Random Act of Gratitude #102: Audio From the Archives

Upon opening one of the boxes brought home from my parents' place, I immediately found six cassettes. Featured below are the covers from three of them.

That's right, John and Keltie, they've started coming out of the woodworks.

Way back in the days when I moved away from Kingston, these two friends of mine kept a link through letter writing and eventually their correspondence went high-tech and letters started arriving as cassette tapes. As you can see, there were both solo and partnered efforts involved. Some, like these three, were very carefully and lovingly prepared, with credits and playlists on the inside. Often times, John would carefully white out the printing on an actual commercial tape and replace it with his own text after recording over some musician's work. (Yeesh. How expensive were blank cassettes back then?)

The entertainment value was immeasurable and I remember sitting down with headphones and listening and laughing. When the two of them were together, interspersed among songs (generally selected by DJ John) were segments of general mayhem, often involving toilet humour and fighting. (I'll be interested to listen again and find out whether these elements were as pervasive as I remember.)

Keltie can rest assured that there's no mention of hotdogs or Kraft Dinner on these tapes, as far as I can recall, since those topics came up on a solo outing of hers, but I'm determined to get the three of us together to listen to them together.

I'm completely amused to have found the tapes after many years of burial, but even more, I'm grateful for the fact that after my big move away from Kingston there were people who spent years (YEARS) frequently reminding me that I had not been dismissed. Today they're both in regular contact with me and stand as a pair of my longest standing friends.