11: WIMP
Plus: 1981 Coulds and Couldn'ts.
Things that were impossible in 1981:
We couldn’t share these tapes. We made them, we played them for people in immediate reach (in the house), The End.
If we’d been in bigger places, a little bit older, we might have joined the network of tape traders. I didn’t learn about that til 20 years after it was over.
Daniel Johnson was a neat guy - but my favourite part of his story is that Johnson’s first recording was handed out without his first duplicating it. He’d record the whole record to cassette in the garage, give it away, and then record the album again on each cassette. What a great, great, crazily inefficient thing.
We didn’t worry about this limitation - it was how it was. (Plus, we had no real concept of the future. We were 11 or 12.) Somehow it was very important to put these jokes onto a tape. Once on tape, it was done.
Brad moved away after grade 9, with the tapes, and he would report later that he’d played the tapes on a college radio station. That felt amazing.
We got less far with a project I also remember fondly: making a stop motion Lego movie. His Dad had a Super-8 Camera, and we had enthusiasm and ideas - but we had no film, no money to print the film if we used it. The plan was the end. When we got to parts of something that were impossible, like making the film or broadcasting the recording, that was the End. Everything after “possible” was imaginary. Still is, sort of.
I don’t know what we would have done with the communication options that are normal now. I guess we would have made movies, on our phones. I guess we would have filmed our neighbourhood hijinks, and shared our hilarious fake radio station on the internet. This video, shown to be my students this week, seems similarly insane. Maybe we would have done something like this. (I’m aware there are other, much worse places we could have gone with inattentive parents and high-speed internet.)
Things that were possible in 1981:
We could roam. Between waking and sleeping, our parents pretty much assumed we were fine. Minor disasters didn’t change that assumption: Put some butter on it. You’ll be fine.
We wandered far and wide. A forest was being mowed down for a new subdivision near us, so we wandered it, enjoying the unfinished houses, imagining we spotted Balrogs and Orcs, talking shit. Once, we snuck into a church and my brother played Hot Blooded on the church organ. We enjoyed ourselves. Nobody ever suggested that some human monster would grab us and rape us and kill us while we wandered. Talking about it and imagining it made no discernible difference to whether that happened or not. Bad random is bad random. I think.
Even if our parents wanted to know where we were, they could not do anything but wait. I’ve since learned that time used to be more relative: before international date lines and railways, noon was roughly when the sun was over your head, wherever you were. This is not far from my childhood experience: there was really no such thing, on a summer break day, as 3:38 pm. You needed to be home, or accounted for with a phone call, by dinner, and then by bed.
It was mostly good.
This is Dick the Bruiser on WRIF in Detroit. Morning shows are great comedy for 12 year olds. Wait til we get to Rappers’ Defeet in two weeks.
Next week is a roll in a pile of Rush. See you then.
Thanks for reading. If you like it, share it.
-jep