Skill of the Past: Using a Cassette Recorder

Having been literally bullied sick by my boss, whose picking up on small things I may have said weeks earlier and then assembling them into a file which apparently demonstrates my unprofessionality (if there is such a word) despite her committing many of the same 'offences' such as receiving personal phonecalls at work, has driven my blood pressure so high as to leave me debilitated.   Back at home I am obviously seeing more of the woman and her 8-year old son who live in my house than of recent when I have primarily been living in another town in the very social class divisive South-West of England.  Anyway, the boy came to me the other day because his mother had said that I might have something him to record music with.  Neither his mother nor I are in a position to buy him a minidisc or MP3 recorder which would be the modern type of system.  However, I did remember that stored away in the shed was a hand-held cassette recorder that I used to use in the 1990s for recording interviews.  It was not one of those mini-cassette recorders that people used as dictaphones back then, it takes full-sized cassettes.  We have had a few machines around the house that take cassettes and my car which is now 14 years old takes them too.  However, I would not know where to go to buy a blank cassette and the only place you can get music on cassette is in the cheaper charity shops like those associated with hospices rather than the big national charities.  Surprisingly quickly I found the machine.  Usually it takes a couple of hours for me to sift the stuff stored in the shed only to remember that I gave the thing away a few months earlier.  I so regret giving away my copy of the 'Talisman' board game when I left Milton Keynes.  The boy in my house would have loved it and even if he had not given the number of expansions I had to the original I could have sold it for over £100; the basic game sells for around £30 on eBay and rare expansion sets for over £200.

I have heard that following the concern in the 1970s that traditional skills were being lost we now have more thatchers in the UK than we have work for.  Every episode of 'Time Team' over its sixteen years seems to have drawn on a different craftsman/woman able to make pottery or mosaics the way the Romans did or weave or make swords the way the Saxons did or cook or dance the way the Tudors did.  It seems that we have sufficient guardians of the 'old ways' for now.  However, what this incident with the cassette recorder showed me was how fast other technology-dependent skills are being lost.  I suppose if, like my grandparents I had lived from the 1910s to the 1980s I would have seen many skills that were no longer needed as mechanisation of all aspects of our life, notably in the home, advanced without cease.  Technology dates very quickly.  I remember the acclaim that the University of Hull received back in 1986 for putting the Domesday Book on its 900th anniversary into computer format.  By the end of the 1990s no-one had computers that could access those files (though ironically people can still read the original book).  This year it was announced that a project to update the computer files was complete.  I wonder how long it will be before these are obsolete.

What I was surprised was that a child whose reading age is well advanced compared to his physical age and is able to programme the Freeview box, search the internet for downloadable games and asks me if I use Google and Word, found it so tricky to operate a cassette recorder.  I realised that the key challenge came from that the rules of cassette recorder are mechanical rather than electronic.  He quickly mastered pressing the 'Record' and the 'Play' buttons together in order to record.  He worked out he needed 'Fast Forward' and 'Rewind' because he is familiar with video cassettes, though even his 2-year old cousin has grown up in a world without them.  What the 8-year old could not get was the concepts of how the cassette machine worked.  When he rewound to find what he had recorded, he asked 'doesn't it know where the music is?'.  Naturally on an MP3 recorder it would know.  I had to teach him about looking at the spools and how far they had wound on and matching it against the little indicators on the front panel.  This recorder had no counter but I must say I have not seen one with a counter in twenty years.  Then he complained that the music had been lost and we found out that in switching cassettes he had put it back to play the B side rather than the A side on which he had recorded the music.  He has never encountered a recording storage item with two sides.  DVDs have one side, CDs have one side, even archaic video cassettes only have one side (unless someone can show me a Phillips cassette from the early 1980s; anyone remember them?).  He even had difficulty opening the cassette box as it looks different to a DVD or CD box.  To me it was a matter of a flick of my thumb but I had to demonstrate a skill that very few people in the world know how to do.

I guess all of this is simply a reflection of me getting old.  I do not feel incapable of operating successfully using current devices but I have probably not slipped into the assumptions about all technology based on what is currently the norm.  Perhaps in the future we will be surprised to find we used to have press buttons (even if these are increasingly simply squares on the screen rather than actual physical buttons) and not command a device by our voice or our thoughts.  I do think it is worthwhile making a record of those little skills that we never even thought about when using them, such as the rules and norms around operating a cassette recorder (the fact that you will not get 'disk read error' but that the tape might snap) and a score of other devices which were once part of everyone's home and are now going the way of the upright washing machine and the valve (and even the transistor) radio.

When Songs' Technical References Become Out-Of-Date

Like many of my comments on pop music my thoughts on this one have been bubbling around in my head for a while, so it is probably a good time to flush them out. In March 1985 when Dead Or Alive sung 'You spin me right round, baby/Right round like a record, baby/Right round, round, round/You spin me right round, baby/Right round like a record, baby/Right round, round, round' in their Number 1 hit 'Spin Me Round' (23 weeks in the UK charts with 2 at Number 1) they could have no fear that any listener would not understand what 'like a record' meant. 

I was rather surprised in 2004 when Kyle Minogue sang 'Can't focus I can't stop/You got me spinning round, round, round, round (like a record)' on 'Red Blooded Woman'. I understand people often sing along with lyrics which they do not understand, but how many 14-year old pop fans have actually seen a record actually playing? Even 'round like a CD' would seem a little outdated now, more like 'spinning around like the patterns on my PC when I download a track' would have been more appropriate. I know it takes a while for songs to be written and get to the charts and maybe Kylie was trying to appeal to an older demographic, but she could update herself a bit. 

Another similar anachronism was in the single by The Cardigans of 1998, 'Erase-Rewind'. (It was most successful in the UK reaching Number 7). This one goes 'I've changed my mind/I take it back/Erase and rewind/'cause I've been changing my mind/Erase and rewind/'cause I've been changing my mind/Erase and rewind' and so on (it mentions 'erase and rewind' 8 times in the song). Now I know cassettes and video cassettes were still around in 1998 but the whole concept of erasing and rewinding has long gone and to hear it now seems pretty archaic. This began me thinking about others and I must confess there are not a great deal.

I suppose many classic songs represent a time when the public telephone was more common and there were no mobiles. You have to find some less obvious examples '5.7.0.5.' by City Boy released in 1976 which it talks about 'but there's no reply', these days you would get an answering service I am sure, and the other thing is no-one now puts their number on the wall, they enter it into the memory of their mobile at least. 

References to 'the operator' began to lead me down the hellish path into more naff 1970s tunes, 'Sylvia's Mother' by Doctor Hook (1971) has a chorus, 'And the operator says "40 cents more for the next 3 minutes"' (though actually the song only lasts 3 minutes it is to get the sense of desperation across). The sense of an operator interfering with a call and you having to slot in more coins again seems very strange in the 2000s. 

Blondie were a bit better off with 'Hanging on the Telephone' in 1978 with 'I'm in the phone booth, it's the one across the hall/If you don't answer, I'll just ring it off the wall'. These days, even in student halls, I doubt you would find a phone box inside a residential building. Even in 1975 when Manhattan Transfer released 'Operator' with the immortal lines 'Oh, operator, information/Give me Jesus on the line/Oooohhhh, operator, information/I'd like to speak to a friend of mine' and more of that ilk (I forgot this when talking about gospel crossovers in the UK) it was pretty rare to be unable to connect direct dial with who you were calling, though I accept William Spivery had written it in the 1950s and it was 20 years before it became a hit in the UK. 

Maybe naff songs are aimed at older people than better quality pop songs and it is referring to their nostalgia. In these cases the change of technology would remove the tension of the circumstances. Imagine the difference if they simply got the dialling tone or the engaged signal, it would leave little to sing about. The Rah Band with their 'Clouds Across the Moon' (1986) may have foreseen the future with calls into space: 'I'm sorry to interrupt your conversation, but we are experiencing violent storm conditions in the asteroid belt at this time. We may lose this valuable deep space communication link. Please, be as brief as possible. Thank you. BRIDGE'/ 'or it's...or it's...Hello? Hello operator?'/' Yes, we've lost the connection!'/' Could you try again please?'/ 'I'm sorry, but I'm afraid we've lost contact with Mars 2-4-7 at this time.'/ 'Ok. Thank you very much...I'll...I'll try again next year...next year...next year...next year...' Yet, even here they have to have the 'galactic operator' get in on the act to provide the tension in the song.

Some may come back to life as technology moves on, Elvis Presley's 'Return To Sender' (1962) with the lyric 'Return to Sender, Address Unknown' could be brought up-to-date for the email generation. To date, the only pop song that I have heard which seems to mention the kind of communication technology is 'Horny' by Mousse T released in 1998 (so the same year as The Cardigans 'Erase - Rewind') with the lines: 'I tried to call you but I can't find the telephone/I sent a message through the internet but it rejected' suggesting she has lost her mobile and the email system is screwed. Hopefully more tracks will actually embrace the kind of technology we now use rather than things like records which are soooo 20th century! 

P.P. Whilst researching this posting, I also found out that misheard lyrics are termed 'mondegreens'. Since posting this I heard 'Get The Party Started' by Pink (2001) and in that there are the lines: 'I'm your operator/You can call anytime/I'll be your connection/To the party line' which is referencing technology which was around before Pink was probably even born. Most young listeners or anyone not versed in 1950s-60s technology would probably assume 'party line' is something like a premium call service, but in fact more than forty years ago it was when there was only a single line going to two or more flats so that you had to wait until the other people, i.e. the other 'party' was off the line before you could make your call. This kind of technology offered the opportunity for difficulties that formed the basis of humour in things like Doris Day movies of the early 1960s. Thus, the lyrics have taken on a new meaning because they actually refer to well out-of-date technology.