Those Old Dusty Cassettes

I bought a Sony Walkman Cassette Player and it finally arrived this week. I am using it along with a male/male 3.5mm audio cable to digitally transfer my old cassette tapes to MP3 using Audacity. I started by digitizing Cry for Mercy's very first tape. It was the white tape that we recorded at my Mom's church in Gardena, CA. We were low budget...so we set up our instruments on the stage, put a microphone on everything, and played live into the church's sound system, which was routed down to a cassette player meant to record the sermons. Yes, very low budget. We "borrowed" the church sound guy and he did his best to make a beautiful noise come out at the end, but there was only so much he could do with what he was working with. At the end of it all, we recorded nine tracks that day. A snapshot in time of Cry for Mercy in the first two years of our band-hood. To make matters even more comical, we bought a bunch of blank white cassette tapes from Focus on the Family when it was located in Pomona, CA. These tapes were meant for recording lectures or sermons that Focus distributed. We used these blank tapes and using a dual cassette player played our master and recorded it on to each tape one by one. We did a J-Card with Danny's original artwork and made copies of it at Kinko's. We painstakingly cut, folded, and placed each J-card in each cassette holder. Again, we had no budget. At the end of the day, we had a horrible sounding "demo" that we sold at concerts and gave away to friends. It was nostalgic and horrifying to hear those songs again. The music, lyrics, and sound hearken back to a simpler, more pure time in the life of CFM. But, the sound quality and vocals keep me grounded to the fact that we had no budget and did the best we could. So, those tracks are now digitized and immortalized as MP3's. If you want a copy of them, let me know and I'll give you the links to Dropbox where they now reside.

It's been fun dusting off these old tapes and listening to old practices and concerts. Also, I found a few tapes of just me working out new songs for the first time. I found early renditions of "Hope" and "Goodbye"...which eventually made it on my solo tape. I found some practices of CFM that had songs that I had completely forgotten about. Like one gem called "The Happy Song"...which I found a practice session version of with just music and no lyrics (or title) yet. I'd like to say that someday, these old cassette tape gems will be worth some money when one of us becomes famous. But, they may only ever be worth something to our kids when they listen to these MP3's and realize that their old man used to be in a rock group.