Don't worry, friends. That wobbling pile of cassettes that you kicked over while cleaning your bedroom closet, hucked into an IGA bag and emptied into a St. Vincent de Paul receptacle? They're here, sitting lumpen in a shopping bag in the passenger seat of my 1991 Ford Grand Marquis, which is throttling eastward down Highway 1, bound for a summer wedding in Woody Point, Nfld.
Everyone needs travelling music and this is mine: 80 cassettes, including 53 purchased en masse for three dollars a shot at Brian's Record Option in Kingston, Ont., a skunky, redoubtable music depot shaggy with CDs, books and albums, but, best of all, tapes. Cassettes are the cockroaches of the musical world. You can crush them under floor mats and bury them under seat cushions, but still they cannot be destroyed. Were these long players digitally plattered, they would have cost me $860. It would have meant selling off all of my tires and hubcaps and spending my summer months in the heat of the city, which I'm not prepared to do.
Because I'm taking this four-day trip to the East Coast alone, the only voices I'll hear will have been squeezed onto thimbles of magnetic tape and housed in cheap black and white plastic. If I've learned anything after years touring Canada, it's that a font of travelling music can make the grind of Winnipeg-Regina or Halifax-Sydney feel easy and transient. For me, Led Zeppelin never made sense until I listened to them while thundering into the mountains for the first time in 1987. And records of loss and detachment – Closing Time and King of America; even the Barry Sisters – never sounded right until I was lost and detached from home. Now, as I pull out of Toronto and sink my hand into the bag, I hope that other records like these will be yielded.
My hand finds Damn the Torpedoes first, then They Might be Giants' Flood, then Meat is Murder (which I quickly expunge), then, as I drive past a huge Prince Edward County billboard of a young maiden cradling a basket of fruit, Nirvana's From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah. The tape ends as I pull into the ferry dock for a stopover on Wolfe Island. Kurt stops screaming and the drinking starts.
Later, under the summer moon, I meet up with friends and we drive around the reedy marshland of Brophy's Point listening to Black Uhuru's Red, then some Cheech and Chong. Then, as we stop at my friend's hunting club, John Prine's Jesus: The Missing Years whirs in the cassette player as my head fades to sleep.
The following day begins with Bob Dylan's Nashville Skyline. It rains during Side 1, then the sun cracks through the sky with Side 2. As I wheel past Cornwall, Ont., toward Quebec, I'm reminded that listening to music in the sanctity of one's sedan is to be chambered away with it; cocooned against the grrrr of fellow motorists and the jackhammer parade of work crews.
Through Dylan, The Best of Asleep at the Wheel, and a Byrds collection with the picture of a jukebox on the cover, I hear things in the music that I haven't heard before: The way the tape echo hits Dylan's voice in Girl From the North Country; Lucky Ocean's pedal steel padding in Miles of Texas; and the delinquent rhythm guitar that plays behind Roger McGuinn's 12-string at the beginning of Eight Miles High. I become so drawn inside the music that I forget to notice that I've taken the wrong highway into Quebec.
While listening to Beck's Mellow Gold, I grind through Montreal's narrow overpass tangle. Seeking something more tranquil and reassuring, I push an Atlantic Rhythm and Blues collection – Roberta Flack, Donnie Hathaway, Aretha Franklin's Rock Steady – into the tape deck. This guides me through the city's traffic snarl until I am released along Highway 40 toward Quebec City listening to Eddie Van Halen's guitar solo in Beat It. Michael Jackson gives way to Hot Chocolate, who give way to Kraftwerk's Trans Europe Express, its electronic machine works thrumming perfectly to the engine's grinding beat. Propelled by the song's deep motoring trance, I flatten the accelerator. To other drivers, I must look like I'm having an impossibly good time.
