Scary stuff!

Tannin

I'm moving house and having a big spring clean. (It's autumn here, but no matter.) I've been trawling through boxes and boxes of stuff that's been here since anything back to 1985 when I bought the place. For decades, I've dealt with chaos and too much stuff by dealing with the easy bits (bin this, store that, put the other thing on the shelf where it belongs) and then taking all the other  stuff - the stuff I'm not sure what to do with which is what causes all the stress and difficulty - and putting it into a great big box. Then I put the box somewhere and I'm done. Tidy house. Until next time. So I have boxes and boxes of stuff, all neatly classified as "other", "misc", "dunno", "assorted", "various", and "not sure".

Anyway, yesterday I opened a box and it was full of cassette tapes. Blimey I bought a lot of the bloody things! Pretty much the complete Jethro Tull, Stones, lots of Australian and New Zealand bands, Who, Neil Young, Graham Parker,  you name it. The amount of money I wasted enjoyed spending on music astounds me. 

Do any of them still work? Dunno. Am I ever going to play any of them? No. Out they go.

So I spent over an hour opening every one putting the paper and cardboard labels in one pile, the plastic boxes and the tapes in another pile and both piles into the recycle bin. Damn shame but there it is. 

And it was only because of this tedious one-at-a-time processing that I happened to stumble across two tapes of my band performing live in 1987. Far out! I didn't even remember that there was a live recording of us, let alone that I had a copy of it.  

Will it be an OK performance? Will it be awful? Will it be decent except for the bloody bass player (me)? No idea.

Luckily, I don't have a tape player. 

BillDL

That was an anticlimax!  Going by the thread title and where you live I thought you were going to open one of the boxes and have a huge hairy spider, or a massive venomous snake, jumping out or striking at you.

I have hung onto a portable cassette player because I used it connected to a PC by the headphone socket a number of years ago to digitise some of the sentimental recordings I had of me playing in rehearsals and also some songs I created on my old Tascam Portastudio.  I used an old Windows XP desktop PC that had a very old Roxio software suite installed, and it had a module where it would split the recording into separate tracks when it detected breaks.  While I was raking I discovered a set of 6 Arlen Roth Hot Licks cassettes that I bought at one of his seminars around 1983 and learned some blues licks from.  Unfortunately they had suffered from stretching and the print-through was so bad that they were useless and I binned them.  It's a real pain in the arse breaking cassette tapes apart to separate the components into recyclable plastics and metals, and I'm sure the actual tape would present a hazard to wildlife if left in long sections, so I chopped the tape into small pieces and sadly had to put it in the landfill bin.

stickyfiddle

I will 100% buy and ship you a tape player if you promise to upload digital versions

Tannin

@BillDL if it had been s spider, it wouldn't have been scary.

 Come to think of it there have been a couple of Redbacks in some of the other boxes I've sorted through recently. No snakes here though, this place is in the middle of suburbia.)

We may have a tape player at the other house. When I get home I'll look around. My brother in Queensland will have one, I reckon - hell, he's probably still got our old Tascam. I might post the tapes up there and get  him to digitise them. That's assuming they are playable - I'd forgotten about print-through and they've been lying around in a shed for 35 years which can't have been good for them.