Made a big leap in my late-late-late spring cleaning yesterday. Seems somehow in my last year as a vagabond, and the two moves that preceded it, I’ve been moving around boxes full of junk. Such boxes contain things I had predicted to be of sentimental value previously, but have since been relegated to “eBay?” status.
Surviving the cut: two Pearl Jam fan club 7” singles from ’92 and ’93, a Dave Matthews Band commemorative new years’ eve foam Frisbee thing from ‘95. These scream “eBay me later” as I do not recall ever being on the Pearl Jam fan club, but I do recall discovering Soul Coughing at said DMB show.
Not surviving the cut: many analog cassette tapes. We’re talking failed mix tapes for friends/loves/car rides, live shows for bands I used to dig in college, 3/8 of Van Halen’s back catalog (both with and without David Lee Roth) as incentive to buy the records on CD as I have long planned, handfuls of tapes I have no use for: Living Colour, Aerosmith (when they were druggy and hungry still!), Buddy Holly, Simon and Garfunkel, John Sebastian.
Amongst the rubble of plastic and ribbon I have found rehearsal tapes for Zero Beat, my old band, as well as hours of song snippets and demos while divining song after song. This is why you have to hang on to these boxes as long as possible. It is up to you to save your past from your future. There just comes a time when you know it’s cool to let go of that tape you made for that girl and didn’t give it to her. I mean, she is long out of your life for the better and you have far more important things to do: sip your makeshift martini and start digitizing the few live songs from Agents of Good Roots you want to keep… that and the recorded sounds of my brother and his friends skateboarding circa age 13 on the flip side of my dubbed Beach Boys tape.
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