Those of you who weren’t teenagers in the 1980s may not remember the image to the right. Back then, the technology that the entertainment industry feared was good old magnetic tape. The industrial-entertainment complex’s movie arm was fighting the Betamax; MPAA capo Jack Valenti famously testified before Congress that “the VCR is to the American film producer and the American
public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone”. In the end, Hollywood discovered that the new rental market opened by videotape technology was a gold mine.
Meanwhile, the music industry was fighting the tape battle on two fronts: home taping on analog cassettes whose fidelity would be considered laughable today, and the possible threat of DAT — digital audio tape. They insisted that the mix tapes that I made for girls I like were threatening the livelihoods of Depeche Mode and The Smiths, while they were running ads in musicians’ magazines screaming that DAT was the devil. Before I became the Accordion Guy, I was a synth guy, and I remember reading two-page centrefold ads in Keyboard magazine with large headlines that read “Don’t let them do DAT!”
As with videotapes, we know what happened with audiotape: home taping did not destroy the music industry, which grew in leaps and bounds as the music scene grew. While DAT as a medium never made it big in the consumer market, the underlying technology — digital music — did.
The fundraiser for Sam Bulte being held tonight at the Drake Hotel will feature a performance by Margo Timmins. You may remember her band,
The Cowboy Junkies, best known for their album,
The Trinity Session. Recorded on a single microphone in the
Church of the Holy Trinity for $250 (ironically, that’s the per-plate price of admission to the fundraising dinner at which Margo is performing tonight), this album was originally released on a small label and got its buzz based on word-of-mouth and thousands of mix tapes that teenagers — myself included — made for each other.
Back then, one way to declare your love (or at least infatuation) for a girl or guy was to make a “mix tape” of songs for her or him. If you were particularly creative, you’d embellish the tape with an artistic J-card (that’s the cardboard liner that went into the cassette case —
here’s an example). The important thing about a mix tape was that it let you say things that it provided a kind of indirection — a way of saying things that you might not otherwise be able to say in a face-to-face conversation (instant messaging may be like that today).
I remember making mix tapes for girls I liked back at Crazy Go Nuts University. Like any guy who’d begun to figure out women even a little bit, I knew to include Sweet Jane from The Trinity Session on those tapes. I’d be willing to bet that the real marketing for The Trinity Session wasn’t done by the record company, but by tens of thousands of people like me, making mix tapes as a form of courting and for make-out mood music. Therein lies the irony of Ms. Timmins performing at tonight’s fundraiser: the viral marketing that made her big back then (and that’s also helping pull them out of the “where are they now?” file) is precisely the sort of thing that the people backing this fundraiser are trying to kill with the help of Ms. Bulte.
A copule of musical gifts for you: this page on Pastestore.com features
Waltz Across America, the Cowboy Junkies’ 2000 live album. It offers two free MP3s from the album:
Sweet Jane and
Misguided Angel (somewhat apropos), both songs that first appeared in
The Trinity Session.
Here’s another goodie — Mixed Messages, a comic from the old dot-com era site Breakup Girl. Breakup Girl was an romantic advice-dispensing superhero, and in this adventure, she helps a guy tap the power of the mix tape.
