Marc Masters’ Excellent Cassette Adventure
A conversation with the author of High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape
“People could copy records and swap them with friends rather than having to buy everything they wanted to hear,” author Marc Masters writes near the beginning of his engrossing history of the cassette tape.
“They could tape albums off the radio, which sometimes played them in full without commercial interruption,” author Marc Masters writes near the beginning of his engrossing history of the cassette tape. “They could compile favorite songs onto tapes, bypassing the way record companies delivered music and the way radio doled out hits.”
As High Bias reveals, much more was possible – art aural and visual, love, friendship, connection, international exploration, revolution, cultural preservation, gray-market livelihoods. Masters – who’s written for Pitchfork, The Wire, Rolling Stone and The Washington Post, among other outlets – offers a thoughtful trawl through much of what this remarkable invention has wrought (and the many hopeless efforts to curb its use and kudzu-like spread).
Tapes launched labels and magazines and scenes and businesses and careers and friendships and bands, and continue to do so to this day; many of the voices in High Bias will be familiar to those invested in the American musical underground, from noise merchant Aaron Dilloway to former Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo to radio DJ Menghsin Horng to Mark Gergis, who records mesmerizing oddities as Porest.
This interview was conducted in early November by telephone, and recorded on one side of a 90-minute Maxwell UR cassette (Position Normal), and transcribed by the author without the assistance of AI.
How was the experience of touring High Bias? Was this your first book tour?
It was, yeah! I mean, for the No Wave book I did two events maybe, but didn’t do a real tour. This was my first tour of any kind; I was never in a band that toured or anything. It was cool to be able to see so many people.
The East Coast is where I’ve spent most of my life, so I got to see a lot of different people I know who live in the different cities there. The turnout was really nice – a lot of people came, and were enthusiastic. The cool thing about this book is that the subject is so accessible to so many people: there’s almost no one, especially in our age range, who doesn’t have some experience with cassette tapes. I tried to make it more of a conversation among everybody rather than a reading or a lecture, with everybody sharing their memories of tapes, and what tapes meant to them.
Something you do very well in the beginning of the book is really hone in on the complexity of the cassette tape – how it really and truly is a miniature machine. I grew up at the moment when tapes were the primary musical currency, and as a result I probably took them for granted in that sense. Was that a point you felt was important to underscore?
Yeah, definitely. I think it’s one of the overlooked or underrated things about cassettes, that they were so … part of their accessibility wasn’t just that they were cheap. They were these miniature machines where you could see what was going on. There wasn’t quite as much mystery to them as there was to records and CDs. You could get in there and repair them or manipulate them if you’re an artist wanting to make weird sounds and stuff. The mechanics of it are cool not just in explaining how it works, but just as a way to connect to them for people.
For me, growing up, I loved watching the cassette in the deck, rolling forward, getting a sense of “there might be this much music left on the tape I got but I’m not 100% sure.”
Do you remember what your first tape was, or some of the first ones?
It’s funny. I’m not sure what the very first tape I had or played was. It’s probably something someone gave to me, or a taped album. I do have a very distinct memory of when my parents let me save up my allowance and get a tape player in my car; that was when I really started listening to tapes frequently. The first one I remember playing in the car was Fear of Music by Talking Heads. I think the first Violent Femmes album was one I bought, too, and then probably a U2 album, or R.E.M. That Talking Heads tape is really burned in my head as one of the first. I remember popping it in for the first time to see what it would sound like in the car, and leaving it in for probably weeks after that (laughs).
You dedicated High Bias to Eric Didul. Who was he, and why did you dedicate the book to him?
He was a friend of mine in college [at The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia]. We went to college together, and we worked at the radio station there together. In the process of writing this book, I felt like one of the reasons I wanted to write this book is because of all the friends in college at radio stations who I traded mixtapes with, who we taped albums off of each other. It was really super formative for me. College radio, in a lot of ways, is like doing live mixtapes, basically.
Eric was one of those friends. He showed me a lot of music. He was one of the first people who knew anything about SST. He introduced me to Husker Du and Minutemen. When I had just graduated and he was a senior, he passed away. In the back I acknowledge almost all my friends who I remember from that time who I traded mixtapes with, but I wanted to dedicate the book to him because he had such a long influence on me that he never really got to know about. Writing this book made me feel closer to him.
I know you’d hoped to get this book finished and out sooner than this year, but we’re in the exact right moment, maybe – the moment where there’s a feeling that the digital has conquered all, or on the verge of that. Were you thinking about this a lot when writing this book?
It’s easy to connect the little, mini return of the cassette to the fact that a lot of labels are tired of waiting for vinyl to be pressed and they’re tired of not getting any money from Spotify or Tidal or whatever. Selling tapes on Bandcamp has been a great way for them to stick around.
On the one hand, people who are into cassettes now – especially the labels that you and I follow, that put them out – are finding value in things that were there before: the cheapness, the accessibility. But they’re also reacting to streaming in some ways. If streaming were a better deal for fans and labels or if vinyl were cheaper, I don’t think tapes would’ve come back as much. It’s partially a reaction.
It’s kind of fun to see young people react this way, people who didn’t necessarily have a whole lot of tapes growing up, looking at the digital situation and saying “this is not working for me and this thing my dad used to like seems like it will work for me better (laughs).”
When and how did the idea of this book come to you?
I had the idea kicking around for a few years in the 2010s, mostly because I was writing about tapes for Bandcamp and finding out about more and more labels, and thinking “maybe it’d be cool to see how we got here.” I talked to a few publishers here and there and nothing really came of it. Then this really lucky situation happened where Bobby Power, who runs the Geographic North label down in Atlanta – he’s friends with an editor at the University of North Carolina Press. And that editor happened to have mentioned to him, “hey, we’re thinking about [publishing] a book on tapes sometime, do you have anyone you could recommend?” And he recommended me. I took what I had already been working on as a proposal, sharpened it up, and sent it in, and they were into it.
It felt like a good time to unite what was awesome about cassettes, and show a throughline that makes it meaningful that people are doing this now, that this isn’t just a nostalgia trip. I’m fine with nostalgia trips, too, but there’s more to it than that. A lot of people who grew up with cassettes and knew about them will hopefully find some surprising stories here – I certainly did, in my research. I had no idea that tapes were that crucial to hip-hop, same with go-go.
What was the biggest surprise you uncovered by doing the research?
I don’t think anything surprised me completely out of the blue. Most of the subjects I was writing about I knew [at least] a little about, but definitely the depth of them, especially hip-hop and go-go.
I grew up around D.C., and knew go-go music; I’d even gone to a few concerts when I was a kid. I somehow had not been exposed at all to the cassette part of go-go, which was really the way that the music got around, and the fact there were stores you could go to say “I want this Trouble Funk set on a tape, please” and they would sell it to you. I had no clue about that! To find out that not only did they use cassettes, but that, probably, the scene wouldn’t have existed without them was definitely a big surprise.
This feels like a deeply sourced book. How much research did it demand? How much material did you have to leave out?
The research was a combination of original interviews – I did somewhere in the range of 100 or 110 interviews – and looking through as many old magazines and journals as I could. Doing this through an academic press, I had the luck of being able to use them, and they gave me access to all kinds of academic journals, but they didn’t want me to write [the book] in an academic way.
It’s got some academic style to it here and there, but I didn’t do that whole kind of thing where the introduction says “in Chapter 1, I will do this –”
Oh, thank God you didn’t do that, Marc! (laughs)
I don’t think I’d have written it if they made me do that! (laughs)
They gave me a word range from the beginning, and I structured my outline and my research thinking in those terms. If there was any [direction] I felt I was going too far down, I didn’t go crazy with the research or with the writing.
The book’s probably somewhere in the mid 70,000 word range, and I only cut maybe 5,000 to 10,000 words ultimately. I talked to Will Hermes about his Lou Reed book, and he said he had to cut about 70,000 words!
Oh my God.
I don’t know how people do that. I lucked out that I never had anything huge that I had to get rid of. One regret I have: there’s probably a story to be told about New Age music on tape. I pursued it a little bit, but couldn’t really find an angle from anybody that made it work. That’s one thing that if I had more time and space I’d have tried to see if I could’ve told a story about that which held up next to the other stories.
VIDEO: Marc interviewed by Tom Scharpling
One of the things that seems like a real theme in High Bias is the idea of connection between people – between listeners.
Right. I appreciate you noticing that. The more I wrote, the more I realized that connection is one of the biggest things about tapes. They were a way to share music and make music that was so much more meaningful than if it had passed through a bunch of record labels or studios.
You’re grouping ideas necessarily in the book, but it has a mellow drifting quality, a flow – one anecdote flowing into the next, connected but casual. I’m thinking specifically of England’s Mandy Barker turning a tape found in the ocean in Spain into an art exhibit, then in the next paragraph, Spain’s Stella Wedell (fatefully) stumbling into that exhibit in Sweden – and ultimately, that had been a tape Wedell herself had lost. How conscious were you of achieving this flow?
That was definitely big for me. I wanted it to seem like the connections between the things I was talking about were there without me having to hand-hold too much; I wanted it to feel like these stories are flowing in and out of each other. Even though I can sit down and read a 1,000 page book about every song the Byrds ever wrote, or whatever, I’m still mostly a fan of a tight, compact book where every paragraph you read you think “wow, I’m gonna make a note of that” and go look for those records. I didn’t want to over explain things to the point where it’s like “well, that’s all I ever need to know about that”. By doing that and keeping it concise, that helped with the flow as well.
My favorite chapter in High Bias is “The Tape Hunters,” which could be its own separate series of books, probably. It was inspiring to hear about the gradations of musical influence spread via tapes – and a bit dispiriting to realize how disposable some of those tapes seem in the countries and regions where they’re made and sold. It’s one of the moments in the book where the specter of practical capitalism rears its ugly head.
It was really fun to write that section. At first I was worried, [wondering] “how am I gonna do justice to this story if I’m writing a chapter that’s ‘what happened with cassettes everywhere but the West?’” (laughs) It’s kind of huge. Could I fairly depict that in one chapter?
There’s a whole book by this guy Peter Manuel, just about north Indian cassettes. There’s a recent book by Andrew Simon that’s just about Egypt and Egyptian cassettes. Whole books about each region make sense to really delve in – both those guys went and lived in those places. I don’t have the resources to do that, so I figured the best way to go about it was to tell the stories of people who go and do this. That combines all these really interesting facts of how cassettes developed in non-Western countries and what they meant in terms of rebelling against the state, and preserving regional styles that wouldn’t be preserved otherwise. But I also got to combine that with the obsessiveness of these tape guys, which is also a big thing in the Grateful Dead and personal mixtape sections. Obsessiveness and wanting to preserve is a big thing. I think those guys are really exciting to read about – it gets you excited about what they found.
Yeah. You read it, and the fascination kind of floats off of the page. You can see how someone can get addicted to this – chasing the next high. What’s on that tape? What’s on that tape that’s under that tape that’s under that stall?
Exactly! Yup. I mean, when I was doing the Awesome Tapes From Africa section, and I talked to Brian [Shimkovitz] and went back on his blog – he still has all his original posts from before he became a label – I think I ended up kinda lost in that blog for like a day! Just listening to everything he posted – and looking at all the cover art.
VIDEO: Tape Time with Marc Masters
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