Lost & Never Found Again: Mixtapes

As a young teen, I never had much spending money. I didn’t have an allowance or a job, so access to music was limited to the few albums and tapes I could afford and/or convince my mom and grandma to buy for me (this was pre-CD). At that age, I was just discovering my own music (i.e., not the stuff my parents liked), and it was mostly new wave, punk, and post-punk, some of which was not all that easy to find at the mall. And a lot of it was Import Only, which of course meant, expensive.

I got into the habit of taping songs from the local college radio station, WTUL, which was like a portal into the universe of amazing, cool music. At one point, I think I had two or three shoeboxes crammed full of tapes that I’d recorded off the ‘TUL. These basically replaced vinyl and pre-recorded cassettes for me.

One of them represented the bulk of a late night show on WTUL, probably the midnight to 2 a.m.slot, which was far too late to be staying up listening to the radio at age 15, but the set was so good, I didn’t care. At one point, I requested Bauhaus’ “Rosegarden Funeral Of Sores” and they actually played it. This made the DJ introduction of “here’s a request” even cooler. Other songs featured on this tape were “Loose” by The Stooges and a live version of “I Don’t Like Mondays” by The Boomtown Rats.

I remember listening to this tape somewhat obsessively over a weekend that was spent with my friends at a church youth group (back in my religious youth). At some point in the late ’80s it vanished, probably because I moved around a bunch during that time period.

The loss of this tape drove me nuts and I spent the next decade trying to find all the various songs on different albums and CDs in an attempt to replace it.

Another one of those mixed tapes included only a handful of truly salvageable songs. (As anyone who listens to college radio knows, sometimes you’ll only hear a few gems in a few hours of mostly weird crap.) One of these was “Lurker On The Threshold” by Children’s Crusade, a band I didn’t know anything about. (Again, this was pre-Internet and the mainstream explosion of indie music.)

Because the tape was of shitty quality, it started to squeak. So I ended up recording the songs I liked onto another tape. And naturally, that tape soon disappeared. This was around 1989. After the Internet became better populated with obscure music information, I was able to find out that Children’s Crusade was a one-off band with Doug Gillard from Guided By Voices. And of course the song itself was only available on an out of print compilation cassette.

Finally, in 2009, one of my friends told me he actually had a digital copy of that song, which he graciously sent to me. It took 20 years not only to get a copy of the song, but also to actually be able to listen to it again.

And yes, the song is just as fantastic as I remember and totally worth the wait.
—Less Lee Moore

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