In December of 1983, we didn’t have internet. We barely had personal computers – a 256k machine cost $500, and you had to program it yourself. You couldn’t just save to disk, you had to format the darned thing before you could even use it. Video tape machines cost $600, and DVDs were still a dream. We were on the cusp of the CD player, but the real world still ran on cassette tapes. 

I was no different, with a cassette tape built into my stereo, eagerly recording songs and programs off the radio as they played live. Yes, we still listened to live radio programs back then, whether Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 Countdown, or Radio Mystery Theater, or, on Sunday nights, Dr. Demento, the leading program for off the wall parody and novelty music.

What’s novelty music? Novelty music is a humorous song that doesn’t fit in any other category but entertainment. You know it well. Alvin and the Chipmunks is novelty music. Barnes and Barnes’ Fish Heads. The Purple People Eater. The Monster Mash. Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini. Steve Martin’s King Tut. Anything by Tom Lehrer or Weird Al Yankovic. While it’s a serious industry with all the requirements of mainstream music, and such songs can hit high on the pop charts (The Monster Mash hit #1), novelty music isn’t considered “serious” music. 

On that Sunday, it was the Christmas edition of Dr. Demento, and I threw a cassette in the player and hit record, because, back then, Grandma Got Run Over by A Reindeer was just a basement tape on Dr. Demento, it hadn’t gotten a contract yet. Weird Al wasn’t mainstream, and hadn’t gotten permission from the Kinks yet to record his Lola parody Yoda. On that tape, I happened, by luck, to record a song that in the history of radio may only have been played one time. It was a “bonus” track to fill space, and it was the only time it ever appeared on Dr. Demento. It hasn’t even been uploaded to his website. And it is one of my absolute favorites of underground tapes. In the era of the cold war, that song scared the living daylights out of me.

Cylent Night, by the Scrooge Brothers, tells a short story of the start of World War 3 to the tune of Silent Night, while air raid sirens start in the background and grow slowly louder. Off went the bomb at a quarter to three/ It’s the end of you and the end of me….  Have that hit you out of nowhere when you’re listening to the radio at 10 at night in your basement. In 40 years, I’ve never forgotten a line. And I just happen to have that song on tape. 

But cassette tapes are fragile things. They demagnetize. They fade. They tangle. My very rare basement tape has been bouncing around drawers and basements for 40 years. So what did I do? With the equipment at the Cheshire Public Library AV Studio, I very easily threw that cassette into the player and transferred that song to digital Media. Now I can store it digitally, share it with other Dementoids and Dementites who have never heard it (if you didn’t hear it live, you truly never heard it), even send it back to Dr. Demento. 

We all have those things kicking around our homes. Media changes so rapidly, from reel to reel tapes to 8 Track to cassette to CD to memory stick. We all have Grandma’s vacation slides of the Old Country, with relatives no one ever met. Dad’s wedding videos. That old LP you have that’s never been released on CD (or singles, like Rolf Harris’s Two Buffalos, which Bob Steele used to play on WTIC-AM). Your personal video of MTV’s top 100 countdown of 1985, when music videos were short stories of their own. You can transfer all of them to digital media, right here.

Beware, though – transfers occur in real-time. If you’re planning on transferring that 12-hour MTV countdown, it’s going to take 12 hours to put it onto digital. You might want to do it over a few weeks. But that LP? 40 minutes, you’ll be done.

Call (203) 272-2245 ext. 61245 to schedule an appointment at the AV Studio!