This Nostalgic Life Issue #5
Our law breaking activities in the '80s, and nostalgia for the most important meal of the day.
This Nostalgic Life is a free weekly publication rich with nostalgia brought to you by co-creators Eric Vardeman and Mick Lee. If this is your first time reading, you can subscribe using the button below so you don’t miss receiving any future issues delivered straight to your inbox.
Welcome to the newest issue of This Nostalgic Life. The summer is heating up, and this newsletter is getting hotter by the day as well! A special thank you to the other fine newsletters who saw fit to give us a nod over the last week, and thanks to you new subscribers who are here now because of it. We hope you like what you find.
In this issue, Eric looks back at his illegal contraband activities of the ‘80s in our Special Feature, and in this week’s Nostalgia Nugget, Mick shares why he thinks McDonald’s breakfast is so special even after all these years. And as always, we have plenty of Recommended Reading links to share with you to some more fine nostalgia-based articles out there on the world wide web.
If you like what you find here, feel free to leave a comment, and please, share us with your friends on social media, and be sure to check out previous issues of This Nostalgic Life to get caught up on the memories you might have missed thus far.
Heisenberg: My '80s Illegal Contraband Life
by Eric Vardeman
I read an article recently talking about the fact that cassette tape technology was making a small comeback. As far as cassette tape sales go, there were 436k+ units sold in 2023 while Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department sold almost 22k cassette units this year. I used to love cassette tapes. The technology grew up with me through junior high, high school and even went to college with me. While the renewed interest in this antiquated technology may be nothing but a passing fancy, reading the article brought back some fond, fond memories for me.
I was a late bloomer, musically. I didn't really get into music till around the age of thirteen. Up to that point (and even after), my parents had tried to head the rock and roll devil off at the pass by pushing me towards Christian music. Early in 1984, though, I heard two songs that cemented my rock and roll fixation forever: "(You Can Still) Rock In America" by Night Ranger and "The Reflex" by Duran Duran. One day, while at a mall with my family, I spent some of my hard-earned lawn mowing money at Hastings Records and Tapes on two cassettes. I bought Midnight Madness by Night Ranger and Seven and The Ragged Tiger by Duran Duran.
My parents promptly marched me back into the store and made me return them, much to my embarrassment. They opted instead to walk me down to the Christian book store where I was allowed to purchase a couple of tapes from a little known Irish band named U2: October and War (the jokes were on them with that purchase...but I digress).
I didn't matter though. I was hooked. I found a friend at school who had the album versions of both of the tapes I tried, unsuccessfully, to purchase. I paid him a buck a tape to record them for me. It was around this time that I started recording music off the radio, as well. Dozens of cassettes with radio recordings (as crude as they were). I also discovered that a local radio station - KMOD in Tulsa, Oklahoma - would play albums from beginning to end, back to back, in the overnight hours of Sunday night/Monday morning. I started recording those as well. I would set a watch alarm under my pillow so I could wake up and change the tapes out when I needed to. On several occasions, I scored the mother lode. One night, they played three Van Halen records back to back (I, II, Diver Down). Recorded them all. Another night, they played four Ozzy Osbourne records (Blizzard of Ozz, Diary of A Madman, Speak of The Devil and Bark at The Moon). Got them too. On and on and on.
When I started high school, I made a couple of new friends that were getting into music as much as I was. One of those friends had something called "dual cassette decks". The music world was suddenly WIDE open. As fast as we could borrow tapes from people, we were dubbing and distributing. It didn't matter what it was or if we were a fan of it or not. When I finally saved up enough money to get my own dual cassette deck set up, my music collection started to really grow. Exponentially. My little twenty-four capacity tape case quickly became two sixty capacity, double-sided tape SUITCASES.
Some of my music was purchased but even when it was purchased…it was bootlegged. I remember driving to the mall one day with a friend, on our lunch break from school, to buy the debut album from the band Tesla, Mechanical Resonance, because we saw their video on MTV the day before. By that evening, I had already made multiple copies of it, ready for distribution. I was like that with all my music. I made copies for everybody. If I liked you, I would just give you a copy. I'd even write all the song and album information on the insert for you. Otherwise, I might charge you a buck or two. What a stupid kid I was. If I had possessed ANY foresight at all I would have been charging for EVERY dub and charging more than a buck or two! Most of us had no idea it was illegal. I don't think we would have even cared if we did. It was all contraband, though, and if I could develop a formula to calculate the value of all the music I stole the amount would be staggering.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention mixtapes in this conversation. So many mixtapes. One for every occasion, it seemed. Out of all the gloriousness that was cassette tape technology, this is the one true gem that has been lost forever. Some of them were truly awesome, some were truly terrible. While most of the fun of mix tapes was crafting them, some of the fun was in the artwork created on the cassette insert. In the 90’s, we still had the ability to combine ten or eleven songs that expressed our emotions or feelings when compact discs came into play but it wasn't the same. They've both have since been replaced with "the playlist" but, really, can the mixtape ever really be replaced? It was tactile, it was personal. It showed you spent time and effort to make something for someone.
Technology rolls on and on and every year will be the anniversary of some piece of it that was thrown by the wayside in favor of something cooler and more advanced. If you grew up in the '80s, though, stop with me for a few minutes, raise your boom box over your head and remember the cassette tape. Also, remember this: had the RIAA be as active back then as they are now in their quest to squash music piracy we'd all be in so much trouble.
Say. My. Name.
Breakfast at McDonald’s Has Always Been Special
by Mick Lee
I took my family on vacation this past week, and on the drive out of town the first morning, my mind started wandering while I was driving. The sun was up in the blue sky on a warm summer day, and I was headed down the highway. So my mind wandered back to many of the trips I took as a kid with my dad.
I’ve probably explained before but my dad traveled a lot when I was young, and in the summer, I would go on trips with him if he was only going to be gone for a couple of days. There was nothing quite like climbing into the front seat of his truck and pulling out on a sunny summer morning and hitting the road for the day.
It was the trips where we headed north that I really enjoyed, and that’s because we’d always stop at McDonald’s for breakfast. Now back in the mid to late 80s, the closest McDonald’s was 40 miles up the highway. While we had a McDonald’s just 12 miles south of us, we never stopped at it when we’d go south. But when going north we’d always stop. Can you imagine in today’s world not having a McDonald’s closer than 40 miles away?
The ad above represents the breakfast I remember from those days. Back then, they didn’t have biscuits on the menu yet, only the English muffins. I remember getting the Big Breakfast and enjoying the toasted English muffin with grape jelly. And I remember sitting there with my dad talking about the things we’d see along the route of the trip and feeling a lot bigger than I was. After breakfast was over I’d grab an extra coffee stirrer to play with in the truck, and we’d climb back in, push the Willie Nelson tape into the 8-track player, and hit the road again, with smiles on our faces.
Breakfast at McDonald’s always feels special to me. Even if I’m just hitting the drive-thru on my way to work in the mornings, there’s still a little magic in it thanks to those special stops years ago. And those are the memories that came back to me as we were rolling down the highway on vacation last week.
I’ll give you one guess as to where we stopped for breakfast.
In every edition of This Nostalgic Life, we like to share a curated list of nostalgia-themed articles, stories, and posts that we’ve come across recently. It gives you a chance to discover great content and remember things from your past that you may have forgotten. With that in mind, here are some things we wanted to share with you this week. (All links will open in a new tab.)
Video Vendor - The Video Vending Machine That Predates RedBox (Retrofied Magazine)
How to Make the Perfect Mixtape - 80s Inspired (Nostalgia Nation)
LEGO vs. Tyco - The Battle of the Bricks (Retroist)
The Games That Defined the Sega Master System (Den of Geek)
Who Was Dan Lafontaine? The Legendary Voice of 80s Movie Trailers (Like Totally 80s)
When Kriss Kross Launched a Backwards Clothing Trend (Mental Floss)
The First Subway Series Between New York Mets and Yankees in 1997 (Yester Year Retro)
25 Classic Summer Movies From the 70s and 80s That Aren’t Jaws (Wealth of Geeks)
Pre-packaged “DIY Mixtape Kit” (Boing Boing)
Making A Comeback: Best Portable Cassette Players Compared (CNET)
Along with this week’s selection of Recommended Reading, I want to point out that if you enjoy This Nostalgic Life, there are several other fine nostalgia-based newsletters out there you should also check out. Below are a few that we highly recommend subscribing to:
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Until next time, try to stay cool.