Cassette tapes were always an unsatisfactory music delivery system. We just didn't realize it in the '80's.

It's hard to believe that we ever got along without CDs. We did, though. If you're like me, if you are about the same age that I am, you probably have a big box somewhere that's just full of all the cassette tapes you aquired while you were a teenager.

My box is red; a tropical fish aquarium came in it, and it's pretty much stacked full of old cassettes. It's in the basement right now, gathering dust. I think of that box as a graveyard full of dead technology and anachronous music. Music that dates me as a child of the '80's. Def Leppard. Billy Idol. Billy Squire. Men At Work. And, of course, the Less Than Zero soundtrack.

Some of it I might still enjoy, if only for nostalgic reasons... but those albums are on cassette, and cassettes suck. They are and always were flimsy, cheap, and built to break. If you're like me, you owned a small set of screwdrivers… jeweler's screwdrivers or small-electronic repair screwdrivers… and you were constantly trying to repair one cassette or another. It was such a pain in the butt, unscrewing those five little screws and gently pulling the shell apart… but it was, of course, worth it to salvage No Jacket Required, right?

And something was always going wrong with cassettes. That little foam pad where the playhead touched the tape would fall out… or get cockeyed… or that whole little metal thing the pad was attached to would get bent or fall out. Sometimes the ribbon of tape itself would stretch or break. And now and then I'd leave a cassette just lying on the car seat and find it the next day, warped into something that would disgust Salvador Dali.

So I'd have to get the screwdrivers out and attempt cassette surgical recovery. If you never had to perform cassette surgical recovery (or, CSR), here's a crash course: First, you carefully remove the five screws on one side and carefully set them aside. Make sure to put them in something that will contain them. There's nothing worse than finishing CSR and only finding four screws instead of five because one of them has rolled off the table.

Once you get the screws out, you'd have to gently lift off the top of the shell and set it aside. What you were doing now would depend on the reason you were performing CSR in the first place. If the little foam pad/metal thing had come out, you'd try to slip a new one in; one you'd scavenged from some old, worn out TDK or BASF blank cassette. Some instances of CSR were more complex, such as a total shell transplant. Boy, that was always a nightmare. You'd have to lift the two little reels of tape up and move them over to an open, scavenged shell… and you'd have to try to wind the tape through all those little plastic spokes and wheels successfully. And you'd have to pray like crazy that the little reels of tape didn't start slipping and getting loose, because if they did you'd have a little brown ribbon of tape everywhere.

If I can go the rest of my life and never again have to perform another instance of CSR, I'll die a happy man.


I remember the first big advance I ever saw in music delivery technology. I'm not talking about the advent of the CD… no, this was back in '84, when Foreigner's album Agent Provocateur was released. The amazing thing about the Agent Provocateur cassette tape was that it was in a clear plastic shell instead of a white plastic shell. This clear plastic gave the cassette a rather high-tech, space-age look. At the time, I thought it would be worth buying the album just for this amazing new technology. As it turned out, I was wrong. "Tooth And Nail" was the only good song on the album. However, listening to it as it played from that clear plastic cassette tape seemed like such a futuristic experience.

Of course, eventually, the CD revolution caught up with all of us. Today, though, even CDs seem outdated. My wife has already moved beyond them. She listens to all of her music on a small white rectangular thing that's kinda shaped like a pack of cigarettes. She says it's called an Eye Pot or some such nonsense.

My attitude is, look: I have made the painful and difficult transition from one kind of technology to another once already. I'm too old and too grouchy to do it again. I do NOT want to end up with my Counting Crows and Tool CDs in a box next to my Dire Straits and Eurythmics cassettes. I refuse to do it. CDs work, they work just fine, I've never once had to try to fix a CD with a screwdriver. That alone is good enough for me.