I don’t have tapes of meditation, but I put on the meditation station. I did as a player, too. I used to always play the game before the game happened. As a coach, I do the same thing.
I always just like to improvise, and that goes for my audition tapes as well.
My cousin used to make fun of me for liking stuff like C+C Music Factory. I didn’t have any tapes; I just liked their song on the radio. We liked that because that was what we had access to.
Lots of people I know have bootlegged tapes of performances and if they play it I will be transported back sometimes with happiness, sometimes with horror.
I remember when I interviewed at MSNBC, one of the first things they said to me was, ‘In your tapes, you had a mustache, right?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I recently took it off.’ I said, ‘If you hire me, you get to decide if you want it or not.’ They said, ‘No, no, we’re fine with it now.’
When I look back at the tapes, your first everything, your first All-Star Game, your first playoff experience, it just seems like it went by really fast.
When I was 10, 11, 12 years old, I would pretend to be on the radio. I bought a mixer and these big, ugly headphones and I would literally broadcast the cassette tapes in my bedroom.
The upshot of the Nixon tapes case was that any president is going to have an extremely hard time resisting a request from a law enforcement officer.
I was the only kids to have Sony Umatic tapes of the old ‘Star Wars.’ It was such an old technology; you needed two or three tapes to show one movie, so the kids used to come over to my house, and we would watch ‘Star Wars.’
When I wrote my eighth thriller, ‘Inside Out,’ in 2009, the villains were a group of CIA and other government officials who colluded to destroy a series of tapes depicting Americans torturing war-on-terror prisoners.
As soon as I came to L.A., things immediately shifted for me. I was now actually here with the people who were making the decisions; I wasn’t out in New York sending in tapes to L.A.
Walt Disney had always tried to get more dimension in his animation and when I saw these tapes, I thought, This is it! This is what Walt was waiting for! But when I looked around, nobody at the studio at the time was even halfway interested in it.
I was with Dre when he was just selling tapes. He didn’t have a car, a license or a job.
I’m not good at audition tapes.
Occasionally, if I’m in doubt over specific Indian classical or raga-related questions, I’ll find myself going back to my lesson tapes or my father’s recordings.
My mum records everything I’m in on VHS. Like, who still has VHS? I told her it’s all online now, but she still tapes it.
All my writing takes place during the recording of the master tapes. I never do have songs when I start up an album. I actually write them while I record.
I’ve always sung. I was really into musical theater when I was growing up. As a kid, I listened to Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone, actually, on cassette tapes.
I love listening to music on holiday, and back in the old days, I used to travel with cassette tapes and a boombox.
I treat recorded tapes the way a film director treats his rushes.
There are so many bootlegged Joy Division/Martin Hannett tapes, a lot of really bad bootlegs on the Internet.
When digital technology started becoming the norm, you’ve got 50, 60, 70 years of recordings on tapes that are just deteriorating. Like, a two-inch reel of recording tape won’t last forever. It dissolves. It will disappear.
I would go to the store, I would buy cassette tapes, and I would read the liner notes and sort of subconsciously creating the connections between the rappers that I was reading and the poets that they were teaching us in school.
A hard copy? It’s fire. People want vinyl and cassette tapes – it’s just cool to be able to touch it and feel it.
The White House tapes, the recordings that Nixon made of his conversations in office, have long been recognized as a marvel of verbal incontinence.
I thought Nixon was getting ganged up on, but when I heard the tapes, I was shocked and terribly saddened.
I have listened to tapes of myself interviewing people and mostly I try to be better at directing the conversation.
I watch a lot of tapes, a lot of games, all the replays. You watch the highlights on TV, those are all about goals getting scored or big saves. So you just look and see what guys do and how they’re successful, and sometimes I see something and I go, Wow, that could work for me.
I had all these tapes in my closet that I had shot years ago with my friend Jean-Michel Basquiat. I was working on a film about him when he died, and then I just put everything away. It was too sad.
There’s an institution here called the National Sound Archive, and there’s a character who works there, Paul Wilson. He takes a very special interest in the history of the music and advised Martin Davidson of the existence of these tapes.
I actually have all these tapes, from when I was five, from when I was 10, and from when I was 15, that don’t really have to do anything with each other, but they’re sort of archeological in my musical history.
I loved the Oscars, and I had V.H.S. tapes for the Oscars, and I used to watch them over and over. There was probably one year where I watched it, like, 20 times or something.
I’ve taken salsa classes. I love dancing and I love to karaoke. So I bought a microphone with some tapes and my son and I karaoke. I know the entire ‘Dora the Explorer’ soundtrack.
I graduated from high school in 1963. There were no computers, cell phones, Internet, credit cards, cassette tapes or cable TV.
We searched around the globe and looked at well over a hundred ‘Marco Polos,’ came down to the wire, and went back and looked at our Italy tapes, and we realized that we had overlooked someone. That was Lorenzo Richelmy.
After my second No. 1, my record company, Warner Brothers, gave me a beautiful present – quite unique at the time – one of the very first Sony stereos which had speaker and radio included so I could record the radio and build up cassette tapes of music, gospel singing, adverts, evangelists.
When I was a teenager, I was mostly getting tapes and CDs, and somebody hipped me to the fact that you can get things on vinyl that are not necessarily available on any other fomat.
I don’t like to judge from tapes. The strategy starts in the ring.
My grandmother loved country music, and she’s the one who really got me into country music. She had George Strait tapes, a bunch of them. I remember listening to tapes, taking them out, the covers and the back.
It’s something we, guys, have all done. Made tapes for girls, trying to impress them, to meet them on a shared plane of aesthetics. Read them someone else’s poetry because they do poetry better than you could do it, because you’re too awkward to do it.
I have a lyric journal that I write in a lot. When I’m going to play, I just sit down and have my books with me and my notes and tapes and whatever I need to refer to. I just play and try different things. It’s a kind of discipline.
When I had my first camera – I was a child of the ’80s. I remember what it was like reusing the same tapes over and over again, and having really bad quality and images kind of bubbling up from under the surface.
The story of Basinski’s ‘Disintegration Loops’ – tapes that destroyed themselves in the transfer to digital – is a parable (again almost too perfect) for the switch from the fragility of analogue to the infinite replicability of digital.
In the late ’70s, I had a band – the David Johansen band, for lack of a better name – and I started collecting, not records, but tapes from people I knew who had jump-blues records.
‘Turtles’ was by far my favourite TV show when I was growing up. It would be the show that I would wanna watch more than anything. We’d record it on the big VHS tapes, and I’d watch it before school, after school, on the weekend, wear the costume, have all the weapons.
When I was a little girl, whenever I would get sick, my mom would go and get stacks and stacks of VHS tapes from Blockbuster.
Getting the ideas are a struggle for me. I’m doing better now that I use the concentration tapes. More unusual ideas.
‘Boyz-n-the-Hood’ was actually supposed to be written for Eazy’s group. He had a group out in New York called Home Boys Only, called HBO. One of them looked like LL Cool J. Eazy wanted to write a song for them, a street song, like what we were doing on the mix tapes. So when I wrote it, it was too West Coast for them.
If you listen to my tapes, you’d hear 14 different ways to arrange the rhythm guitar behind the harmony vocal, and then 14 different ways with a different vocal. You’d have to really be a music lover to sit through that and find it entertaining. I enjoy it, but I’m easy to please.
Where I grew up, there was only one CD shop, and I didn’t really like school, so we’d register, then bunk off, and we would be round my mate’s house making drum-and-bass mix tapes.
I recently read some of the transcripts of Nixon’s Watergate tapes, and they spent hours trying to figure out who was leaking and providing information to Carl and myself.
More than 30 years ago, in Washington, D.C., I secured a copy of a single by a Los Angeles band called The Bags. The two-song 7-inch, released on Dangerhouse, had a girl on the cover who looked right at you with huge eyes. The songs, ‘Survive’ and ‘Babylonian Gorgon,’ were great and made many of my mix tapes.
