Celebrating Mixed Tapes

          Growing up in the ‘80s, I celebrated the mixed tape. My family has always loved music, and my sister Kathy and I spent much of our allowances on cassette singles and albums by our favorite artists. The house rocked to the tunes of Billy Joel, Whitney Houston, Madonna, and John Cougar (Mellencamp). We boogied to the classics of the ‘50s and ‘60s, which we’d grown up listening to, thanks to our parents, and come Christmas time, the tape player would be covered in sugar and flour while we baked cookies to the mischievous song antics of Alvin and the Chipmunks.

          But the absolute passion of this time period came in making the mixed tape. In the early days, I had only a shoebox tape recorder that I carried with me everywhere. I kept a blank tape in it so whenever a favorite song came on the radio, I could push “record” and receive a lovely, staticky recording of the latest Top Ten hit. Everyone in the car had to be super silent during this time, as the slightest noise would be picked up by the microphone. I remember once, on a three-hour trip to my grandparents’ house, “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor came on the car radio. Now I loved this song (still do), and I scrambled to get the recorder over the front seat hump as close to the radio as I could while instructing the other four members of my family to “Shhhh!” It was a classic recording, complete with the DJ announcing the song and artist, my daddy laughing, and the tires swooshing on the pavement.

          Over the years, technology improved, and soon I found I was able to record straight from albums. My sister and I began digging through our tape collection and selecting our favorite songs from each album to put onto a blank tape. It became not at all uncommon to find mixed tapes where The Jackson 5 sang “I’ll Be There,” followed by Huey Lewis and the News’s “If This Is It,” followed by Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” Now whenever we traveled, we had an eclectic collection of only the very best songs to listen to.

          Kathy and I would even make each other mixed tapes (and eventually mixed CDs) as presents to each other. There was nothing more fun than popping the tape into the player and listening to the surprises that had been carefully selected. Different versions of our favorite songs sometimes made an appearance. On one such tape, there would be Barry Manilow’s cover of “Strangers in the Night” and Scandal’s cover of “Downtown Train,” only to have another tape with Frank Sinatra and Rod Stewart singing their signature songs. We never tired of our songs, and like every mixed tape aficionado of the ‘80s, we knew well how to reel in cassette tape using a pencil.

          Recently, upon cleaning out the shed, I found a large plastic bucket of tapes that had been “stored” with all the other junk my husband and I have been hesitant to get rid of. Oh, the joy of rediscovery! I immediately hauled the bucket and tape player into the house and spent hours listening to the mixed tapes from my childhood and even through college! There were so many songs I had forgotten, little gems like Climie Fisher’s “Love Changes Everything” and Restless Heart’s “Why Does It Have to be (Wrong or Right)” and Exposé’s “As Long as I Can Dream” and Henry Lee Summer’s “Hey Baby.” (I think I drove my husband a little batty with a constant rewind of that one!) Each song brought back feel-good memories and a sense of youth and dreams and freedom.

          Of course, I have recently added many of the songs from these mixed tapes to my much more advanced playlist, but I found that the magic of the mixed tape is just as powerful now in 2020 as it was in 1985. After all, nostalgia is a pleasant jaunt, but to properly enjoy it, you need the music of your life, and the best music is the imperfect kind—scratchy, staticky, full of background noise—that sometimes requires a pencil’s eraser head to put back on track.