Wait I can now bring my brand new cassette tape with me where ever I go?? Mind blown! Ok, so the walkman came around in 1979 and by 1980 I was shoveling snow and cutting grass at a fever pitch just to buy one of these! And I did by the end of the summer I could cut the grass while jamming to Michael Jackson's "Thiller" or Lionel Richie's "Can't Slow Down"! And of course, who did not make mixtapes just to carry your favorite new tunes with you. I mean come on Sunday was reserved for taping the Weekly Top 40 to enjoy over and over again! In fact, I was so good I taped MTV on to cassette. Music was life and now I could take it everywhere.
And this one time at band camp....
So I went on two very long road trip band tours one to Canada and the other to Walt Disney World. One of the best parts of the trip was sharing music with everybody around you. We all had stacks of batteries and those brown Cassette carrying cases full of tunes just to get us down the road. Sad really that kid's today can watch tv everywhere they go! But I'm jealous of the fact that they can carry 1,000's of song on a little iPhone!
I bet that I went through one walkman a year and I know that I bought the auto-reverse version for taking to camp and those band trips. I also miss those god awful foam-covered headphones and who had the model with auto skip mode, you know the mode that let you skip to the next song. Sure I upgraded later in life to a CD version but life would not have been the same without the walkman!
Make sure you check out the other bloggers as we inch ever so close to the letter Z!
Oh yeah -- cassette carriers! I had those too! So where did you go in Canada on your band tour?
ReplyDeleteWell here is what I remember The needle, the parliament, a restaurant that served the fish with the head still attached, and Niagra Falls. So was that Toronto or Montreal? I was a freshman dating a senior so my mind it was else were.
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