taped off the radio, probably sometime around 1990 when the box set was coming out. Those old radio specials, they were interesting because sometimes they had rare songs and bootleg recordings. This one had things like the early Robert Plant single "Everybody's Gonna Say", some live stuff, possibly from the Destroyer bootleg. They played "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago", which _really_ impressed my young mind, even though I didn't quite get the title - I thought it was called "Whirl of Time". I don't know quite how that stuff got worked out... probably they didn't ask to many questions and relied heavily on Peter Grant remaining dead. Anyway, by '93 I evidently figured it wasn't something I needed to keep, since most of it was album tracks and I'd already pirated pretty much all their records by that time.
At some point the tape did get damaged - you possibly can't tell the extent of it from my not-very-good photos, but the entire top of the cassette has been torn off. The reels themselves were undamaged and remained playable, though, and it's not like the tape was replaceable at the time it was damaged, so I kept it around. At some point, probably when I culled my tape collection, I did switch the J-card into a new box - the original box I had was damaged and cracked just as badly as the cassette inside, and since I had more tape cases than I needed I figured there was no point in keeping the old one.
I do note that I put "Orion" on this cassette, but here it is credited to a "Mr. Crowley". It was common in the BBS scene for people to change handles frequently - I know I did it with some frequency, going from "Zaphod" to "Eraserhead". When I listened to the MOD I downloaded it did sound very familiar, so I'm pretty sure it's the same version.
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