Daily Listen by Brian Brock

Golden Boots - Telelog Freedom

My wife Lea loves cassette tapes.  For her birthday, her one wish was a cassette stereo for the car.  She has been making mix tapes for 15 years and has amassed a heap.

A mix tape is still preferable to a CD mix.  A CD requires nothing of the creator, just drag and drop and you’re done.  The mix tape maker has to sit near the cassette machine, finger ready to hit the pause button.  She hovers and thinks, draws pictures for the cover, makes choices for the future.  So the mix tape is by nature a creative product.

It’s also much more useful than a CD mix, because the stop-in-the-middle, start-in-the-middle quality of tapes is better suited to mixes, which sit somewhere closer to radio than conventional albums.

So, I got the Golden Boots tape for Lea to hear in the car.

Lea really doesn’t have that many tapes.  My friend Tim has around 15,000.  That’s right, fifteen thousand cassette tapes.  He and I have a long-running conversation about my King Missile tape.  The conversation goes:

Brian: I have this tape that you would probably love for your collection.  It’s They by King Missile - I’ve had it since high school.

Tim: Yes, I would!

Brian: I can’t possibly allow it out of my sweaty grasp.

Tim: Oh.  That’s too bad.

At one point we talked about trading the tape for like a drum or something, but I still couldn’t do it.

I think I got Golden Boots’s Telelog Freedom for Tim, too.