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| The cassette was a little dusty, but after blowing away the age, it played like a beauty. I have plenty of concert recordings on CD and on my computer, but on this day, a friendly reminder of humbler collecting was turning in my tape deck, a nod to the days of my first taped shows. I didn’t go to my first concert until deep into my senior year of high school. So, one of the ways I channeled an already-obvious love for live music was to craft and create live tapes, from friends and, more often, from the radio. It’s difficult for me to fathom now, but not long ago, the late 1990s in fact, concerts were routinely played late night on mainstream radio. And they may still be. My regular stop was 95.5 out of Providence, R.I., but there were plenty in the region around that time that either played entire shows on “Bootleg Night” or subscribed to Westwood One’s “In Concert” program. It was through the radio that my bootleg tape collection began modestly. It became a semi-regular ritual for me to stake out the living room with blank tapes (always Maxell XLII High Bias), notebooks and a watch on Saturday nights with nowhere to go. I had a pretty good handle on taping shows off the radio to guarantee the best listening experience later. With each side of the cassette being 45 minutes, I kept track of how long each side had run with my trusty watch, while marking down the setlist as it played on a legal pad I had sectioned off specifically for this, with pages divided into “Side One”/”Side Two” sections. As the show unraveled, I kept an eye on the remaining tape and, hopefully during a commercial break, I sped the tape forward to the next side when I felt that the time remaining wouldn’t equal the next song. Working with this method, I built a decent little collection of live tapes from some of my favorite 90s-era bands. And I developed an understanding of the pacing of a live show, as well as what separated a good concert from a great one. For example, the first Pearl Jam tape I got my hands on, “Berlin, Germany 11/3/1996,” was a complete show, broadcast in real time and uncensored on a Sunday afternoon. That show granted me my first listens to “State of Love and Trust” and “Leaving Here,” while the thrill of listening to the show unravel — from “Long Road” to “In My Tree” to “Blood,” “Who You Are,” “Present Tense” and finally “Yellow Ledbetter,” never escaped me. From there, more tapes and more bands started filling up my dresser drawers. I had a couple of great Red Hot Chili Peppers tapes from 1991, while a couple from Jane’s Addiction and Jimmy Page & Robert Plant remained long-time favorites. Afterwards, I fed my classic rock sensibilities with live tapes from Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead. But recently, during some sorting and cleaning as I prepare to move again, I uncovered one these gems: a Black Crowes tape, labeled “Royal Albert Hall 1995" (most likely consisting of the guts of this show). So, for my commute down to work, I popped it in the cassette deck, likely the first actual tape in there in at least a year or two. Within the first notes of “Black Moon Creeping,” I remembered what a winner this tape was. The sound, save for some inevitable radio static on “She Talks To Angels,” had held up very well, and the band was a fiery as they’ve ever been. This was also the first and only place I had the Crowes track "Waiting Guity," while the take of "Feelin' Alright" got plenty of miles back in its time. But with that casual listen on a random Saturday in December, all the effort made by the 15-year-old version of myself came to fruition. The goal then was to preserve all this music I dug for the future, and nearly 10 years later, one of the tapes I had anally crafted was keeping me company once again. These days the tapes are replaced by CDs, torrents and the occasional snail mail trade, and I couldn't imagine repeating that ritual, sitting on the carpet in the living room for the hours it took to create them. But the charm contained in those now- archaic cassettes has never diminished, and the feeling those cassettes brought me will last far longer than the magnetic tape could ever hope to. |
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| I had plenty of these through high school. |
| Dec. 17, 2006 |
E-mail Nick Tavares at nick@staticandfeedback.com
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| THE BLACK CROWES Live at the Royal Albert Hall, 1995 Recorded on Maxell XLII 90, direct from FM, circa 1998 Side 1: Black Moon Creeping Thick N' Thin A Conspiracy Hard to Handle Waiting Guitly Cursed Diamond No Speak No Slave She Talks To Angels Side 2: Shake Your Money Maker Feelin' Alright Jealous Again Remedy |