The Tale of the Tape
Music streaming by the likes of Spotify and Deezer was about two decades away when I went to high school. Back then, if you wanted to listen to an artist’s music, you could either wait for your local radio station to play their songs or buy or borrow their album. I chose to buy albums almost all of the time.
I’ve never been into collecting things except for cassette tapes. The music they contained somehow gave me a sense of identity. When you’re a teenager, you struggle with insecurity because you’ve yet to fully grasp who you really are. My album collection was a testament of who I was, or at least how I perceived myself at the time.
And then there’s the thing that collectors love doing. There’s something soothing about admiring the stacks of albums that I was slowly starting to accumulate, reading the artist and album names on the spine, and choosing from that collection the music that will serve as my life’s soundtrack for the day.
Eraserheads’ Cutterpillow was the first album that I ever bought. I heard it the first time at a friend’s house back in elementary and we wore it out by playing “And Huling El Bimbo” at least a hundred times. So, when I finally had the money to buy my own copy, in high school, I got one immediately. I scrawled “CED” on the case with a black marker hoping to avoid any confusion on the ownership of my first, my precious, and beloved tape.
I always kept my tapes neatly stacked inside my cabinet, but never really kept track of them. One afternoon, while walking along the path from the classrooms going to the kitchen, I noticed a cassette case lying on the ground with my name written on it with a black marker. Someone took my copy of Cutterpillow. I never thought of buying the album again. I should have. Cutterpillow, after all, was my gateway drug to the addiction of collecting albums.
Not Your Average Joe
I can still picture Evan sitting on his bed at the far end of the Old Dormitory holding a pen on which he spins a cassette tape, probably The Cascades, Third Eye Blind, or Megadeth.
Unlike digital music, you can’t skip tracks with cassettes. You have to rewind them to go back to the beginning of the album, which drains your Walkman’s batteries. So, many of us did what Evan did at the time: we spinned our cassettes on a pen to rewind them. This meant that we didn’t waste our batteries on anything other than listening to music.
While the popularity of cassettes may have had a bit of a resurgence in the past few years, I’ve never been nostalgic about them. I bought a lot of those in high school to remember how much of a pain in the ass they were to maintain. Store them somewhere dark and damp and you’ll end up with moldy tapes. Play them in a crappy player and it’ll eat up the tape and ruin it just like it did to my treasured Van Halen Best Of Volume I album.
One evening, I decided to pop it into a cassette player and listen to Eddie Van Halen’s life-changing “Eruption” guitar solo. Towards the second half of the music, the glorious finger-tapping crescendo that brought a lot of wannabe guitar gods back to the woodshed began to warble before coming to a complete stop. I pressed the eject button and there I saw the carnage of the brown magnetic tape stuck inside the player. I tried to pull it out gently in the hopes of saving it, only for it to break off. I had to put it together with Scotch tape to save whatever was left of “Eruption”.
So, when old people like me talk about the struggle of listening to music on tape, we mean it. Kids have it easy these days with their Zunes and Myspaces.
Now, if cassettes were such a hassle, why did we buy them anyway? Simple: price.
Around the late 1990s, cassettes cost around P100–P140. CDs, on the other hand, cost three times that. Walkmans and cassette players were cheaper too than their CD-playing counterparts. So, if you were a teenager with a limited budget, tapes were the most economical way to get your aural fix.
In Borongan, there was really just one place where seminarians and practically everyone else could buy the latest tapes at the time: Papa Joe Music House. Formerly located in Sawang across the Borongan Cathedral, Papa Joe was often my first stop whenever I got my monthly allowance. Of course, I’d make sure to set aside some of it for my personal effects, but a lot of my money went to buying tapes. Because of that, one could say that my parents fueled my addiction to music and I’ll forever be grateful to them for that. At the end of my freshman year in the seminary, I amassed a small collection of about 30 tapes.
Now back to Papa Joe. At its entrance were racks of newspapers and magazines and from its ceiling hung songhits, weekly music magazines that featured popular songs and their chords so you could play them on the guitar. I would often casually browse songhits to check out new songs before going inside where the tapes in display cases were. I’d typically ask for their new arrivals or for specific albums if I knew beforehand what I was looking for. Sometimes, I’d buy tapes solely because of the album art or the artist’s name, which was how I ended up with Van Halen’s greatest hits album, a collection of dance music, Black Sabbath’s greatest hits, and a few oddities. Asking for new arrivals, meanwhile, meant looking for tapes that have already been out in the market for months. But because we lived in a far-off province, we had to wait before Papa Joe finally had them, that is, unless someone beat us to the last remaining copy in their store.
For tapes that I really wanted to have my hands on on release day or at least with the least delay as possible, I’d write a letter or talk to my elder sister via long-distance call to ask her to buy them for me. That was how I got the likes of Oasis’ Be Here Now, the first MTV Alternative Nation album, and Eraserheads’ Fruitcake sooner than most people in the seminary.
Majority of my tapes, however, came from Papa Joe. Its decks of tapes wrapped in plastic with the circular neon-colored sticker on which the price was printed became a part of my musical journey and provided the soundtrack to my youth. While I’ve since thrown the tapes away after a flood in my childhood home submerged it, I began to rebuild that collection and replaced them with CDs. Why not vinyl? Because CDs are cheaper these days.
And like my original cassette collection, Papa Joe is no more, at least in its original location. I’m just glad I’ve made it a point to drop by there occasionally over the years when I had the chance. Sometimes, I’d say hi to Joel too, one of Papa Joe’s kids and who became my classmate and Blano at SJN for a day or so before he decided it wasn’t for him. I’m sure though that a part of that old Papa Joe Music House lives on in long-forgotten tape collections of seminarians that are gathering dust and mold in boxes, drawers, and cabinets, with their owners thinking that one day they just might decide to pop them back into a cassette player, press play, and go on an sonic journey that may be the closest we’ll ever be to traveling through time.