Monday Memory: tapes for a dollar

If you grew up when I did, maybe you picked out your own too.

I think I’m going to try this new feature whenever the mood strikes me to break out of my Wednesday-Saturday routine. Something that’s not political and maybe a bit part of an autobiography.

First, I have to thank Elbert for the second post in a row for jogging my memory on something. He reminded me of an old ZZ Top album called Deguello that I once owned on cassette. It was one I received in an old-school manner, which led me to this initial Monday Memory post.

If you are a Boomer or GenX person of a certain age, you have to remember the offer. I think it was mostly in teen-oriented magazines but also as inserts to your Sunday paper and there were two main companies that would offer tapes for a dollar if you agreed to buy x more over a certain period at their regular price. The more you got for the buck, the more you had to buy later on, and if memory serves Columbia House was the group which gave you more free tapes and the higher number of required purchases.

Instead, I took advantage of the RCA Music Service offer of six tapes for a dollar because I think I only had to buy three more. The initial six I received (if my memory serves) were Deguello, the eponymous Foreigner and Van Halen albums and their follow-ups Double Vision and Van Halen II, respectively, and Def Leppard’s On Through the Night. I ended up buying a few other tapes from them, of which I remember the Def Leppard follow-up High n’ Dry, Riot’s Fire Down Under, Paranoid by Black Sabbath, and maybe one or two more. (I remember Riot was a discounted one so it didn’t count against my required number, but it was still a good album.)

The odd thing about these tapes was that they were repackaged by RCA to have a plain insert, which came in a pastel color with a photo of the album cover on the front and a simple track listing on the back - no liner notes. Thus, it was obvious which cassettes I got from them, and that may be why I remember them well.

The other big weakness was that, since RCA was competing with Columbia House, they didn’t carry records from Epic Records, which was a heavy hitter in the rock genre back then. Because of that, I couldn’t pick out albums from some of my favorites like Ted Nugent, Molly Hatchet, or Judas Priest, to name a few. For those I had to wait until one of my rare trips to the mall to go to the record store there and pick them up when I had the spare change to do so.

And I don’t know about you, but I compiled a bunch of my cassette collection by buying blank tapes and recording albums (usually my older brother’s.) Later on, the first credit purchase I ever made, from Hudson’s back in 1986, was an AM/FM stereo with a turntable and dual cassettes, which allowed me to dub tapes. Ahhhhhhrrrrr, call me a pirate! And that sucker could get Detroit stations like a champ, which was great when you lived 50-70 miles away from some of the best rock n’ roll radio in the land.

Finally, there was one other promotion I remember in this same vein. One summer, right around the year 2000, Pepsi ran a promotion where you could order a mixtape CD with songs you picked out from a list. Well, I drink Pepsi and there were 11 songs I liked on the list, so they sent me a CD and I still have it somewhere. (Once I switched from cassettes to CDs, I instantly became aware that perhaps my favorite shopping venue was the local used CD store. Talk about a grooveyard of forgotten favorites!)

I may try two other things with this one. Substack now has a chat feature and this seems like a good icebreaker for that. I’ll send out instructions on how to start it later this evening by talking about music, and not the homogenized crap that passes for popular tunes now.

I'm also tossing out a fun poll here at the end.