Transcript:

Grayson: So we’ll just get into some first, some simple questions about your use of cassettes. So, how did you primarily listen to music before you were listening to cassettes?

Catlin: Well, when I was very young, so I was born in 1984, and my first memory of listening to music is on my parents record player, They had a suitcase style record player, I don’t know if you’ve seen photos of them, but it looks like a suitcase and you open it up and there’ s a record player inside, and I remember being like five, six years old and being allowed to put my parents records onto the record player. But, at the time it was like a toy. I was a young child. When I first remember listening to music for its own sake, that was on cassettes. For most of my childhood, I would say cassettes were the main way I listened to music. I listened to music in the car on cassette, I listened to music at home on cassette, I can go on, but do you have more questions?

Grayson: Yeah, what kind of music were you listening to on the cassettes?

Catlin: Well, that’s an interesting question because when I started to develop my own musical tastes was around the same time CDs were coming in. The very first album I ever purchased for myself which was in 19… sometime in the mid 90s, I purchased a Barenaked Ladies album that was on CD, so the cassettes I was listening to were all before that, so it reflected my parents taste in musicals – and I say musicals cause it’s a Freudian slip because they were almost all Broadway musicals, my parents were very much into that – plus a lot of folk rock so like Peter, Paul and Mary, John Denver, stuff like that. That’s, well you know I need to take back what I said because I said that everything that I listen to on my own accord was on CD as a teenager, but that’s not true, cause cassettes could do something at the time that CDs could not do, which was record, so when my friends and I wanted to share music with each other, this is before MP3 players, this was even before recordable CDs – I remember those were a big deal burnable CDs when they came out – we would share tapes. We would share either entire pirated albums on tape or things taped off the radio or mixtapes. I still have a shoebox somewhere in my house of tapes that my friends gave me, many of which were like mixtapes that they gave me. A mixtape is it’s own art form, you know, people will design their own sets of songs to flow into each other. Basically, we think it was a playlist today. It’s like a precursor to the Spotify playlist, not just music, as well. That same shoebox, I have a recording of my 10th birthday party in there cause they could be used to record anything. It didn’t have to be music; they could record things from your everyday life.

Grayson. That’s so cool. Our next question was about how did it impact your life but that’s so interesting that you were able to share things with your friends and family

Catlin: Yeah

Grayson: Yeah, do you think there’s any other interesting impacts that it had?

Catlin: Yes, I owned a Sony Walkman. It was a big deal. I won it as a prize in my boy scout troop for selling the most popcorn when I was nine years old, but the thing about the Walkman is it let you take music on the go. It had a pair of headphones, like if you could see those headphones they look goofy now they had a lot of foam on them, but again mid 90s it was a big deal to be able to take your music out with you. So, I’ve always been interested in music. I wound up minoring in music. I like playing music, but the Walkman allowed me to listen to music, like when Mom says pile in the car we’re going grocery shopping, I don’t have to just sit there bored in the back of the minivan. I can put my Walkman on and I can listen to my tapes.

Grayson: That’s so cool cause we’ve touched a lot about how the Walkman and the portability of music made a big impact…

Catlin: Yeah

Grayson: …with cassettes, but what was the kind of the reaction from like your parents with the Walkman like did they use it or were they big fans?

Catlin: It was mine, I was ten years old! I wasn’t going to let them use my stuff. I don’t think they cared about tapes as much as I did the whole concept of headphones, I don’t think, because my parents are baby boomers, they had music of their own on radio, radio and boomboxes, and eventually like the suitcase record players like the one I described, but I don’t remember my parents ever owning headphones, so my headphones that I got with my Walkman were I think the only ones in the house.

Grayson: But were your parents, like, did they ever use cassettes too or was it mostly just you?

Catlin: Well, they had their Broadway musicals. I’ve heard Man of La Mancha and Annie Get Your Gun more times than I can count, so they would play their own tapes, but they wouldn’t put headphones on, we had a tape deck and you would just put it in the tape deck and play it through speakers

Grayson: Our last question is what was your favorite memory of having cassettes?

Catlin: Oh gosh I’ve already mentioned the mixtapes. Those were a big one. I’ve mentioned the recordings. I wanna flip your question a little bit, I want to mention first my least favorite memory and then I’ll go back and mention my favorite memory. My least favorite memory is the cassettes would sometimes get tangled. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this happen, but if something goes wrong, the actual physical magnetic tape inside the cassette will form this terrible knot. If you’re lucky it’s outside of the cassette. If you’re unlucky, it’s knotted up inside the plastic cartridge and then you have to pick it up with the paper clip. I also remember having to stick a pencil inside the hole and turn the pencil to try to wind the tape back on the reel when that happened was frustrating. My favorite memory of cassettes though I think I’ve already answered that question. I think it was the portability. I think it was being able to take my music with me. Cassettes were how I understood music at the time. Like these were my albums, these were my tapes I would listen to all of side A and I would listen to side B. When CDs became a thing, I got my first CD in 1996-ish, shuffle mode was a thing on CDs and that was remarkable, like you could play your track in any order or you could jump directly to a track by just hitting skip, skip, skip until you get to track five, track six – that wasn’t a thing on tape. It was so ingrained in me, that when you listen to a cassette tape you either listen to the whole way through or if you wanna hear the fifth song, you have to fast-forward and listen and fast-forward and stop and listen until you hit the fifth song so that was just normal for me and that was the whole idea of there being a shuffle or a skip on a CD was radical.

Grayson: Perfect that was all the questions we had, thank you so much for your time.

Catlin: You’re welcome!

Abby: Thank you so much!