Radio Free Me

I've gotten old enough that I judge good music by how it resonates with me after years of not hearing it. This afternoon, I was cleaning out some stuff and found a bunch of old cassettes.

That's right, cassettes.

I stopped buying cassettes around 1992 for the most part, so I knew these were old. However, I found out that most of them were from my high school collection.

One of the tapes was a dub of two R.E.M. records - Murmur and Life's Rich Pageant. These tapes had been in various cars for the better part of 20 years, so I just knew they were toast. They weren't. Given that R.E.M.'s signature in those early years was lo-fi or as Stipe used to say, "mumbles," they sounded pretty good. I'm just lucky Carol is a technophobe and won't part with her tapes so we still have a player.

As I listened to Murmur (complete with air drums and guitar), it was great. It made me feel the same way it did in 1988 when I first heard them. Of course, to me R.E.M. has been one of the greatest bands ever to grace the stage. In that same bunch was the copy of Document I bought when it was released. It still has mud on it from falling out of my car after a wreck sometime in 1989.

They're all on iTunes now. Maybe I'll download them.

Or maybe I'll just put them back in the car. The antique does have a tape player after all,