Preface To Howard Gently Year Three, Concluded: It All Has To Start Somewhere

(image from here)

This is a story I may have told before. But since, this week, I'll be playing more improvised bits by dear friend Russell, I wanted to share with you something he did that, I think, changed my life: he made me a mix tape.

Russell & I bonded over our love of the Beatles but by the time I entered ninth grade I was still listening to the radio to find new music. He suggested to me that he might make me a mix of David Bowie. I knew Bowie from his hits but otherwise didn't know much about him. So I gave Russell a blank tape & oh boy. It was a very cheap tape - not much like the one above. It was one of those cassette tapes you could buy in packs of three in a drug store. When I gave it to him, he looked a little disappointed - like, you want me to use this? I didn't know there was such a thing as "good quality cassette tapes." The tapes I had were the tapes my mother used to send recordings to her family in Germany. I don't what to say that he begrudgingly took the tape, but perhaps he did.

He made me a magnificent David Bowie mix which I still have today. Unfortunately I don't have it with me right now - it's in a box somewhere - but I remember that while it had some of the hits - Space Oddity, Ziggy Stardust - it had some songs that have never made it onto the greatest hits. For example, as a samples from Young Americans, Russ chose not the title song nor Fame, but Somebody Up There Likes Me.

People talk about gateway drugs - that Bowie tape was gateway music. I suddenly had a sense that the music being played on commercial radio was not all that there was. There was more. For whatever reason, the radio stations were choosing to play the same thing over & over where there was a vast music library out there they ignored.

However one might map the winding path that led to the music I love & listen to now, the Bowie mix tape Russell made for me in 1983 was a revelation. & it was the beginning. That's where it all started. Gosh! I hope he knew that.