Rich here. Longtime readers of this blogsite will remember that it was originally called "The 1980's Cassette Culture Blog" because its emphasis was on the homemade music that started coming from home recording artists when 4-track cassette recorders became popular in the early '80s -- technology that allowed thousands and thousands of DIY musicians the opportunity to write & record & distribute their own songs.
Those of us who were employing the new cassette technology began trading our self-recorded cassettes with other home-recording musicians and sending the tapes to a handful of fanzines & radio programs that featured DIY music. Our "product" may have looked fairly primitive with its hand-drawn, cut-and-paste artwork and photocopied lyric sheets, but, oftentimes, the music rose heads and shoulders above the appearance of the cassette package.
A very cool thing about those tape-trading years was that you didn't have to live in L.A. or New York or London to record your music or to collaborate with other likeminded musicians. And in the '80s and early '90s I made dozens of friends around the country, including with Dan McKenzie, an accomplished singer and actor from the small town of Streator, Illinois, who was featured on a number of the self-recorded tapes I was receiving from a mutual DIY musician friend who lived in the area.
Like many of us who'd started out as bedroom recording artists, after the cassette culture reached its peak in the mid-'90s and began to diminish as CD's became more accessible as an option for releasing music, Dan also moved on to the relatively more sophisticated world of releasing CD's. And in 2012 his band The Gilligans released a CD of snappy, well-written pop tunes that I would only describe as a modern-day equivalent to The Monkees. As you can see and hear from the selection below, Dan and the band retained their sweet DIY innocence even as the production of their music became more professional. I love this tune.
