This tape, sent to me by Peter J. Daley Jr., was spotted on a beach at Sandy Hook. This is a good one to start things off again. My apologies for breaking the site and then not fixing it. More tapes like this, please.

This is Thriller. For those who believe the myth that Michael Jackson was a perpetual 9 year old, perhaps you should listen to this album. Excluding Paul McCartney’s terrible track, The Girl is Mine, it is pretty obvious that a brilliant adult conceived these songs, not to mention the music videos that he designed, choreographed, and performed. The perpetual child discussion is a farce. I guess I am suggesting that his various oddities were a result of some other imbalance, and that his dealings with children were nefarious. So be it.

Thriller was and is awesome. I remember being so young watching the videos from this album at my grandmother’s house in Lansing, IL. She had cable. She was sort of weirded out that I liked colored music, but hey, Chief Justice John Roberts didn’t get it either and he is only three years older than Jackson! My grandma was probably 80 at the time. Whatever, Colbert would call him double-white. Can you imagine, being so white and so self important that you feel compelled to write a memo recommending that the King of Pop should not be invited to the white house? I digress, as usual.

I never had a jacket or a glove, but I still can listen to Wanna be Startin’ Somethin’ any day of the week. Whatever happened is unfortunate, but it was not unpredictable, obviously.

Let’s do a little project. Can you email me your scans of Thriller? Send them as a high resolution scan and I will clean them up and post them. Don’t forget to include a narrative to go with the scan. I will be posting the scan of the tape itself next. Perhaps I will include audio too, especially if the tape is distorted.

Submitted by:

Nick De Pirro

Does this album really need explanation? This was Bjork before all the red carpet events, before Matthew Barney, before overwrought movies. Sort of pop, sort of cheesy, but pretty good. A 1992 release date, I can hardly believe it. I remember that Hit was often played on XRT in Chicago back then. Johnny Mars really knew his stuff. This tape is still playable.

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Mike Lamfalusi

Ah, my first death metal band (as well as my first time recording in a studio).  Funny because I knew who the guys in this band were and vice versa because we had some of the same friends (and went to the same high school), yet it wasn’t until a year after high school until we actually met for the first time.  We recorded this at the infamous Sheffield Studios while I was home from school that summer.  Coincidentally, Nick (co-creator of this site) was there and filmed the whole recording of this demo at the studio. We put on all this black metal corpse paint for our band pictures although we weren’t even close to being a black metal band.  That was the fun of the band though: evil death metal band full of goofy dorks from Indiana who wore corpse paint even though they weren’t a black metal band. Demo didn’t go very far, although I think we did get a review in Terrorizer and one or two small ‘zines overseas I think. We made another demo the year after but changed the band name to Morthona for that one.  Two of the guys in this band (as well as Nick) ended up standing up in my wedding 11 years later!

Submitted by:

Chris Janus

SIDE A:
The first side is the home-recorded demo we made as Morthona a year after we recorded the Snuffleupagus River Thy Eyes demo.  We recorded it at Bryan Booher’s (bass) house one weekend.  Big Steve (guitar/vocals) was out of town camping or something with his whoa-man at the time, so all the guitars and vocals are Neil.  We recorded it on an electronic drum kit (Roland TD-5) I had back then – this was way before Roland V-Drums came along, so there were no dynamics to any of the drum sounds so everything came out full volume even if you just barely tapped one of the pads. The sensitivity wasn’t very good either, so sometimes there might be an extra hit that was triggered by something else, or maybe a hit might not get triggered ’cause of interference with another hit… so there are plenty of random and missing hits throughout the songs (AWESOME!)  Just for the record: electronic drums suck for recording death metal.  By the end of that summer, we had gone back to Sheffield Studios to record the full Morthona demo which included these three songs.  Steve was there for that one!

SIDE B:
The next summer, I stayed in Boston so Snuff/Morthona was pretty much done.  One of my friends at Berklee, Joe, was taking classes over the summer and he asked if I’d play for his recital… which I gladly did.  I think our friend, Eric MacPherson, played bass if i remember it correctly.  Crappy recording – maybe one or two room mics.  Two or three prog-rock songs… Vinnie Moore song (the loner) maybe? Joe went on to get his master’s in business I think and has worked for a pretty big record label in Florida for a number of years now.

Submitted by:

Chris Janus

An incredible mix tape dated 2/8/87 from an old college friend from Allentown PA, thanks Paulie K., your gift to me has survived the test of time, and travel. I have listened to this tape up and down the east coat, and coast to coast. One of my oldest non self made mix tapes.

Side 1

Trampoline – Julian Cope

Angels Don’t Cry – Psychedelic Furs

It Doesn’t Have To Be That Way – The Blow Monkeys

It Didn’t Matter – The Style Council

Man With A Gun – Jerry Harrison

In A Lovely Place – The Smithereens

Greetings To A New Brunette – Billy Bragg

The Answer Is Clear – Peter Murphy

This Wheel’s On Fire – Siouxsie And The Banshees

Side 2

Angels Of Deception – The The

V Thirteen – B.A.D.

Shoplifters Of The World Unite – The Smiths

That’s What I Call Love – Crowded House

Ever Fallen In Love – Fine Young Cannibals

Earn Enough For Us – XTC

Bludgeoned – Shreikback

Buoy – Mick Karin

Not My Slave – Oingo Boingo

Seven Year Scratch – Madness

This tape is playable.

Submitted by:

Peter J. Daley

Another song/tape that I took with me to swim camp at the University of Michigan.  My and Mark Radio’s joke parodies were Slave To The Groin and Monkey Penis which I think we had words for at one point maybe, but even if so – long gone at this point.  I remember first hearing Slave to the Grind – for Skid Row, this was an unusually heavy song that sounded more along the likes of Megadeth back then.  I remember first learning to play Monkey Business in my first high school band, Sweetleaf – I bought my first cowbell to use for this song (I think this song and Piece of Me were probably the only two songs that ever required a cowbell). Rob Affuso, the original Skid Row drummer, was actually a pretty rippin’ drummer and did this somewhat funky beat for this song, and I remember it being crazy hard to play at the time.  Wow.

Submitted by:

Chris Janus

As you can see from the various tapes I have posted on this site, my labeling of individual tapes was pretty atrocious. I used to know exactly what was on each tape just by these simple labels. Some of these are now a mystery, but a quick run through the Walkman clears things up. This tape has an R.E.M album on one side and a dub of U2’s fan club-only release called Melon, which was later released commercially over a year later. Melon was an electronic remix album of songs from Zooropa and Achtung Baby. I got the dub from Pat DiMichelle when he got the envelope from the U2 club office. I have to say, Achtung Baby and the Zooropa interlude was what we thought of as good U2. Most U2 fans complained, as the story goes, and electronic U2 faded away after the release of the Passengers album.

Submitted by:

Nick De Pirro

This is where my love of industrial all started…  KMFDM.  Mr. De Pirro first introduced them to me in high school.  From there I had a long and great relationship with Sacha, En Esch, and Nainz, not to mention Brute’s artwork.  I also think this is where my love of all things German started.

Submitted by:

Mike Lamfalusi

This is a dub of Cure for Pain that somebody left in my cheap radio at the Columbus College of Art and Design when I was doing a one year sabbatical replacement teaching position there in 2001. I don’t have too much to say about it. I guess it is just a relic from that year of teaching in a private art school. I really enjoyed it, but I have lost contact with most of my old students. Posting this tape has put a little string around my finger to reach out to a few of the old sculpture crew.

Posted by

Nick De Pirro

This is my dub of the original Naïve album with the orange cover art, not to be confused with the later remix album Naïve Hell to Go with the green cover art. I was never quite sure what that was all about, but it gave us long time fans something to mark our history as fans of the band once they briefly became popular nationally, and especially in the Chicago area because it is where Wax Trax was. Everybody got the Drug Against War single once the video hit MTV. Some people bought some other albums, but ha! They all got the green cover graphics.

This is another dub from Randy. The other side is a dub of What Do You Know, Deutschland? We saw KMFDM play numerous times. I will never forget the first KMFDM show that I saw at Metro in Chicago that was part of the Money tour. As far as I know, they really had only done the Ministry tour before that, but I could be wrong. I had been to a few big concerts before that show, but maybe not too much in a little hall like Metro. It was simple and amazing.

I should have been more careful with this tape. It appears to have a chunk missing from the upper right.

Submitted by

Nick De Pirro

This tape is a dub of Public Enemy Fear of a Black Planet and INXS Listen Like Thieves on sides B and A respectivley. I am just scanning just about everything that isn’t a commercially produced cassette, so this is just another one that goes way back to high school. No real story to speak of for this tape. It is just one of mine.

Note the scotch tape over the recording tabs. Apparently this one had something important on it, that I later thought was less important than INXS. Well, I can’t blame my past self for that.

Submitted by:

Nick De Pirro

I have no back story for Uncle Jim. I can’t remember who gave me the tape, or anything about it. I found it yesterday when I was going through my tape box, and thought you might find it interesting.

Submitted by:

Peter J. Daley

I can’t remember where I got this tape, but it did lead to an early love for this band. Of all the bands I have seen live over the years (at least 100 or more), this is one of the few that I missed out on. One time in Portland, Oregon I had a chance, but flat out did not have the $$. Had to spend it listening to this tape at home that night instead. This tape has seen so many cars/players over the years, I am surprised it still works great.

This tape is still playable.

Submitted by:

Peter J. Daley

Yeah, so this was one of those tapes I bought randomly at some used music store.  I was into metal but a pretty narrow selection, But Anthrax, Slayer, Megadeth… all up my alley, so I bought it.  I had never heard Hook In Mouth until this tape, but it’s been a favorite since.  I had never listened to Death Angel until this tape either… and probably haven’t listened to them since; sounded like a first grade girl screaming on vocals.  There was a time that I tried to get into Nuclear Assault because of Dan Lilker in SOD, but I think I was one metal generation too old and never found a liking for them.  Anyway, this used tape was of course terrible quality, but I cranked it in my Cutlass nonetheless… plus, my buds at Al’s Diner were all into it, so it was in regular rotation when I was on the schedule.

Submitted by:

Chris Janus