CASSETTE WEEK - DAY - 4
COLLECTORS
Welcome back for day #4 of Cassette Week! Today is about cassette collecting.
Every cassette collection starts with one, but how far down the rabbit hole do you go? You cared enough to find it. You cared enough to buy it. You cared enough to keep it, and that in itself is special. Collections tell a story and hold memories. However there are some who take collecting to another level.
Below are the stories of 2 cassette collectors with some amazing collections.
Tim Morgan
Tim Morgan is from Madison, WI and has a collection of approximately 20,000 tapes. He is also a member of a facebook cassette group I frequent called “The Cassette Tape Collectors Society”. He posts a daily photo from his collection titled “One pic of 34 tapes per day, for the next year”. I needed to know more about the man behind the 34 tapes a day post so I contacted Tim for a quick interview.
When did you start collecting tapes?
- I had a a few tapes as early as 1985 but really stated keeping them together in cases, maybe even alphabetically, as early as 1990. One of the first 100 which really stated me off was a Velvet Underground White Light, White Heat, bought for $2.00. At the time I sort of knew who the they were from seeing the Doors movie (once) but the copywrite date said 1984, so I thought maybe this was a new wave band from the 80's, who had maybe toured with the Violent Femmes.
-What I love has changed over the years. When I started, tapes were considered to be in the process of being replaced by CD's. In the liner notes to Big Black The Rich Man's Eight Track Tape- which I dubbed off CD in the summer of 1993, Steve Albini panned the format, stating you should eat scrambled eggs off them since this new fad would be replaced. I do remember wondering if we'd be listening to music on computers, as both are digital format, 0's and 1's. As a result of CD's popularity, CD's were expensive and used tapes were cheap- 50 cents at thrift stores, $1-$2, $3.50, $4, $5 or maybe a bit more at record stores, and even things like the new Sonic Youth for $8.99 you'd pass on at first in the hopes of finding it a month later used. There were lean times when I'd dub music (legally of course, why would it even be a question) but the goal was always to have factory originals wherever they existed. Since those days, tapes have made a slow resurgence, covered so extensively and repeatedly, from the late 00's to the present, the result of whether they are "in" or "out" has been rendered almost meaningless. Meanwhile, on the whole, the value of any individual cassette actually stayed the same for many years, possibly due to an inverse proportionality between a cassette's increasing perceived rarity vs. its possible declining condition. Though, fortunately for sellers and unfortunately for collectors, in the 2010's, sites such as Ebay and Discogs now track sales for many cassettes, as a result it's getting hard to find that really rare tape for cheap, one of the great thrills of collecting anything. It does happen, but less and less. Flipsters have gotten in on the act, too- people who take advantage of collectors by buying low and selling high, without even necessarily knowing or respecting what they're selling. This has taken some of the fun out of it- the good news is that computers don't know everything (yet) and if you're patient, you can still do well and find that long-lost thing you've had on the grail-list for years.
What type of tapes, genres do you collect?
I ask people what kind of music they like, most people answer "everything" (or sometimes "everything except rap and country".) So I guess like most people, I like everything. There are a few notable collectors besides myself (I know of) and a few key differences between us.
Pongchet Mahawan of Thailand (home of some incredible tapes) to my knowledge has a collection where its speciality is to have the most versions of any given tape. If they were to be counted simply as what albums does he have, it wouldn't be that many, but if counted as how many versions of that album, it's mindblowing- basically every imaginable version. The overall number is about as many as I have.
John Platt Sr has, as far as we know, the largest private cassette collection. His ongoing goal has been to get into the Guinness Book of World Records with the sheer number of tapes. Because of the restrictions on what makes the cut for Guinness, he seems to have 2 different counts of tapes, the official and unofficial. This is truly the home for lost, abandoned, wayward cassettes, with none turned away. Unfortunately the goal of a world record (an interest I don't share due to the rules such as "must have a barcode" which discounts so many important things) has not been met as of this post. I'm fairly convinced that at up until as early as 2010 to as late as possibly 2015, I had more cassettes than John- however the water gets muddied when asked about this in terms of his official vs. unofficial counts. I could be wrong- but I had 1000 by 1995 (Let it Be) and 10,000 by 2005 (some tapes from a friend including some Mr Bungle bootlegs- had a listening party with wine, which must have been a little weird since I'm protective to the point of OCD and paranoia generally about the collection) so I think it's very possible.
There may be others with comparable collections- perhaps many more than we have. Ebay seller Calen Lind for example, sells huge lots of tapes- has had to have sold tens of thousands. There's a brick and mortar store out east who claim to have millions of CD's, tapes and records. The lines blur a bit.
My collection, by contrast, seeks to gather as many rare cassettes in one collection. I think I've accomplished this. I don't have as many tapes as John, or as many versions of any given tape as Pongchet, but I feel like my musical tastes and knowledge are broader and greater. Part of this due to not having my time and energy diverted by raising a family. My tapes are my family. Perhaps I should segue now to the question
What do you love about collecting tapes?
Part of what I started doing, from the beginning, was to have a rule whereby I listened to every tape at least once (and read the entire line aka the j-card). Back in the 90's I listened to certain tapes a lot, but the more I got, and with the rise of the internet and the ability to listen to almost any thing you want within 5 seconds, and with tapes becoming more simply collectables, they now 99.99% percent of the time only get played once. (The only exception would be something not on the internet which I need to listen to to transpose or make some sort of musical arrangement.) Every day of the last year going back to December 23rd, I've shared a pic once a day on Facebook on the groups The Cassette Tape Collectors Society, Cassette Hoarders United, Cassette Magnetic Tapes and Tape Decks, Cassette Community and Cassette Tape Collecting For Sale/Trade/Show (got gloriously banned from the 80's/90's Tape group after almost a year of posting from silly, angry people who are still holding on to their glory years of creating music straight out of the SNL skit "Sprockets"), of 34/tapes per day of the cassettes I have listened to as of the time of photographing, which took place exactly a year ago. During "Cassette Week" (on October 12th I think) I'm due to wrap up with the Z's, at which point I'll be posting that which I've processed and photographed from October of last year to the present- this will take 2 or 3 weeks- and then I have to move on to some lower priority postings, since the high priority stuff is in flux- in order to make it to the end of the year. Sorry if that gets off the topic of "what I love about collecting" but I think it illustrates that, regardless of "why" (and there are days when I look at these stacked boxes and I have no idea why) it should be clear no one loves these dumb orphan music boxes more than me.
John Platt Sr
John Platt Sr is from Burnside KY. and claims to have the worlds largest cassette collection with 27,332 tapes. John is 43 and has been collecting all genres of tapes since he was 10 years old. He says one of the things he loves about cassettes is “Unlike most things people collect you can play them and they still keep their value where if you collect stamps or coins the more you touch them they lose value”.
It’s taken John 5 years to get cassettes into the Guinness book and is now just waiting for his evidence package to be confirmed. He’s quite modest about his collection stating “it doesnt matter how many cassettes you have its the love of music and cassettes that matters and its collectors like us that keep them being made”. He also says “I hope others never give up on their dreams, Music touches us all and is the only thing we all can agree on”.
See the video below of a news report done on his collection.
*UPDATE - John just sent me a letter from Guinness stating that “due to COVID we cannot accept physical evidence at this time and to hold off for a few more weeks until our offices reopen”. So we must still wait to find out. I will update the story here when he gets in.
Well there was supposed to be a 3rd collector, but that fell through so I decided to just take some last minute pictures of my own collection. It’s nothing in comparison to the ones above and a bit unorganized at the moment. It also used to be much bigger, but from years of needing tapes for the store it shrunk down dramatically. Here’s my keepers tho.
If you’re new to cassettes or you’re just looking to learn more about the different tape types and players out there. I recommend this video called “better than you don’t remember”. Its well done and you’ll learn alot.
It’s all about that moment. When you really fell in love with music. When you “got it”. It wasn’t just background noise anymore, it wasn’t just for parties. It became important, and there was no turning back.