I was sent these cassette tapes by an acquaintance of mine, we rarely speak anymore but he imagined I’d find them interesting. They smelled like his aunt’s house. The plastic of the first cassette’s cover looked stained with the residue of thousands of fingerprints, in black magic marker you could read the words PHIL SPECTOR: 1984
on the paper. My Walkman was a bit dusty but I wiped it off with my shirt, sat down at the kitchen table, and popped in my earbuds. Click.
Drums burst through, but not drums I’d expect. More synthetic than natural. Spector’s drums are typically acoustic and drenched in reverb; these sound like Oberheims. The reverb is present, but reversed and gated, making the snares feel thick and bolstering. Another unexpected surprise: crystalline synthesizers. Bass writhed through my ears, warm with transformer saturation. The timbre was a tapered off Minimoog with battling sawtooths. Finally, a voice was heard. She sounded seductive, yet vulnerable. As I heard her first lyrics I reached over the table to grab the letter sent with the cassettes.
He wrote to me that in the early 80’s Spector had been experimenting with a couple different vocalists, all of them women, along with a new sound more contemporary than the dreamy doowop of yesteryear. More contemporary is putting it lightly, I would’ve mistaken this for ‘88 Bobby Brown until the vocals came in. One line from her singing rang out to me, As I cried there in your car.
My eyes squinted, and I remembered a personal incident from years ago. How hideous you looked as you broke me.
I clicked the pause button. Enough of that one. I thumbed through the others he sent and picked one labeled 1980.
This one sounded a bit more typical of Spector’s work, spectral soul music with a comfortably familiar chord progression. For 1980, the synthesizers in this track are to die for, they’re bubbly and buoyant, gently resting on top of the sonorous upright bass. The woman’s voice slowly found its way into the song, ascending out from the ooh’s and aah’s of the backing choir. Her vocal command reminded me of a feminine take on Unchained Melody. You never even told her about me.
My head shot up and for a brief second I stared blankly into the ceiling. I yanked the earbuds out when I realized I remembered this voice. As I looked down, I could see the tape swirling in the handheld cassette player, and I couldn’t help but wonder what else she was trying to tell me. My hand trembled as I reached for a single earbud and pulled it to my ear. And you’re all alone, all alone again.
I looked through the rest of the envelope he sent and found photos of the singers, they were all faces I recognized. The music spoke to me, of course, but not in voices I wanted to hear.