Mixtapes, continued.

Aah! I prickle with embarrassment at some of my song choices... I guess the prickle means quality posting, as more truth is revealed than my natural tendency would have. Two more mixtape stories, a suburban artform that may never come again.

My proudest mixtape achievement is this - analog audio tapes have a five second lead at both ends, a portion of tape that isn't coated with electromagnetic dust. This lets one start playing the tape without having music start right away. One of those subtle facts about things that one tends to take for granted. I opened up a cassette and cut the tape so that there were magnetic bits all the way up to the end of the reel. Then, when recording side A, I left five seconds of silence at the beginning, as normal. For side B, I picked the song I wanted at the end... in this case, Prince's Batdance (there's that prickle again...). Then I picked songs of just the right length so that when the last song ended, and Batdance ends abruptly, the cassette recorder shuts off immediately, rather than waiting 5 seconds. On the larger, heavy recorder I used, the effect was very disconcerting.

Less clever was this: Rain's roommate her first year in college was a huge David Wilcox fan. I'd never heard him before but I wanted to seem like I had. My mistake was this: I went to a soulless chain record store, rather than the many stores in Duluth staffed by helpful, friendly music fans. I left with a David Wilcox fan, but not a key piece of information. There exists a David Wilcox (link contains music) who hails from the United States: a relatively mellow folk singer. There also exists a Canadian David Wilcox: a brash, irreverent blues musician (this link has music too). My CD was the latter. So my mixtape contained the latter. The response I got was something along the lines of "There must have been a mixup, because the cassette I got was full of music you would never put on a tape". I can only assume the lyric My name is David Wilcox / I am the high sheriff of hell must have been misconstrued. I've never told this story, but I still enjoy both David Wilcoxes.