The sun shone through the clouds in bursts of rays as I
drove down leafy Park Presido Boulevard . It was a couple of weeks ago. The desiccated land needed rain badly and it
was finally coming. My happiness was the
perfect balance of warmth, comfort and knowledge of the impending deluge; that,
and the anticipatory joy of a free afternoon.
I was early for lunch so I pulled onto Fulton
Avenue and parked a few blocks up from 25th. I grabbed my phone and walked into the thin
strip of Golden Gate Park
I had fifteen minutes to get to the Tennessee Grill so I
departed lazily and crossed Fulton
toward my car. As I was doing so, my
eyes were drawn to a plastic bag which had been placed on the corner. It called to me. There is no other way to explain it.
Upon looking inside, I saw it was filled with cassette tapes. Believe it or not, both my cars have tape
players in them and I continue to collect and use these seemingly ancient
articles from the annals of my boyhood. Still,
it appeared that the vast majority of the tapes were blanks that had recordings
on them, making them somewhat less “valuable” than commercially produced
examples. One voice inside my head
screamed out, “Leave them, you idiot!
You don’t need any more crap in your life.” But I couldn’t help myself. I just had to have them. As my old Uncle C always used to say, “If it’s
free, it’s for me.”
Blindly reaching into the bag I pulled out a tape marked
“Roots and Blues 1925-1955.” I saw names
of artists such as Big Bill Bronzy, The Humbard Family, James Clark and Sister
Myrtle Fields among many others. Most of
the artists I was unfamiliar with. I
popped it in the machine and hit the road.
Almost immediately I was struck. Bluegrass, gospel, folk, early blues and
old-timey religious classics like “I’ll Fly Away” cascaded down like the
impending gentle storm that was soon to be.
Somehow, it was exactly what I needed to hear at that precise
moment.
After a disappointing but sociable lunch with Rick, the two
of us got into my car and I explained my find.
“These probably belonged to some hipsters,” he said. “They love this kind of thing.”
Yes, I agreed. I had
read an article recently in an airline magazine describing the resurgence of
cassettes with the so-called hipster set.
But for all I knew the tapes were from the 1980’s. We dug through the bag and pulled a few
out. One stood out of the stack we had
created. The inner sleeve song list had
been meticulously typed in courier font – not hand written in pen – on an actual
typewriter. I was certain now that the
collection was indeed very old until I read the side of the sleeve: “March 26, 2010 – Mixed Tape To
Natalie, From Miles.”
We set about our day with the “Roots and Blues” collection
still playing. We went to the zoo but
decided against it after surveying the skies above and went instead to the De
Young Museum. Somewhere along the line
we changed tapes and inserted one titled “Angel Dust: Music for Movie Bikers,”
a compilation of 60’s B-grade biker movie soundtracks and film dialogs. Later, while darkness and light rain
descended, we sat outside near Irving Street
and enjoyed a cup of coffee.
We were finishing the night on Turtle Hill, sitting in the
car, enjoying the view and a few one hitters from Rick’s Billy Bat. The lights of the Sunset district shimmered
in the night. “Angel Dust” was our third
companion, whispering masculine visions of open roads and surf-rock
fantasies.
“This album is fucking awesome,” he remarked. “It’s a goddamned time capsule. It makes me want to drive.” This is the best assessment of it I can
imagine. The second best is my wife’s,
who remarked distastefully when I forced her to take a listen a week later,
“They should call this shit ‘Man Town, Music for People with Balls.’”
Indeed they should.
As days passed, I went through a few of the other tapes but
none of them really inspired me. Some of
them were really awful, others were just so-so.
The whole lot of them was worth picking up if only for “Roots and Blues”
and “Angel Dust” anyway, I assured myself.
Finally, this morning, I decided to take a listen to “March 26, 2010 ” on my way to
work.
Side A begins with the song “Stop” by the Black Rebel
Motorcycle Club: the band’s name a nod to Marlon Brando’s gang in The Wild
One. Side B finishes with Japanese
cowboy troubadour Toshio Hirano’s “Thanks a Lot .” In between are songs by Asobi Seksu, Mogwai
and My Bloody Valentine, among others.
Somewhere between Novato
and Petaluma I began to get shivers
up my spine. A visceral feeling of
emotion washed over my body as the compilation progressed. I did not even like all of the song
selections, but collectively they were infused with an emotional quality where
the whole was so much greater than the sum of its parts. It has been twenty years since I made a mix
tape for a girlfriend. Why the
overwhelming emotion?
Who were Miles and Natalie anyway? Were they lovers? I imagine that this is the case. But my imagination does not make it so. And who are they today? And where?
How have their lives changed? Was
it she who left the cassette tapes on the street? And if so, why? Why didn’t she just throw them away?
I today feel more justified than ever in the fact that I
still buy old records at thrift stores, that I never got rid of my CD
collection, that I find art and music and books by accident, that I’ve never
owned an Ipod. Where before I saw the
ascending generations just behind my own as mired in their pre-programmed digital
world I now feel a individuated sense of kinship with at least some of them who
are reaching into the past, grasping antiquated technologies and making them
relevant once again. Digital music, this
approximated digital life, will never ever replace the tangibility and
solidity of my analog world, I promise myself with a nervous lump in my throat.
How can there be any mistakes in the reality we
inhabit? At this moment the idea of a
random, meaningless universe seems utterly ludicrous to me, as does the notion
that any thing can be said to be valueless.
Somewhere inside all of this, I am convinced, is a clue at the meaning
of existence. It is as if I can
literally feel my destiny and purpose – banal as it often seems to be – pulling
me forward not to an ultimate end but to a never ending beginning.
And all this from a bag of cassette tapes.
