When I was 11 or so, I had a portable mono Panasonic tape player. It was the first cassette player I ever owned, and I played that thing to death. Standout albums for me at that time included The Beatles, 1962-1966 and 1967-1970; Billy Joel, The Stranger and Glass Houses; and the the original cast recording for the musical Barnum (it’s really very good!).
When I was at camp one time, another camper surreptitiously stuffed some grass into the little hole at the top of the cassette and recorded the inspired phrase “My name is Bob Hope!” over a section of “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant”—I never did find the bastard who did it. To this day, I can’t hear that song without “hearing” the extra overdub when the appropriate section comes up.
Such fond memories are very much the point of the iRecorder Retro Speaker for iPhone 4/4S/5 (or, should you be too young to have such memories, perhaps you simply have succumbed to the allure of long-outmoded technologies). At $40.47, the item is priced to move—I may buy one of these suckers my own self.
Here’s a picture of the real thing:
It has a USB power socket and working buttons that let you play/pause, rewind and fast forward, and increase/decrease the volume. (The word rewind is rapidly becoming one of those words that will not have any intuitive meaning for anybody.) The handle does slide out for easy carrying, just as with the original model.
Here’s Bow Wow Wow and their ode to the cassette tape—reputedly the first “cassingle”—“C30 C60 C90 Go”:
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
All Tiny Creatures: Cassette collage memories
The mundane beauty of blank cassette tape insert cards