The Tape Trade
In early August of 1991 my friends and I wandered into a thrift store looking for some used audio tapes. We asked the owner if he had anything that we might be interested in, for cheap. He shrugged his shoulder and said, “I am not into music that much and I wouldn’t know what was good and what wasn’t, but if you want you can look through a few boxes of tapes behind the counter”. Taking him up on his offer we stated sorting through the boxes. All was good until a friend noticed a box of unopened tapes. Of course, we had to know what was inside. The owner said that was a shipment he had received earlier for music to be released on the 12th. With that, we all looked at each other and said, “It must be the Black Album”. The most anticipated thrash album…. ever. Sure, enough it was. After about 10 minutes of pleading with the guy and offering him every dollar we had between us, he said you will have to come back on the 12th. That was the way it was, metal was sought, bought and traded on cassette tapes. Sure, CD’s existed but they weren’t easily copied. No one had a CD burner in the 1980’s. To put things in context I once asked a fellow metal head if he could remember the day the Black Album came out, he said “dude I was 4”. For those of you from this era who are reading this, you are likely going to have to Google most of the stuff I say because you were likely not even born when all this happened and the internet as you know it, didn’t exist.
My very first album was Loverboy’s “Get Lucky” (1981 on vinyl) and the next one was Billy Squires “Emotions in Motion” (1982 on vinyl). Great music but, I never truly turned into a Metal Head until the “Master of Puppets” was released in 1986. The world stopped when I first heard “Battery”. It was on a cassette. A magical piece of plastic that contained up to 90 minutes of music. Music that was up until that time impossible to get at any costs. Yes, we had Columbia House, but the “metal section” sucked. Nuclear Blast wasn’t even created until 1987. I never saw any real Metal titles in the mail order catalogue.
As a kid, I lived in a small town in Newfoundland. We had no big music stores and the stuff you could get at the local Drug store was pretty lame. So how did we become Metal Heads with access to bands like Dirty Rotten Imbecile’s, Exodus, Gwar, Slayer, Overkill, Savatage, Accept, Helloween, Metal Church, Kreator, Celtic Frost, Venom, Rage, Death Angel, Anthrax, Iron Maiden, Suicidal Tendencies, Yngwie Malmsteen… the list goes on. They are all different, with one thing in common. The tapes weren’t purchased they were traded. I should say copies of the tapes were traded. An thus the Tape Trade was born.
Don’t get me wrong, I would have happily spent my last dollar on any of these tapes, but they were nowhere to be found so they had to be traded. Some Metal Heads visited cities with large record stores, or had family who lived overseas, the sources were numerous and we weren’t picky. It didn’t have to be a perfect copy, it just had to be metal. I once snagged a copy of “Assassin” a live recording of one of Jason Newstead’s shows with Metallica. I still have it. Again, I would have happily given my allowance for it but it could not be bought. I traded a copy of Garage Days Re-Revisited for it.
I now have a subscription to Apple Music and Spotify and buy a new album most every week. I listen to so much new music, it is amazing. What a great time to be a Metal Head. I buy all my music these days, I never did the download a pirated mp3 thing. But I traded tapes.
I am still a little bit angry at the world that I was in my late 20’s before I heard of bands like In Flames, At the Gates, Amon Amarth, or Dark Tranquility. But I am not sorry for trading tapes. It was a metal thing, it was our “social medial” networking before the internet existed. The younger generation will never know the struggle of Tape Trading, but they may also never know the joy and anticipation of scoring a copy of “Puppets”.
