In a time when music was not touched with the tip of a finger on a cold glass screen, listening to music also meant handling an object that had weight: opening the case with that new plastic smell, taking out the cassette, choosing side A or side B, and figuring out whether it was better to press play or rewind.
The alliance between the pencil and the cassette
The pencil was not just for writing. Or the pen, depending on what you had nearby. What mattered was the shape: it had to fit into the reel and grip it well enough to turn without slipping. Sometimes it was used to rewind a cassette, sometimes to straighten the tape, sometimes to save it from a brown, wrinkled tragedy.
To save batteries
It was not just a whim. Rewinding directly with the Walkman or cassette player used up batteries, made noise, and felt like we were shortening the life of our precious tapes. If it could be done by hand, it was done by hand.
The six-sided art of patience
We would stick the pencil into the reel, hold it upright, and start turning it, not too hard and not too slowly, giving it just the right flick of the wrist. You could not do it too slowly, because the cassette would touch your hand and get stuck; but if you spun it too hard, it could fly off the end of the pencil.
Sometimes we simply used an index finger, when it was just to fix the tape or rewind just a tiny bit. It was a simple mechanism, but it fixed something important. Today, a song goes back to the beginning with one tap. Back then, you had to wind the memory by hand.
Did you also rewind cassettes with a pencil to save batteries?
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