Flashes of Panic

Car audio has done some evolving in my lifetime.

For the longest time, I simply counted on having a tape player in the car, and I littered the car with cassettes. When I shifted my music purchasing to CDs, I taped the CDs for the car. In my first car, the cassette deck was bolted below the dashboard, and though it supposedly managed auto-reverse, in one direction it would only play the left-side stereo channel, so I turned the tapes over anyway. I cultivated the ability to pop out the tape, flip it one-handed (I think I slapped it against my knee to change my grip,) and re-insert it.

At some point after college, I obtained a portable CD player and a cassette adapter, which finally rendered cassettes obsolete. Still later came the iPod, of course, which conveniently plugs into the same cassette adapters. The cassette player is now simply a plug for input from whatever portable audio I bring along, and a while ago I finally purged the car of all but eight or ten holdout cassettes.

The problem with this arrangement is if my trip isn’t enough to justify hauling out a player, plugging it in, and listening. When I commuted to work, I listened to NPR, but I’m not on such a schedule nowadays, and radio around here, while sometimes interesting, is often not.

So sometimes I dig into the armrest where the fossilized cassettes live, mostly mix tapes from the previous decade. This weekend I found that one of them was a motley collection of Steely Dan tracks taped from my mother’s collection. (Oh, definitely cool.)

And, midway through one side, I heard the unmistakable sound of a needle being placed on vinyl. (Aja, I believe.) Now that’s something I hadn’t heard in a long time. Particularly not in the car. A cassette tape recording of a vinyl LP.

Now Playing: Clean Up Kid from Songs From The Other Side by The Charlatans