The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Radio One Cassette

Quite a few people could claim to have invented rock music. But there was only one inventor of rock sensibility, and that was Jimi Hendrix.

This was the man who turned the Fender Stratocaster guitar into a sex symbol, and its life was never the same again. It’s now the most famous and popular guitar on the planet by a humungous margin. But in fact, before Hendrix achieved fame, the Stratocaster was far from a world-beater. Its fortunes had been significantly waning, and its makers, Fender, had been focusing on other models.

The BASF CR-E II Cassette Design – Circa 1986

I mentioned this design variant of 1980s BASF chrome cassette in yesterday’s BASF CR-E II 1988 post, but didn’t have a photo handy and couldn’t put my hands on the actual product. A quick dig through some drawers, and a snap of the shutter today, has just remedied that, so here it is.

This CR-E II 60 minute tape was bought in England, in March 1986, so manufacture would almost certainly have taken place early that year, or in late 1985. The front faces of the cassette feature the chamfered user-write white label portion, and matching case relief – traits that were associated with the first half of the 1980s, and which would be resolved into a straight rectangular shape by 1987. The combination of this latter 1980s style of CR-E II label and the chamfer was short-lived.

Stevie Ray Vaughan – Texas Flood Audio Cassette

There is no real blues without torture. And what Stevie Ray Vaughan went through in order to produce his stunning range of guitar sounds and expressions was a severe punishment in itself.

To optimise the tone, he would use incredibly heavy and thick strings, which were actually painful to play in a blues style – sometimes slicing into the tips of his fingers as he pushed them into wide bends. The pain was clearly visible on his face, and the guitar fingerboard literally convulsed with the power of his vibrato. This was a man for whom no agony was too great in the name of musical expression.