Member-only story
The King of Christmas Music
How I went from mixtapes to CDs to Scrooge
Tl;dr:
Not to brag but I invented the mixtape. It happened in my bedroom in February 1980, the day I conquered “drop the needle on the vinyl” vs. “unpause the tape deck” so deftly that no space could be detected from Elvis Costello & the Attractions’ to Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass’s to Martha & the Muffins’ That was also the day I learned to draw a freehand ampersand in order to write out the track listing. Not only did all the new wave bands have them, but apparently so did the artists in my parents’ ’60s record collection I was raiding.
My father had a complete set of Christmas albums sold at gas stations. I’m not sure why they were early adopters in the merchandising of holiday music, but as on WQXR blog, it was not a Starbucks invention. “[T]here was a time when these impulse purchases were tied to whitewalls, not white vanilla mochas. During the 1960s and ’70s, the Goodyear and Firestone tire companies peddled annual Christmas albums in their stores, usually for a dollar each, to customers who waited to get their tires changed or wheels aligned.” Dad was first in line every year.
