Part 3 of my conversation with guest Phil Stacey as we wrap up the second round of a March Madness-style tournament featuring our favorite rock artists. Listen to the episode below or download directly (right click and "save as").
Show notes:
Round 2 forced some difficult choices
The Smiths vs. Spoon
Led Zeppelin vs. Prince
James Brown vs. Queens of the Stone Age
Rush vs. Allman Brothers Band
Rolling Stones vs. Beastie Boys
The Cure vs. The Afghan Whigs
The Tragically Hip vs. The Clash
The Police vs. Mark Lanegan
Stevie Wonder vs. U2
Sonic Youth vs. The Replacements
The Who vs. Beck
Talking Heads vs. Dinosaur Jr.
Tom Petty vs. Pixies
Neil Young vs. Steely Dan
Van Halen vs. Beatles
Pearl Jam vs. David Bowie
Next: The final two rounds
Completely Conspicuous is available through Apple Podcasts. Subscribe and write a review!
The opening and closing theme of Completely Conspicuous is "Theme to Big F'in Pants" by Jay Breitling. Voiceover work is courtesy of James Gralian.
Unsung is a feature in which I take a look at a pop culture phenomenon (be it music, TV, literary, whatever) that has been forgotten or underappreciated. In this installment, I look at the rise of the audio cassette and its impact on the music industry.
There have been many audio formats that consumers have used to enjoy music over the years. Digital audio streaming is currently the most popular and convenient format, but vinyl records, 8-track tapes, compact discs and digital audio files like MP3s and WAVs have all had their moments. I mainly use MP3s and streaming these days, but I still have a ton of records, CDs and cassettes that I've acquired since the late '70s. They all hold sentimental value for me, but I have a lot of love for the cassette, which played a huge role in my growth as a music fan.
The Compact Cassette, as it was initially called, was invented the Dutch company Philips and first released in August 1963. The cassettes contain two miniature spools, between which magnetically coated tape is passed and wound; they're enclosed in a small case. The audio cassette as we know it is essentially a miniaturized version of the reel-to-reel audio tape first developed in the 1920s. Engineers improved the audio fidelity in the 1940s and reel-to-reel recorders were used by major recording studios; less expensive recorders were sold for use in homes and schools, as well as for business dictation. My dad actually bought one in the late '60s and would record some audio of us kids goofing. I still have it and one of these days I'll see if it still works.
Anyway, once the compact cassette was released, it became popular with consumers for its portability and ease of use. I highly recommend the book High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape by Marc Masters for an interesting look at how cassettes were developed and how they became popular and in some small pockets, still remain so.
As for me, I was too young to experience the popularity of the 8-track tape, which around from the mid-1960s to the 1980s. It was bulkier than the compact cassette and was mainly used in cars; it could play continuously in an endless loop and did not have to be ejected or flipped to play the full tape, but you couldn't rewind it.
I became aware of cassettes through my dad, who would sometimes play them on a small Panasonic mini-boom box. When disco was getting popular in the late '70s, I remember him bringing home a few mix tapes of disco hits that a work buddy of his had made. Around 1979, I got a clock radio that had a built-in cassette deck, so I would buy cheap 3-packs of blank tapes and make crappy mix tapes of songs I liked off the radio. The audio quality was shit, but I loved those old tapes, especially when we moved a few years later to a city in Washington state that was lacking in quality radio stations. I used to listen to those old tapes all the time.
It was 1982 when I bought my first Sony Walkman, which had been introduced a few years earlier and was revolutionizing the personal audio space. Now people could listen to their music anywhere. I wasn't rollerblading with it or anything like in the commercials, but I definitely brought it to school to drown out everybody else. (Here's a post I did a while back about the different audio devices I'd purchased over the years.)
I didn't typically buy pre-recorded cassettes; I preferred to buy music on vinyl and later CD and then record it on cassette to listen to in a Walkman or the car. I also enjoyed making mix tapes for personal use (as well to give to friends).
Not everybody was thrilled about the advent of cassette recorders. In 1981, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) launched a campaign called Home Taping is Killing Music, which argued that the rise of home taping would eat into record sales. The logo had a Jolly Roger pirate flag in the shape of a cassette with crossbones and the words "And It's Illegal." It turned out to be for naught, as it was parodied by many artists and indeed, record sales continued to rise.
Meanwhile, taping or bootlegging of concerts was more of a trend than taping off the radio or from friends' collections. Bands like the Grateful Dead would create dedicated areas for tapers and it was common to find classified ads for bootleg concert tapes in music magazines; I contacted and received a list of available tapes from a bootlegger who had put an ad in Circus magazine, but I never actually ordered anything from it. A bootlegger used to set up in the student union building at UNH selling cassettes when I was a student there; I bought a version of Prince's then-unreleased Black Album.
If anything, the cassette increased interest in music instead of the BPI's alarmist claims. Similar concerns were raised in the early 1980s by the Motion Picture Association of America about the advent of the videocassette recorder and in the early 2000s by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) about CD burning.
Of course, the audio format that really did major damage to the music industry was the MP3. As Napster and then other peer-to-peer file sharing networks emerged in the late '90s/early '00s, CD sales took a nosedive and sales of recorded music dropped by 50% from 1999 to 2009. Even though the RIAA and the major labels led the charge against Napster, forcing it to shut down in 2001, the damage had been done and the genie was out of the proverbial bottle. Apple launched the iTunes store in 2003 as a way to sell music files and other services followed suit, but the sale of recorded music never returned to previous levels.
As high-speed internet and WiFi became commonplace, Spotify and other streaming audio services made it affordable for users to have access to a huge catalog of music via their cellphones. And that's where things stand today. You can still buy CDs and records of new albums (as well as some cassettes), but it's more of a hipster trend than anything else. I still use MP3s because I put together my radio show with them and I still like to own music, but I think I'm in the minority; I refuse to pay for Spotify but my daughters do and listen to it constantly. I buy vinyl on occasion, but mostly older used stuff. I still love going to a record store and combing through the stacks for cool albums.
As for cassettes, I still have pretty much all the tapes I made in the '80s and '90s, but right now I have nothing to play them on. I bought a used tape deck from someone off Craigslist about 15 years ago but it crapped out after a few years. Plus my old Walkman that I bought around the turn of the millennium doesn't work anymore, either. I want to buy a new deck but they're expensive, so I'm keeping an eye out for a good deal. Also, I was driving an old 1996 Explorer that had a tape deck in it, but that died about seven years ago, so no more tapes in the car.
Those were my favorite times with cassettes, driving around listening to a kick-ass mix I made. I have great memories of bombing around the North Shore in the early '90s, driving to interview someone for an article or going to a party, cranking the tuneage. Not quite like Wayne, Garth and pals, but pretty close. Long live the cassette!
Much is made about the insanity of the world right now, and with good reason. It's good to remember that things have always been crazy, although it's ratcheted up now. It was pretty nuts in the year 2000: post-Y2K, pre-9/11, Napster was blowing up and then blown up. This week on Stuck In Thee Garage, I played songs from the year 2000 in hour 2 (after playing new hotness from Model/Actriz, Blondshell and Melvins in hour 1). In 2000, the biggest thing these guys were worrying about was the location of their car.
Dude, here's my playlist:
Hour 1
Artist - Song/Album
Model/Actriz - Vespers/Pirouette
PUP - No Hope/Who Will Look After the Dogs?
Mclusky - People Person/The World is Still Here and So Are We
Viagra Boys - Uno II/Viagr Aboys
Blondshell - T&A/If You Asked for a Picture
Preoccupations - Ill at Ease/Ill at Ease
Friend of a Friend - Beautiful Ppl/Desire!
Ekko Astral - Pomegranate Tree/Pink Balloons: Popped EP
Lunchbox - Gravity/Evolver (2025 Vinyl Edition)
Melvins - King of Rome/Thunderball
Bob Mould - Breathing Room/Here We Go Crazy
Crime Oblivion - And Again/Chime Oblivion
Rude Television - Emphasis/I Want to Believe
Tunde Adebimpe - Pinstack/Thee Black Boltz
Dean Wareham - New World Julie/That's the Price of Loving Me
Mekons - Surrender/Horror
Cameron Keiber - Never Let Me Go/Nurser
Hour 2: 2000
Outkast - B.O.B./Stankonia
The Hives - Main Offender/Veni Vidi Vicious
Rollins Band - Get Some Go Again/Get Some Go Again
PJ Harvey - Kamikaze/Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea
Sleater-Kinney - You're No Rock N' Roll Fun/All Hands on the Bad One
Pedro the Lion - A Mind of Her Own/Winners Never Quit
At the Drive-In - Rolodex Propaganda/Relationship of Command
Hot Snakes - Salton City/Automatic Midnight
Queens of the Stone Age - Leg of Lamb/Rated R
The New Pornographers - Execution Day/Mass Romantic
The Tragically Hip - The Bastard/Music@Work
The Twilight Singers - King Only/Twilight as Played by the Twilight Singers
Radiohead - Everything in Its Right Place/Kid A
Modest Mouse - Tiny Cities Made of Ashes/The Moon and Antarctica
Elliott Smith - Son of Sam/Figure 8
Yo La Tengo - Cherry Chapstick/And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out
Unsung is a feature in which I take a look at a pop culture phenomenon (be it music, TV, literary, whatever) that has been forgotten or underappreciated. In this installment, I take a look at early '90s Gen X marketing.
Generational marketing strategies have always had a certain amount of bullshit to them. It's kind of ridiculous to think that an entire generation of people would respond to the same themes and calls to action. Advertising really took off in the 1960s, '70s and '80s with the Baby Boomer generation, especially as they had more money to spend.
As a member of so-called Generation X (people born between 1965 and 1980), I grew up watching an inordinate amount of television and seeing an onslaught of commercials. We didn't have ad-free streaming services, so when we watched a show or sporting event, we typically just sat through the commercials. Now it's a lot easier to avoid ads, except when you're watching local stations or live events.
It definitely became noticeable when advertisers started to market to my generation when we became adults in the early '90s, especially as terms like Gen X were adopted, grunge became a thing and Madison Avenue became convinced that we were all slackers who wore flannel shirts and ripped jeans and didn't have a clue about what we wanted to do with our lives. And sure, there were people like that, but some of us were also career-driven professionals who had goals and aspirations.
So it was amusing to see some of the lame attempts to sell shit to us. Here's a few notable commercials that stood out to me.
'This Car is Like Punk Rock!'
Thanks to YouTube, we can go back watch early commercials featuring actors who went on to become familiar faces. Jeremy Davies (whose given name was Jeremy Boring) started out with appearances in the early '90s on General Hospital and The Wonder Years, but in 1993, he starred in a commercial for Subaru, comparing the Impreza to punk rock. He's wearing a baggy jacket and pants and a Cobain-esque striped shirt, pontificating on the inherent punkness of a crappy hatchback: "This car's all about reminding you and me what's great about a car, and moving forward, and making cars better and less disappointing. Just like punk, except it's cars." Sure, pal. I remember seeing the ad a few times and thinking about how dumb and obvious it was. No disrespect to Davies, who went on to appear in Saving Private Ryan and have great roles on LOST and Justified, two of my favorite shows. But I could picture some ad copywriter in his mid-50s thinking he was onto something with this punk rock thing, even though grunge and punk were not the same thing and clearly buying a Subaru was not remotely related to punk. I can only imagine what the guys in Fugazi thought about this bunk. It's fun to look back at, though.
'Things Are Going to be OK'
History is littered with the debris of soft drinks that came and went. In 1993, Coca-Cola tried to appeal to apathetic Gen Xers with a new beverage called OK Soda that was marketed with ironic ads that emphasized its "OK-ness." Trying to be cool by pretending to not give a shit about the product, Coke focused more on the marketing than the drink itself, which its own ads said tasted like "carbonated tree sap." It was supposedly similar to an orange soda mixed with Coke and it didn't sell well. The ads were oh-so-clever and hip, talking about "OK-ness," but they didn't resonate with anyone, let alone with the 20somethings they were going after. The cans had bleak packaging with drawings of glum-looking young people who couldn't care less if you liked the drink, and featured dour slogans like "What's the point of OK Soda? Well, what's the point of anything?" The underlying message of the ads was "Things are going to be OK," but ultimately they weren't for OK Soda, which was test-marketed in nine cities and was a huge flop.
'Obey Your Thirst'
Coca-Cola had better luck in 1994 with its "Obey Your Thirst" campaign for the lemon-lime beverage Sprite. The ads targeted African-American consumers with hip-hop-themed ads featuring NBA stars Grant Hill and Kobe Bryant and cool artists like Nas, LL Cool J and A Tribe Called Quest. One from 1996 featured three street ballers making a soda commercial, who when they screw up a take are revealed to be English thespians, with the lead saying, "Don't talk to me like a child. I played Hamlet at Cambridge." Then "Image is Nothing. Thirst is Everything" flashes on the screen, followed by a voiceover that says, "Trust your gut, not some actor." Sprite continued with the campaign until 2006, and has revived it a few times since.
'Save a Buck or Two'
One of the more '90s developments was the advent of services like 1-800-COLLECT. After AT&T's monopoly on collect calling was broken up in 1993, MCI made a big splash into the collect-calling market by launching 1-800-COLLECT, which would allow users to place collect calls at a cheaper rate than AT&T; of course, the person you were calling was still on the hook for the call. MCI rolled out a huge marketing blitz with commercials featuring celebrities like Phil Hartman, Wayne Knight, Mr. T. and Arsenio Hall, but some of the more memorable ads from 1994 featured SNL star David Spade and the great Larry "Bud" Melman, who rose to fame as a comic foil on David Letterman's late-night shows. Spade was known for his snarky personality and certainly brought that to the fore in the ads, which presented him as an irreverent and sarcastic/annoying Gen Xer (which of course he was). I never used the service and didn't know anyone who did, but the ads were on constantly. Most of the service's users were on pay phones, which were also prominently featured in the ads. But by the early 2000s, the burgeoning popularity of cell phones and declining use of pay phones led to the end of the ads, although the service is still operational, despite the fact that MCI isn't a thing anymore.
'Los Angeles, Start Your VCRs'
Beer commercials have always been a staple of TV advertising, and in the '90s, Bud Light began a regional campaign called Bud Light Spotlight in different markets around the country, focusing on "real" Bud Light drinkers in local bars. I never saw this at the time, but the Los Angeles market got a grunge-themed ad that is so cringeworthy and amazing. It features a long-haired Evan Dando wannabe who's singing "I just want a Bud Light" while one of the women he's with breathily describes how drinking a BL makes her feel good all over. It's something, that's for sure. I'd love to see a follow-up ad in 2025 that catches up with these three, just to see what they look like now.
Winning isn't everything, but it's pretty cool. This week on Stuck In Thee Garage, I played songs about winning in hour 2 and hot new numbers from PUP, Mclusky, Viagra Boys and Wet Leg in hour 1. On your marks, get set, go!
This playlist is off to a good start:
Hour 1
Artist - Song/Album
PUP - Get Dumber (feat. Jeff Rosenstock)/Who Will Look After the Dogs?
Mclusky - Chekhov's Guns/The World is Still Here and So Are We
Viagra Boys - Man Made of Meat/Viagr Aboys
Scowl - Let You Down/Are We All Angels
Wet Leg - Catch These Fists/Moisturizer
Ekko Astral with Mikie Mayo and Dreamrats- Shred Empty Blues (Popped Version)/Pink Balloons: Popped EP
The Bug Club - Better Than Good/Live at KUTX's Studio 1A
Ty Segall - Possession/Possession
Savak - Tomorrow and the Day After/Squawk!
Lunchbox - Satellite/Evolver (2025 Vinyl Edition)
Model/Actriz - Diva/Pirouette
Preoccupations - Bastards/Ill at Ease
Chime Oblivion - The Uninvited Guest/Chime Oblivion
Friend of a Friend - Oasis/Desire!
Tunde Adebimpe - Somebody New/Thee Black Boltz
Bantom Woods - The Chase/All Due Respect
Mekons - You're Not Singing Anymore/Horror
Hour 2: Winning
Motorhead - Live to Win/Ace of Spades
Ty Segall - Every 1's a Winner/Freedom's Goblin
Infinity Girl - The Winner Always Talks/Somewhere Nice, Someday
David Bowie - Win/Young Americans
Baked - I Win/Farnham
Emily Haines & the Soft Skeleton - Winning/Knives Don't Have Your Back
Kathy Valentine - Win/Light Years
Girlpool - Like I'm Winning It/Single
Quasi - The Losers Win/Breaking the Balls of History
The Police - When the World is Running Down, You Make the Best of What's Still Around/Zenyatta Mondatta
