Thursday, April 10, 2008

Memory Lane

At the end of last week, I downloaded some freeware that allows me to transfer my cassettes to mp3 files, so I have been taking a walk down memory lane. As I have been doing my work, I've had music playing.

This kind of reminds me of "the Great Vinson Music Purge" in which my mother heard rumor about the nasty, profanity-laden music that I was listening to and demanded to listen to every cassette I owned (to those born after, say, 1985, check out this history lesson). Hour after hour, day after day, my mother listened to our music (I say "our" because my brother gladly threw his cassettes into the pile, too).

Some highlights of the "Purge" included Big Mama actually liking some of our music (I can distinctly remember that she liked Love and Rockets) and walking into the living room to hear the screaming guitars of Quiet Riot (she didn't like them all that much, but can you blame her? I have it on good authority that (the late) Kevin DuBrow couldn't kick butt even with the aid of "butt-seeking boots").

Of course, when it came down to it, she only confiscated one cassette (this doesn't count the Judas Priest cassette she took from the Dunce some years before - it had long since been "returned" via a "seek-and-destroy" mission). We gleefully ripped the tape out of it, much to Big Mama's horror (I'm not sure exactly what she was going to do with it).

So anyway, it's been fun listening to the music of the high-school Thief, from days when my babysitting money bought me a cassette every week from the scanty "alternitive" section at the mall music store while the babysittee was in CCD class. It takes me back to a much more confusing, difficult, and less simple time in my life.

2 comments:

Big Mama said...

Hey!! I listened to all his music too! You weren't the only one mistreated there! It emphasized the fact that I really could trust you mostly!! And that I couldn't really trust the perpetrators of the gossip--who should have been more trustowrthy being your youth leaders and all! I would simply have thrown them away inside their cassette, of course. And I'm sorry your time was difficult at that age but welcome to the teen age life, huh? Yeah, "your teen years are the best of your life" and all that trash!

Anonymous said...

I felt like "Ivan" with the suitcase full of Bibles.