Found classics among cassettes

We Americans like to accumulate stuff through most of our lives, then somewhere around old age we start trying to get rid of it.

At least that’s true for me. I’ve been working to downsize my stuff since around my 60th birthday, and I’m still at it six years later. Right now, I’m going through a stack of boxes that contain bits and pieces of my life through the years.

It’s a step back in time for me, to go through stuff that at some point I couldn’t quite let go of. I’m not a hoarder, but all those boxes suggest that, at one time or another, I came close.

And so it was, on a recent weekend of rummaging through those boxes, I found my old cassettes collection.

Back in the early 1980s, I recorded all my vinyl albums onto cassettes, gave away my turntable and records and expanded my cassettes collection through the 1990s. Never quick to abandon old technologies for newer ones, I stayed with my cassettes until around 2001, when I bought my first car with a compact disc player and began to buy CDs instead.

And despite the streaming and downloading options the internet now provides, I’m still sticking to CDs. Only now, I seldom buy the new music, preferring instead the “classics” from my younger years. No surprise there, right?

I found several classics among my old cassettes. Performers like the Eagles back when they were the hottest sound coming off the West Coast, John Prine and his debut album right around when he quit his post office job to make music full time, Linda Ronstadt’s hard-driving “Living in the U.S.A.” album, and much more. But I’ve actually re-purchased most of them on CDs, so I’ll just see if I can give most of my cassettes away. Maybe somebody out there is still into cassettes.

Same with the “mixes” I made, or a friend made for me. Maybe someone else can find their own memories in them.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

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