Slow Change May Pull Us Apart

By Wm. on May 27, 2025

I turned in the final paper for the Environmental Philosophy course I was taking for May Term during my junior year of college on Friday, May 17, 1985. As I still have the graded paper in my possession, we must have had class the following Monday and maybe even Tuesday for it to be returned to me. One of those days would have been the final exam period, after which everyone but the seniors was expected to clear out--commencement exercises were to be the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. My best guess after all these years is that I did go home for a few days, but I would have been back in Lexington the following week to start the summer job at IBM that my advisor had arranged for me (fortunately I was able to remain in the dorm that summer).

And so it happened, almost certainly 40 years ago this week, that I spent two consecutive evenings in the basement of Clay Hall, squirreled away in the WTLX studio to record a couple of mix tapes for myself. Each night I popped a BASF Performance I ninety-minute cassette into the station's tape machine and over the course of two hours programmed selections from the station's and my collections, both LPs and 45s. I worked in the station instead of using my own record player in the dorm room to leverage the dual turntables down there--while one song played I could queue the next one and utilize the mad segueing skills I'd developed over the past couple of years without pausing the tape. The results got a decent amount of play on road trips over the next decade.

This wasn't the first I'd done such a thing: about eighteen months earlier I'd made a tape to be placed in the cornerstone of the campus student center that was dedicated in December 1983. (Nor would it be the last time prior to graduating a year later.) I would count it as the beginning of an era for me, though, the moment when I joined the legions of regular mix tape creators, mostly for either my own consumption or that of roommate James. It would last through the end of 1995.

These cassettes acquired an even greater significance more than three decades after I'd created them. In August 2016, as I was in my office preparing for the upcoming school year, I threw them one after the other into the portable stereo I kept on top of one of my file cabinets, listening for the first time in quite a while (the tapes made in the 90s were getting considerably more frequent play at that point). It had already occurred to me that I could share the contents of one of my mix tapes with Facebook friends; this time I acted on it. Over the course of forty-four days, I wrote a blurb about each tune, occasionally including a memory about or association with a particular song. I guess I got enough positive reaction to the series that I decided to post more and more about music. In January 2017 I began picking songs to write about off one or both of the weekend's American Top 40 shows on offer from Premiere. Along the way I'd also been sharing on Facebook artifacts and photos from the boxes I'd taken out of my parents' townhouse after they'd passed away. It was just a matter of time that I merged these two trains of thought into this blog. The snippets about tunes on these two tapes appeared over its first six weeks of existence. A chain reaction, one I couldn't have imagined happening at the end of May 1985.

The picture at the top, courtesy of my friend Suzanne, is the only one I know of where I'm in the WTLX studio. It was likely taken sometime during my senior year; the clock suggests it was near the beginning of one of my shifts. Of course I wish the focus was better, but I'm simply grateful that Suzanne has shared it with me after so many years. (And I'd love to be able to identify the LPs on the table near my feet.)

I've been listening to the cassettes and re-reading those original Facebook posts about the music and the accompanying comments as I've been writing this post. It's been a more emotional experience than I expected, particularly when I come across one of James's occasional remarks. A lot of change, slow or otherwise, can happen over nine years, over forty years.

The playlists:

Side 1
Phil Collins, "Sussudio"
Head East, "Never Been Any Reason"
REO Speedwagon, "Follow My Heart"
Eric Clapton, "Cocaine (Live)"
Eurogliders, "Heaven (Must Be There)"
Roxy Music, "More Than This"
Eurythmics, "Would I Lie to You?"
Def Leppard, "Photograph"
Madonna, "Burning Up"
The Vapors, "Turning Japanese"
Marshall Crenshaw, "Cynical Girl"

Side 2
Simple Minds, "(Don't You) Forget About Me"
Paul Young, "Come Back and Stay"
The Cars, "Dangerous Type"
Talking Heads, "Slippery People"
Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, "Change of Heart"
Night Ranger, "Sister Christian"
Fleetwood Mac, "Gypsy"
Al Stewart, "Year of the Cat"
Art Garfunkel, "All I Know"
Survivor, "I Can't Hold Back"
Air Supply, "Lost in Love"

Side 3
Klaatu, "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft"
Glenn Frey, "Smuggler's Blues"
Foreigner, "Night Life"
David Gilmour, "There's No Way Out of Here"
Boz Scaggs, "You Got Some Imagination"
Dan Fogelberg, "Face the Fire"
707, "I Could Be Good for You"
John Waite, "Change"
Billy Joel, "She's Right on Time"
Huey Lewis & the News, "Giving It All Up for Love"
The Bee Gees, "New York Mining Disaster 1941"

Side 4
Pretenders, "2000 Miles"
Face to Face, "10-9-8"
'Til Tuesday, "Voices Carry"
Elvis Costello & the Attractions, "Everyday I Write the Book"
Rod Stewart, "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?"
The Sherbs, "We Ride Tonight"
Electric Light Orchestra, "Do Ya"
Talk Talk, "It's My Life"
Elton John, "Someone Saved My Life"
Queen & David Bowie, "Under Pressure"
David Dundas, "Jeans On"

If you want to see what I wrote about these 44 tunes all those years ago, select July and August 2017 from the dr0pdown menu under Archives. I will embed the lead songs from the four sides here, though.