“You can’t touch it,” says Henry Rollins of digital music in the film Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape (2016). He doesn’t mean you can’t touch its quality—nobody but the most die-hard tape-phile would claim the cassette is a high point of fidelity. No, the boss of Black Flag means that you can’t physically hold a digital file, can’t trace its progress through the smoked-glass window of a stereo, can’t pick up a download off the floorboard of a ’73 Plymouth Duster, blow the schmutz off, and hear it click into place in your cheap aftermarket stereo.
This story originally appeared in Volume 6 of Road & Track.
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Records get all the glory as the most romantic and physically present form of recorded music, but there’s no buying a Patsy Cline LP in a truck stop off I-10 and then listening to “She’s Got You” all the way from San Antonio to New Orleans. When it comes to automotive audio, my memories are wrapped around the yellow plastic spools of a Memorex DBS. The original playlist, car play before it was capitalized: a custom mixtape. Even now, anytime I hear Fugazi’s “Waiting Room,” I expect it to be followed by Young MC’s “Bust a Move,” because that was the order they played on the tape a boy I met at art camp made for me.
“People prefer a worse quality of sound because of nostalgia,” said Lou Ottens about the continued use of cassette tapes in the modern age. A Dutch engineer working for Philips Electronics, Ottens came up with the idea of the portable self-contained cassette in the early Sixties after an evening spent wrestling with a reel-to-reel player. “The cassette was born from the clumsiness of a very clever man,” said one of his coworkers, Willy Leenders. Ottens, who died in March at age 94, could never understand the affection people felt for his little plastic progeny. He lost the original model for the cassette player—a pocket-size piece of wood—when he used it to support a jack under his car. He couldn’t remember the first thing he recorded on the prototype cassette.
Ottens personally listened to all his music on compact disc, another technology he played a major part in developing. In the scope of automotive history, the CD player would go on to reign longer than the cassette deck as desired audio tech. CDs came in during the mid-Eighties and phased out after 2010 as Bluetooth became popular, whereas the cassette player was a bragging right in a new car for really only about 10 years from the late Seventies through the Eighties, if even that long.
In the early and mid-Sixties, the audio quality wasn’t as good as the larger 8-track. By the end of the decade, the cassette was starting to sound all right, but the 8-track was the factory-installed king of the dashboard. A few manufacturers, notably Mercedes and Chrysler, adopted the cassette player as early as 1971, but it wouldn’t become common on options lists for almost another decade. GM first offered a cassette deck in 1979, according to historian Kathleen Adelson from the GM Heritage Center. Music geeks might notice an overlap in the proliferation of the tape deck and the spread of genres previously kept underground. Both hip-hop and hardcore punk found new audiences thanks to the relative ease and affordability of recording and copying a cassette tape. The first mixtapes were made by DJs and garage bands. So maybe my Fugazi/Young MC mix isn’t so weird after all.
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