Little Feat – Let It Roll Cassette

My previous post looked at the 1993 Buddy Guy album Feels Like Rain, which happened to feature Little Feat’s Bill Payne and Richie Hayward. This, in turn, took me back another five years for a revisit to Little Feat’s own album – Let It Roll.

Buddy Guy – Feels Like Rain on CrO2 Cassette

Last weekend I was listening to a fascinating radio interview, which Cerys Matthews did with engineer and producer Tony Platt – noted for his work with Bob Marley, AC/DC and a diverse range of other major artists. There were some great insights into the making of legendary recordings, including a discussion about Bob Marley and the ‘commercialisation’ of his track Stir It Up. Lots of nuggets of info from what one might expect would now be fading memories, but recalled with consummate assuredness.

Pre-Recorded Ferric Tape vs Blank Ferrics

I thought this would make for an interesting experiment. I’ve griped a little recently about expensive, pre-recorded cassettes, manufactured between the mid ‘eighties and mid ‘nineties, being produced with ferric tape formulations, as opposed to chrome. So I thought I’d assess exactly what customers were getting, in terms of sound quality, from these pre-recorded, CD-era ferric tapes.

The Damned – Anything (CrO2 Audio Cassette)

Made at the height of the chromium dioxide era, this pre-record, released on the MCA label, forms a nice little nugget of nostalgia. With its black shell, silver paper label, and green tape leader, the cassette looks, as well as plays, like a quality product.

Talking Heads – Stop Making Sense Cassette (1984)

This is the companion album to Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense movie, as released in 1984. The album was phenomenally successful, which perhaps wasn’t that surprising given the astronomical budget of the project, but for a 1984 album to have stood the test of time so well, is rare.

Deutsche Grammophon 3D Classics Series Audio Cassette

This is another of the highly attractive, abundantly classy and sonically spectacular Polydor / Deutsche Grammophon CrO2 pre-records of the 1980s. It’s part of the 3D Classics series, which was released around the cusp of the ‘80s and ‘90s decades, with this particular instalment hitting the shops in 1989.

Rare 1983 TDK Records Audio Cassette Hybrid

There isn’t much here in 2015 that’s managed to evade the attention of the Internet. Once in a while, however, you unearth an item which, as far as Google is concerned, doesn’t exist. This rare and highly unusual audio cassette fits that bill perfectly.