I ‘m a driver for buddies on cruising sometimes. Pretty fun. Weird things happen and then it’s nice to be sober knowing I didn’t do anything. Lets go for a ride. by Jan Silén.
When you were young and without anything behind the frontal bone you made a lot of fuzz.
Turning 50 I’ve thought back on the follies of youth, and it is fortunate that we live and are not seriously injured but that’s another story
It was cruising in Sundsvall and I was the driver. When had been cruising around for a while when the car owner started to play “Alptoppen”, whatever that was. It turned out that it was an old “hit” with Ove Törnqvist, in my ears a clean catastrophically disaster of real lows.
Swedish rock&roll.
Not in a million years
When the song was over, he rewinded the tape, and the noise was there again .
After being plagued by song at high volume 25-30 times during the evening I was severely sick of all the noise.
I worked at a steel industry with high noise and rattling. I’m hardened but this was much worse than a noisy day at work.
After a lot of beer drinking, they went out and relieved the pressure. Then I hurried and took the cassette and threw it in the back of the glove box and were looking forward to another tape. When the car owner came back he was going for Alptoppen again and began to wind the tape back and forth but found no song. Then he looked very, shall we say, surprised.
.
He presses eject and sees that it’s the wrong cassette so now starts an intensive search for the right one and eventually he finds it and sadly it gets to exacerbate my tinnitus again.
If only it had been a good quality recording. Then I might have managed to withstand it but the recording had everything to be desired.
To understand the quality. . .
Take this affliction of song recorded on a scuffed vinyl , put the disc on a gramophone at 1 watt 60’s with 1.5 Watts plastic speakers and turn the volume to max .
Then take a cassette recorder of 3 watts of 1973 and record the song with a microphone.
Then remove the cassette and put it in a car radio player of 2.5 watts from the mid 70’s with 8 Watts plastic speakers and turn up the volume full throttle. Imagine the sound , dig into this and sing along.
To cut bodywork sheet with pad in a large, echoing garage without hearing protection is music compared to this recording. Who run with cassettes today anyway? There are CD satellite radio, sticks, Bluetooth and modern gadgets now, subwoofer boxes, base tubes, filters, or whatever it’s called. . .
I have a cassette player in the Buick, but with a giant amp in the trunk. One of those with fins and so is the 120 watt speakers in the parcel shelf and two huge woofers in the rear seat backrest. Turn it up and the backbone vibrates. The backrest could be used as a defibrillator.
Gets to laugh when I sit here and write. I bought the Buick the day before Christmas Eve in 1995 and then made a C90 tape with “Sillens greatest hits Rock`n Roll” (no Ove Törnqvist with someone yodelling alpine summits) but with “real” music.
I’m no better my self
I have not changed the tape in the player since -96.
I have played the same cassette for 19 years.
It is a bit exciting in the spring when I bring out the Buick and turn on the player and listen to all the old favorites again.
I know exactly what the next song is. A friend, Edwin, who has helped me with my next build has noticed it. One day he asked:
– Are you going to be wild and change tape in the Buick this summer?
