Operas I Was Too Lazy To Write

I miss mix tapes. I like to kid myself that I had a certain talent when it came to their creation. I spent hours in front of my component audio system, carefully selecting tracks from my record collection, lining them up and then just as carefully rearranging the order of songs I wanted to play. Nick Hornby was on my wavelength when he discussed all the myriad rules that define the perfect mix tape. I tried to keep one thing foremost in my mind as I made those little plastic cassettes of joy way back then: Don't repeat artists. If you've got one shot at putting a Bruce Springsteen song on a ninety minute sequence, it had better pay off. Each segue was cleverly engineered for a particular visceral or emotional response. When I got it just right, I got both.
Originally, the idea was that those tapes were created to share music with friends who didn't have the same record collection you did. Not a lot of my contemporaries had the record collection I had, way back then. I would stand in front of all those vertical titles, staring at those narrow reminders of what was inside, searching for inspiration. Then a song would come to me: "Cool for Cats" by Squeeze. Should I go for the obvious feline angle there? Maybe take a slight detour into David Bowie, before eventually landing somewhere like "Rock This Town" by Stray Cats, allowing me to move into all those Rock songs, but not to stay, since we had all those songs to fit in before the hour and a half was up. I used to give them away like candy, and if you told me you liked what you heard, you got more.
It was an exact science, but the tools I started out with were less than forgiving. Cuing up a record, finger on the pause button, waiting for the needle to drop into the groove with the barest of hesitation, trying to keep the clipped bits to a minimum. It was nerve wracking. Would it have been easier to just start the tape at the beginning of the album and let it play? Sure. but it wouldn't have allowed me to send all those none too subtle messages to those closest to me. I wasn't creating greatest hits compilations. I was making song cycles with meaning that came along with the gift of music you might not have heard otherwise. Sometimes, amid the hit parade I would stick a comedy bit, a parody commercial or new favorite stand up routine, just to make sure my listeners weren't lulled into a false sense of complacency. All the while, I kept my eye on the steady progression of tape from left to right, watching for the magic total of four hundred thirty. It was always magic when the songs I had selected for side one actually fit on side one without a lot of shifting or back tracking or worse: Having to record over something that didn't quite make the cut.
These days I have all kinds of computer assistance for finding just the right running time to fit on a compact disc. I can pick songs by searching via keyword. I don't have to have a head full of songs about trash, but sometimes I still do. I have to resist the urge to track down some Maxell UD XLIIs, and set to work. These days I don't even have to make a CD, I can just send a playlist somewhere and let the digital magic happen elsewhere. Pandora will find me music that I long since gave away or sold to make room for all those DVDs I never watch. But I know that somewhere out there, are some ninety minute jewels that were gifts from me to those lucky few, tucked away in shoe boxes or glove boxes. Waiting for that hipster revival of the audio cassette.