Ten TDK tapes and a summer of KIIS-FM
The other night "Brothers in Arms" came on while I was cleaning up some code. That slow guitar, the rainy, patient mood of it. Before the first verse was done I was somewhere else entirely, and not where you'd expect.
The song is from 1985. The memory it pulled up was from the year before: the summer of 1984, my first trip to the United States.
I can't fully explain the jump. Memory doesn't keep a tidy index by year. It keeps associations, and apparently it filed this song right next to that summer.
Six weeks in La Palma
I stayed six weeks with my aunt and uncle in La Palma, a quiet little city in Orange County. Wide streets, low houses, lawns that were green in a way that made no sense in that heat. Coming from the Netherlands, everything was bigger. The cars, the supermarkets, the portions, the sky.
We did the day trips you do. Universal Studios, with the tram tour and the shark lunging out of the water. Hollywood, which was smaller and scruffier than the movies had promised, and somehow better for it. And the drives down to Seal Beach, windows open, the Pacific on one side and the radio filling the car.
No feed, just the moment
It's hard to explain 1984 to anyone who grew up with a phone in their pocket. No map following you around, no feed telling you what other people thought of the place you were standing in. You took a few rolls of film and hoped some of it came out.
So you were just there. You looked out the window. If you wanted to remember something, you had to pay attention to it.
I wrote about this earlier in Why my posts now start with five bullets.
And the soundtrack wasn't something you picked. It was whatever the car radio decided to play.
102.7
In our case that was almost always 102.7 KIIS-FM, with Rick Dees in the mornings. I'd never heard radio like it. Dutch radio had its own charm, but this was fast, loud, funny and relentless. Jingles, bits, a hit, another hit.
I got hooked. I had ten TDK 90-minute cassettes, and I spent a good part of that summer next to the speaker with my finger on the pause button, waiting for the DJ to stop talking. Sometimes I caught the intro. Often I didn't. Some songs ended with Rick Dees talking over the fade. I kept those too.
Ten tapes, 900 minutes. That was the plan: bring America home in a shoebox.
What was on them
The Cars with "Drive", which still sounds to me like late afternoon on the freeway. Michael Jackson everywhere, Thriller still refusing to leave, "P.Y.T." on permanent rotation in my head. Prince with "When Doves Cry", a song without a bass line that somehow hit harder than anything else on the air. Tina Turner pulling off the comeback of the decade. Van Halen, with that ridiculous, glorious synth on "Jump".
And then there was MTV, which in 1984 felt like the future showing up early. Back home, the guy who connected those dots for a lot of us was Adam Curry, on Veronica radio and TV, playing the same records and talking about the same videos. A few years later he'd actually be a VJ at MTV in New York, one of our own on the other side of the screen. In my head, that bridge between Dutch radio and the American thing has always started in that summer.
More on this in my article Where Cursor Stops and My Judgment Begins.
Rebuilding the tapes
The TDKs didn't survive. Some got taped over, some wore out, some disappeared in a move. What's left is a list in my head, faded and out of order.
So after "Brothers in Arms" sent me back there, I did something I couldn't have imagined in 1984. I sat down with an AI and reconstructed the playlist. What was charting on KIIS that summer, what I remembered hearing, what I only half remembered. It filled the gaps, I corrected it where I knew better, and within an evening I had something pretty close to those ten tapes.
It's a good playlist. I've played it twice already.
But I keep thinking about the difference. Back then a song cost me something: patience, attention, a finger hovering over a button, and the real risk of missing it. Today I can summon any of those songs in a second, in perfect quality, with nobody talking over the ending.
That's better, mostly. I wouldn't go back.
Read also Why I Still Test In Safari First (And The Bugs It Catches Early).
Still, the version I remember has Rick Dees in it. It has the click of the pause button and two seconds of the wrong song before I caught it. Those imperfections were the proof that I was there, listening, in that car, in that summer.
The playlist is the time capsule. The tapes were the time.